John Perretti, the former UFC matchmaker widely credited with shaping the sport’s early rules and matchmaking philosophy, has revealed on the MMA History Podcast that he was expelled from the Machado Academy after a dispute with the family. Perretti made the claim during an interview covering his years as the UFC’s matchmaker, where he was brought to the school by Gene LeBell.
“They were incredibly fearful of me. They didn’t want anybody to do this sport. They kicked me out of their academy because I created this sport,” Perretti said.
Perretti talked about the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community’s wariness of the rules and format he was building for the UFC and, before that, Extr*me Fig*ting.
Asked directly whether he was kicked out mid-class or simply told not to come back, Perretti confirmed the latter.
“Don’t come back,” he said.
He then explained the origin of the falling out, tracing it to a phone call with the Machados.
“John Machado made some stu*id remark that I called up. And I called them up and they recognized my voice and I said, ‘John, you couldn’t recognize the difference between an American voice, even if I was a Chinese-American, you know? You had no knowledge of that.'”
Perretti pointed listeners to his own memoir for the fuller account of the incident. He framed the expulsion as part of a pattern of resistance he faced from the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community during his career, arguing that the sport he was building was never designed to favor any single discipline, including jiu-jitsu.
“Those guys, the jiu-jitsu community, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community, were so backwards that they didn’t really understand that the sport that I was creating wasn’t for them,” Perretti said.
Co-host Mike Davis suggested that Perretti had structured matchups in a way that disadvantaged jiu-jitsu specialists, a claim Perretti flatly denied throughout the exchange. He insisted that his matchmaking was based purely on finding the best possible matches rather than any bias against a particular style.
