Rashad Evans Says There’s No Longer A Blackzilians

Former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Rashad Evans has been out of action for quite some time now, dealing with some medical and licensing issues that have kept him out of the octagon.

Evans is also one of the original members of the Blackzilians, a group that is no more and has been splintering apart for quite some time now. Evans elaborated on the situation this week.

“The truth of the matter is, the team is splintered, the team is fragmented,” he said to The MMA Hour. “It just became a very hard thing for Glenn 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. Our gym was sold, and Glenn was supposed to build another gym and I guess they moved into a temporary gym. There was some kind of falling out with the temporary gym, so then part of the team stayed at the temporary gym and more than half of the team went with Henri. I was one of those guys that went with Henri.”

Longtime Blackzilians coach Henri Hooft recently took to Instagram to announce his departure from the team:

 

After 6 years working with a great team the blackzilians I am going my own way I had a great time met some cool people and learned a lot. Now it's time for #hkickboxing and new challenges that come my way…………….. NOTHING IS FOREVER BUT DREAMS AND GOALS

A photo posted by Henri Hooft (@henrihooft) on Jan 16, 2017 at 11:54am PST

Evans stated to Ariel Helwani that one of the main reasons behind the teams breakup is due to the amount of gossip tearing the team apart.

“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,” he said. “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. 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 was training with the Blackzilians — we’re still training together.”

Evans hasn’t competed himself since a knockout loss to Glover Teixeira at UFC On Fox 19, he will be dropping to middleweight upon his return to the octagon. You can see the full interview over at MMA Fighting.