Morning Report: Matt Serra details how he gave ‘drunk’ a ‘free jiu-jitsu lesson’ night before Hall of Fame induction

Last week, Matt Serra made headlines for more than just his induction into the UFC Hall of Fame. The night before the ceremony, Serra got into an altercation with a drunk man in a Las Vegas restaurant, harmlessly subduing the man before security intervened.

On the UFC Unfiltered podcast Monday, Serra discussed how the situation came to be, explaining that he and his family were attempting to leave the restaurant when the man confronted him, threatening to fight the former UFC welterweight champion. When the situation was close to getting out of hand, Serra said he took action in the most gentle way possible.

“We’re eating at the cafe and this couple comes in that’s out of their mind drunk,” Serra said. “She passed out the second she was in there. He left, came back, left, but the he started getting really, really nasty to the staff. Cursing, just totally drunk, loud, obnoxious, rude. Then he starts throwing stuff at the waiter as he’s walking by and yelling to the point where everybody is stopping and looking. . .

“I was almost out of there! I was almost in the clear. My waiter is bringing me the check and then he gets up and he goes after my waiter – just a drunk moron and he has his fists clinched. He was throwing s**t at the other waiter, now he’s facing me and my family. So he’s drunk and something’s gonna happen. This guy is hitting him or he’s gonna throw something and my family is behind me, so I stood up and then he directed everything towards me the second I stood up. ‘You! I’ll fight you!’

“So he took his shirt off and the second he took his shirt off, I don’t know if he went to swing but I just neutralized that s**t. I stepped right in, got him around his waist – my wife, she goes, ‘When you went in I thought that you were gonna slam him. You let him down so gently!’ Dude, he just, like, melted when I grabbed him. He folded to jelly. so I got him around the waist, basic takedown. I gave him a free jiu-jitsu lesson.

“I put him on the ground, I mounted him. His mount defense, his elbow escape and his trap and roll were not there. So then the second I got him down I told my sister to film this. So you got it from there and you saw the rest.”

Serra posted the video of the altercation that his sister shot to his Instagram account where it quickly went viral, racking up over 10 million views.

In the end, the situation was resolved cleanly, Serra said. No harm came to anyone, the unknown man was escorted away in handcuffs, and Serra doesn’t believe the man will follow up on his threat to sue. Looking back on it, Serra is happy with the way he handled the situation because even though the guy may have deserved to get hit, at the end of the day, that would have been a far worse outcome for the newly inducted Hall of Famer.

“I took him down, I got a bigger applause then I did in my first GSP fight,” Serra laughed. “The audience erupted. They were still clapping by the time my sister started filming because that dude was as obnoxious as you can get. Yelling, screaming, making a scene, being vulgar. Total f**king d**khead.

“Even though he deserves to get smacked or something, the loser goes to the hospital and the winner goes to jail. I know there was no winning in beating up this guy but he definitely needed to be subdued because he was gonna hit somebody.”