BJJ 101

On Friday nights, my son (I'll call him tres_arbolitos) throws a bullpen under the studied eye of his pitching coach. His bullpen session lasts one-half hour to 45 minutes depending on whether coach shoots some video and the two of them review it together at the end. Then after 15 minutes break, tres_arbolitos goes through the third of his three weekly strength and conditioning sessions with the two program S&C coaches. Together, these sessions consume about two to two and a half hours. Some would call that a lot of work. A gnarly old guy calls that an opportunity to run down to FBJJ for some training.

This past Friday night, while my son went through his pitching, lifting, and sand pit work (sorry, I don't miss a minute of his pitching or hitting work), I skedaddled over to the dojo (do they even call it that anymore?) and took in FBJJ's "BJJ 101" class. Even though I have about two accumulated years in BJJ, I made a conscious decision when I signed up last month to completely abandon my ego and start at the bottom. Instead of trying to forge my way into the school hierarchy, I stand at the end of the hierarchical line that begins and ends each class. And instead of rationalizing my failure to progress in the sport through promotion and make up for it by "winning" while rolling (as I did eight years ago), I have decided to accept the maxim that there's a lesson every time I tap, even if I tap to a student with less accumulated experience than me, with less physical capacity, or less technique.

And so I embrace BJJ 101, which happened to be the first class I've attended since rejoining FBJJ in which the majority of students are white belts like me. As an aside, I suppose most BJJ schools are now well populated with blue and purple belts, and the upper belts are well represented. In contrast, when I first rolled with Coach James several years ago, he was a purple belt.

When he opened his first school, he did so wearing a brown belt and was just promoted to black belt when I left his school. Most of his students wore white. Now James has his first stripe which can be earned only after six years as a black belt. And I'm told there are 40 black belts in Washington State, only a few of whom are Brazilians who moved here with their belts. And many of these black belts have several Brown and Purples under them, as does James. To put it mildly, this is a crap load of dedication and achievement. For the uninitiated, there are only five belts in BJJ: white, blue, purple, brown, and black. The progression through each is long, requiring dedication in the form of patience, passion, and hard training.

Of course, leaving my ego at the door as a method of expressing such dedication is a calculated one. This time through, I am not just here for the rolling. I want to understand intrinsically, the sense of the progression in the sport that leads to promotion. Said another way, I am not here just to accumulate an inventory of submissions and training sessions. I am here to learn everything that occurs between the takedown and the submission. So while that makes promotion an outcome, the journey through promotion is my actual goal. To me that route for that journey is paved on a firm foundation of the principle techniques and concepts of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Which is exactly what I got a nice dose of in BJJ 101 as Rick took us through five sweeps from the guard; things I knew (well I knew four of them) but had yet to find the trigger for during rolling over the past two months. Now instead of the mind going straight from A to D, I have been reminded to go from A to B first.