Brazilian Jiujitsu Stories #1

On the maniacs who love to grapple

Note: All the following stories are fictional. They are the sort of stories grapplers tell each other in the gym. I have changed the content of these stories from their real analogues, but the tone is not hyperbolic.

I.

My coach Blake is a jiujitsu veteran. His knees have been reconstructed multiple times. At 45, he’s still a crusher. If his hands lock around your body— any part of your body — your need to prepare yourself for a smashing. He also likes to occasionally rip wristlocks on lower belts, so you need to be extra careful about how and where you put your hands on any part of him. This gnarly grittiness is a principal component of his personality that finds itself in odd company, as the remaining elements of his personhood are situated somewhere in the center of: San Diego surf bum; guy who buys rare cacti off of Instagram; and Dimes Square podcast enjoyer. He spent a decade training in Brazil grinding his joints to dust. He says, the Brazilians give you a nickname within days of meeting you, and that’s basically your name for life. It’s usually based on your most conspicuous physical feature, so if you’re fat you’ll be Gordo or Gordinho or something. I had a hair then, blonde hair, so I was “Alemão” — The German. There was a guy who trained with us at Gordinho’s place in Rio, ex-firefighter. He lost his leg and half of his face was burnt, so he retired and just trained jiujitsu all day. His name was “Frito”.

One day before practice I mentioned to Blake that I just read an analytical report from PornHub concerning which nations consume the most pornography. Apparently Americans come out on top, consuming 3x more than the runner-up. Where does Brazil rank? I said the Brazilians were the 9th most per capita. Blake thought about this for a bit, then shook his head sadly. Impossible. Something must be wrong with the data. Brazilian guys are on WhatsApp all day sending hardcore to each other. Straight up hardcore. You know when I came back to the US, I trained and taught at Vladimir Souza’s gym. Don’t tell anyone this because Souza is, like uh, widely respected now or something. He wasn’t particularly degenerate or anything, but listen: every day he used to teach an 11 AM comp class, and needed to get back to the gym by 2 PM to teach some privates. So he would drive back home and have lunch. He would make himself a sandwich and then blast anal porn on the livingroom tv for 45 minutes. Fully clothed, standing up, eating a sandwich. Just to take the edge off. 45 minutes of cumshot compilations, then back in the car. So yeah, no offense, but there must be some “data quality issue” in that study.

It was then time to start class, which was a bit small that day, and Blake helped me tune my double leg. Afterwards, I noticed Blake was a bit melancholy, so I asked him if anything bad had happened. Yeah, so the gym’s still new and everything is going great, but I just got an email from two different people who are like reviewing the gym at me for some reason. The first is from this lady who visited last week and she was like, “I’m NEVER coming back to this WOKE gym again. You make all the REAL WOMEN change in the same locker-room as the TRANNIES, and im just here thinking when did the world go insane why do i have to see penises in the women’s room?” So I was like, lady, all of our changing rooms are single occupancy. What in the fuck are you talking about? Then the next email — which, again, I got the same day — was like “either you don’t know the following (in which case you’re negligent), or you do know and you’re choosing to do nothing about it (which is fucked??), but there are like, multiple guys in your gym that have neo-nazi tattoos on their legs and arms. I’m eagerly awaiting your response.” I don’t even know how to respond to this. Obviously, there aren’t any Nazi tattoos here. Do I take photos of everyone’s tattoos and explain in detail why they are not white power dogwhistles? Dude, what’s going on with people? Social media has melted everyone’s brains. I get messages from chuds and libtards like this all the time. Emails! It’s so fucked…

II.

My friend Abner Cohen is a weeb who has become a grappling savant. He convinced me years ago to start grappling. He likes to say, jiujitsu is like if aikido was real. He also likes to say, jiujitsu is like if anime was real. He also likes to say, jiujitsu is one of the few domains of life where complete retards can have authentic moments of genius.

Abner made a couple felicitous investments in his early twenties (…eons of ancestral Talmudic study has instilled Lamarckian ur-memories into me, gifting me truesight into forecasting risk and volatility. Also: Jews are good at insider trading…) which rendered him retired at 25. Now in his mid-thirties, his life is dedicated to jiujitsu and anime, enjoyed from the heights of sunny Malibu. He spends his money generously on his friends, whom he loves with his whole soul. At the same time, he is unapologetically a social climber. He strategically navigates social graphs to entangle himself with the right people. Right now, his ideal targets are MMA fighters who are a little autistic.

The core of Abner’s jiujitsu was learned from ex-UFC lightweight top-contender Yukio Nuñes (or “Dai Sensei” as Abner calls him). Yuki’s family immigrated to California from Argentina when we he was 3, and his martial arts is all SoCal: obsessed with Karate as a kid, he would work on his kata for hours in the backyard of his family’s tiny home in the San Fernando Valley; he later added wrestling on top of that, starting in middle-school (which is absurdly late), and was recruited by Oklahoma State; at 17 he and his 5 brothers watched UFC 1 and they all fell under the MMA spell — they spent every weekend beating the absolute fuck out of each other and tried to recreate Brazilian Jiujitsu via imitating what they saw Royce Gracie do; he would have, and perhaps should have, directed all his effort into becoming a UFC fighter right then and there, but he had no idea how to do that and the pressure of accepting a full scholarship to wrestle Division I was overwhelming; so Yuki spent 5 disappointing years wresting for the Cowboys, accomplishing nothing of note. Upon graduation he switched to MMA and entered the UFC contender series. Yuki spent the four months leading up to the contender series teaching himself jiujitsu and striking from first principles (since the scraps of knowledge he had cobbled together during his childhood was basically completely useless for MMA). He won the contender series handily. He then proceeded to go on a historic rampage through the lightweight division in the UFC proper. But he never won the belt, despite getting five title shots. Yuki told me that every time he got out of a title fight, his piss would be red and chunky for about a week (the broken muscle tissue entering the blood via traumatic rhabdomyolysis causes the viscosity). He broke his body down, retired, and went home to teach BJJ.

Now, Yuki ran a gym in Malibu called Damashi for four years with a guy named Chank Baker. Chank is an American with a black belt from a very prestigious lineage. He has fully Brazilianated: he spends most of his day on WeChat talking to Brazilian expats. Abner trained obsessively with Yuki, and as a side-effect has a long-standing relationship with Chank. About a year into Yuki and Chank’s business relationship, it became clear to Yuki that Chank is an insane person. It took him 3 years (and a lot of money) to disentangle himself legally from Chank; having accomplished that he promptly ran away to the East Coast to make sure he never has to interact with him ever again. As part of their agreement, Chank became sole owner of Damashi. Under normal business conditions, Damashi would have immediately collapsed, but COVID struck, and Chank committed unspeakable amounts of PPP fraud. He completely got away with this, and accrued enough funding to keep Damashi solvent for at least a decade.

So Abner was stuck training with Chank for years. Now Abner is at my gym studying under Blake, and much happier for it. A couple months back, some onlookers at the gym were shocked by Abner’s skill. I’m confused — is he a brown belt or a black belt? He told me he’s a brown belt, but someone told me he’s a black belt. I told him that Abner is both a brown belt and a black belt, and that there’s a funny story behind this. I waved Abner over, and he explained the situation as follows:

So I’m a brown belt under Yukio Nuñes. I did train with Chank Baker for a long time. Chank knows I’m rich and so gave me a black belt, thinking that I would give him seed money to start Damashi Dubai, or whatever other retarded scheme he has going on. I was avoiding him for 5 months, but he finally cornered me and gave me a black belt. I refuse to tell anyone that I’m a “Chank Baker black belt.” The first thing you need to know about Chank is that he likes going around saying that he’s the “Freddie Roach of West Coast BJJ”. What in the fuck could that mean? If he’s Roach, who’s his Pacquiao? He hasn’t coached anyone into winning anything. Chank thinks I like him. I don’t understand why. While he was still married he slept with the girl working reception at Damashi, who was also married. When the husband found out, Chank threatened to armbar him in front of his kids. I’m not against pussy-getting, but come on. Also, I object to this guy lecturing us for 15 minutes out of every hour about how grappling makes you a better person and teaches you discipline. Chank likes calling me with his problems. One time he called me at 1AM and he’s driving 90 mph down the 5 to San Diego. He said that his gi distributor misprinted something on about a hundred gis he ordered for the gym and wasn’t going to refund them. He was sobbing on the phone and told me he had his .44 Smith & Wesson out and he was going to drive this guy’s house and shoot him. I talked him out of doing that. Another time he came to the gym with his entire leg wrapped in plaster and tried to pick a fight with one of his black belts outside the gym. The guy just laughed at Chank and said “uh dude I’m just going to kick you in your broken fucking leg, how are you going to fight me”, and Chank just kept on waddling forward screaming “SO DO IT PUSSY DO IT SO DO IT PUSSY DO IT”, so the guy did it. Last month Chank asked me if I could get him on the Joe Rogan Experience. So yeah, I’m a Nuñes brown belt.

III.

As said earlier, Abner is very good at wrangling successful people into friendship. One night I was watching classic grappling matches at Abner’s house, and two of Abner’s friends from Damashi visited. The first was a blue belt Graylor Hawk: all-American Midwestern boy next door, tall, jacked, ex-Michigan State Wrestler, now an anesthesiologist down in Long Beach. More insulting than all of this is that Graylor is a deeply kind, golden retriever-type. People send their children to Harvard to meet people like Graylor, but Graylor has state-school modesty to add to his already long list of virtues.

The second friend was another blue belt named Saïd Ibrahimi, a minor member of the Emirati aristocracy who has turned himself into a biotech angel investor. Saïd is also tall and beautiful, which is an affront to myself and Abner. Saïd is also easy to like, but unlike Graylor has a streak of imperiousness: I admit people see me and think, “he must be a complete douche”. They’re not wrong, but I can’t help it. I try! Really, I try. But some things were not meant to be. Listen, when my great-grandfather decided to marry, he did some negotiation and had two Bulgarian sisters brought over and he married them both. What hope does that leave for me?

Graylor and Saïd make very picturesque friends. Their conversation is natural, funny, and warm. It’s grappling that brings out their competitive streaks. Particularly anything related to wrestling transmutes Graylor’s personality. He started wrestling when he was four, and despairs of the laziness of amateurishness that jiujitsu people take into grappling.

The four of us were yapping away watching techniques in Abner’s home theater room, when Graylor tells Saïd to take a single leg on him. Saïd complies, and crams Graylor’s right ankle into his armpit, leaving Graylor to hop buoyantly on his left leg. Since Saïd is so tall, Graylor’s legs are split about 120 degrees apart. Graylor says: I’m verrrrrrry comfortable in this high single leg position. If you had to guess, what is your chance of completing a takedown from here? Saïd naively thinks about this for a couple seconds and says 10%. Graylor shouts, ZERO! Your chance is ZERO! Peals of golden laughter ring out as he continues to hop around. I frequently see this image in my mind.

Later that night when Graylor and Saïd are leaving, I turn to Abner and bitterly remark that God really does play favorites.