WAL­TER AL­IBEY

A de­sire to en­sure there is change in the stan­dard of of­fi­ci­at­ing in MMA, Sam­bo, Grap­pling and oth­er com­bat sports in T&T, has led War­ren Gill to flee from the sport of Jiu Jit­su as a fight­er and in­to of­fi­ci­at­ing.

He was on­ly 31 years old when an un­favourable de­ci­sion dur­ing a hot­ly con­test­ed fight left him in tears, and even­tu­al­ly brought his promis­ing ca­reer to an end.

Gill, 43, is set to work along­side world renown Herb Dean, the Amer­i­can mixed mar­tial arts ref­er­ee and for­mer fight­er, as the lead of­fi­cials for the Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al In­vi­ta­tion­al Com­bat Sport Cham­pi­onship to be held at the Na­tion­al Cy­cling Cen­tre (NCC) in Bal­main Cou­va on April 28-29.

T&T fight­ers are set to face the best of the world in MMA, grap­pling, sports sam­bo (self-de­fence with­out weapons), com­bat sam­bo, kick box­ing, wrestling and box­ing. The fight­ers will come from from 27 coun­tries in­clu­sive of Aus­tralia, Aru­ba, Venezuela, Brazil, Eng­land, Unit­ed States, Rus­sia, Colom­bia, Mex­i­co, Hol­land, Ja­maica, Aru­ba, Cu­ra­cao, An­tigua and Grena­da, among oth­ers.

Gill be­lieves lo­cal of­fi­cials are not prop­er­ly equipped with the knowl­edge to en­hance the com­bat sport. He feels al­so that they are not al­ways fair in their judge­ment at tour­na­ments.

Gill, who now owns his own jiu jit­su clubs in St James and Barataria which has its head of­fice in Vir­ginia, Unit­ed States, said he in­tends to cham­pi­on the cause for change in the qual­i­ty of of­fi­ci­at­ing by en­sur­ing that lo­cal of­fi­cials are cer­ti­fied and com­pe­tent to con­duct the af­fairs of the sport in a fair an un­bi­ased man­ner. This he be­lieves will on­ly auger well for the sport.

"In my opin­ion a lot of teach­ers in the sport are not skilled and lack the un­der­stand­ing about fight­ing sports. Be­cause of this I have de­cid­ed to get in­volved and make a dif­fer­ence," Gill said.

With the cham­pi­onship set to be streamed live to 87 coun­tries world­wide, cou­pled with live cov­er­age from in­ter­na­tion­al sports tele­vi­sion net­works Flow Sports 1, Caribbean Me­dia Cor­po­ra­tion (CMC), Carib Vi­sion, Con­da­do Broad­cast­ing, ABC Sports and CBS, Gill will be ex­posed to the globe, while show­cas­ing the qual­i­ty of of­fi­ci­at­ing one can ex­pect from the twin-is­land re­pub­lic.

He be­lieves T&T will have a great chance of a clean sweep in the fight­ing Mixed Mar­tial Arts (MMA) and Sam­bo, due main­ly to the ex­pe­ri­ence gained over the years by its fight­ers. T&T will be rep­re­sent­ed by Keron Bourne, Joash Walkins and Mar­tin Joseph, among oth­ers, all of whom have won medals at in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tions. A num­ber of new fight­ers from T&T will al­so be ex­posed at the in­ter­na­tion­al cham­pi­onship.

The fea­ture event of the cham­pi­onship will be the Ruff & Tuff MMA Ti­tle fights and Gill is call­ing on T&T to come out and sup­port the C'ship.