Despite some measure of success, former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Rashad Evans thinks the end could be near for the Blackzilians. At the very least, the team founded in Boca Raton, Florida is not what it once was.
Evans was a recent guest on MMAFighting.com‘s “The MMA Hour” and gave his take on the state of the Blackzilians:
“The truth of the matter is, the team is splintered, the team is fragmented. It just became a very hard thing for Glenn [Robinson] to kind of keep his grasp as far as keeping everyone together. Henri [Hooft] wanted to throw his brand into his own thing and it just wasn’t matching up with where Glenn wanted to go. That’s part of the fragment, but another part of it was that we didn’t have a gym anymore.”
Drama seems to have reared its ugly head on the team as well. “Suga” said he’d be caught in the thick of things trying to play peacemaker.
“I mean, at the end of the day, I got so sick and tired of going into the gym and having to put out these fires, and there was so much drama, and everybody jockeying and pushing for position. I was just like, yo, I just want to train, man. And there’s a lot of other guys that just want to train, and that’s what the team was made for. So we could have a great training environment. But you start bringing everything else into it and all the drama, it just got exhausting.”
While the team itself looks to be on its last legs, Rashad Evans said the bulk of the members are still together.
“Now, the state of the Blackzilians…I guess there really is no Blackzilians. It’s all in the namesake, but for the most part everybody — or most of the people who were training with the Blackzilians — we’re still training together.”
