Zuckerberg vs. The New York Times: a BJJ Imbroglio

The biggest non-story of the year just got bigger.

Art by Chris Rini

Four weeks ago Bloody Elbow posted the first interview with Zuckerberg BJJ referee Lucas Costa. The New York Times, subsequent to this, ran an article and didn’t cite us, outside of on Twitter. Despite author Eugene S. Robinson having penned an article for the New York Times in the past. A mistake we trust won’t happen again. — Eds.

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“At no point during the competition was Mark knocked unconscious,” Elana Widmann, a spokesperson for Meta, said in an email to The Daily Beast. “That never happened.”

And piling on, filing a measure that comfortably could be called “damage control” Zuckerberg’s coach, Dave Camarillo, dismissed the snores that we reported referee Lucas Costa called the match over “effortful grunting.” This in response to a follow-on piece written by the New York Times’ Joseph Bernstein where Camarillo claimed Costa had misheard. Making Costa a semi-competent referee or, worst case, a liar and Bernstein a dupe, or…

Or the forest is being missed here for the trees and so a recitation of terms must be established. For which we must head headlong into the weird weeds of the IBJJF rule set and what it means to competitors, as well as what the non-BJJ world thinks they mean.

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