Thanh Le has been at the center of the controversy following his title defense against Garry Tonon. While Le wasn’t controversial in the way he finished Tonon, Le’s coach Ryan Hall took umbrage to the way Garry Tonon spoke about Le and their team during the promotional package for the event.
This further escalated thanks to Tonon’s bff, ADCC champion Gordon Ryan who went on to negate Hall’s accomplishments in jiujitsu. The entire thing kept on spiraling with the announcement that Hall is looking to participate at ADCC 2022.
Fast forward to earlier this week, ONE FC featherweight champion has a pretty funny Instagram game, usually accompanied by his brother and trainer Vihn Le.
In a recent video, the “Le Bros” are seen accompanied by Shawn Gayton, the head coach of Mid City MMA.
The video starts as a normal martial arts instructional. In the first clip, Gayton is teaching how to stop a double leg by cross-facing the opponent and disrupting his base. Thanh Le then interrupts the coach to show “his way” of defending it.
Le just proceeds to throw a knee to the face of the opponent, alluding to the time he knocked out Yusup Saadulaev with a knee during a ONE FC bout.
Then the video continues and the instructor shows how to defend an Ashi-Garami entry (also known as leg entanglement). Gayton does the usual process of addressing the opponent’s feet while keeping a good base on the entangled leg.
Thanh Le interrupts the instructor once again to show “his way” of defending the position. The ONE FC champion just drops down landing hammer fists on his opponent.
That of course is an allusion to Le’s most recent fight, where he defended his belt by viciously knocking out the BJJ leg-locking expert Garry Tonon in the same way as he demonstrated.
The champion jokingly said in the caption of the post:
“Ignore those boring fundamentals that are taught way too often by Shawn Gayton and just do cool sh*!.”
Despite all the jokes, Thanh Le has a lot of respect for his coach. After winning a second ONE FC belt, he decided to give one of his belts to coach Shawn Gayton as a sign of respect.
He previously stated that Gayton “saved his life” by getting him involved with martial arts.