May 12, 2026, 5:17 PM
On August 17, 2024, Kade Ruotolo and Nicky Rodriguez each walked off a mat in Las Vegas with a $1,000,000 check.[1][2] On the same weekend, roughly 60 miles down the road, the winner of the ADCC World Championship absolute division — the most prestigious individual prize in submission grappling — collected $40,000.[3] An ADCC weight-class gold medal paid $10,000, a number that had not moved in over a decade.[4]
That gap — two orders of magnitude between the same athletes doing the same thing on the same weekend — is the entire story of what Craig Jones did to professional grappling. Everything that has happened since, from ADCC's first-ever show money to the $10M figure now sitting on the table for July 2026, is a downstream consequence of one Australian black belt deciding the leverage…
→ Full article: /explore/news/5fe92c46-2466-42c4-989a-9e8ed8558034
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