Having People In Your Corner

Dust Mop Jiu Jitsu: The Combat Base: Part Five

Team Jucao- Manhattan, New York

 

-On mentorship and learning to admire people who can handily kick my ass

This is the Thirteenth article about my journey in Jiu Jitsu. If you want to know more about what this project is, you can read more about it in the first article here.

It’s also the fifth of 7 articles about my time as a member of Combat Fitness MMA. While I was there, I would learn to push myself beyond harder than I ever had. 

For a while, I have been doing some volunteer work with an organization called WeDefy. It takes US Veterans with a high disability rating and gives them a scholarship to a BJJ gym near them. My role is to be their first point of contact should they need anything. 

Really, I’m there if anything is going wrong. If they’re injured or hurt they let me know so that we can put the scholarship on hold. But I always tell them the same thing. “I’m also here for when things are going well. I want to hear if you got your first arm bar or triangle choke. Did you try competing for the first time? Let me know! Because most guys get really excited about Jiu Jitsu and realize that most of their friends don’t know or care about it. So they have nobody to celebrate with.” 

That was true for me. I didn’t have any friends that did Jiu Jitsu when I started. Save for one guy. 

I first met Max when I was in college. He went to college with a few buddies of mine and later on I found out he was getting into boxing. Those friends told me I should keep in touch with him once they heard I was getting into BJJ. We weren’t even friends on Facebook. But we had come from a familiar enough background that we started bonding over it. 

It felt important to have a friend that knew I had a life outside of the gym. We had already gotten drunk together, he was friends with my friends and was dating someone from my high school. Max was already a purple belt and had done way more tournaments than I had. 

After Thanksgiving of that year, I was still motivated by my tournament losses. So I took the opportunity to train everyday in Lincoln, Nebraska. I had learned a ton in my classes at Lincoln Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Center and I was excited to go straight back to Combat Fitness MMA in Vermont. 

There are, however, no direct flights from Lincoln to Burlington. And Lincoln is one of those airports that is prone to cancellations. The only way we were getting home was to grab an available flight to NYC, spend the night there and hop on a puddle jumper up to Burlington. For those of you that aren’t American, the journey was gonna look a bit like this.

We realized we had to spend the night in NYC as we were flying there. Luckily, Rachel’s brother lived in Manhattan so accommodation wouldn’t be a problem. My worry was about seizing an opportunity to train somewhere in the city. I had a clean travel gi with me ready to go for the occasion. How could I miss this?

So I texted Max to see if I could train with him in the next 12 hours. As it happened, he was going to a lesson at Team Jucao that night on the Upper West Side and he just happened to live five blocks away from my brother-in-law. 

We met up and did the 30 minute walk together catching each other up on life and jiu jitsu. He and his partner were thinking of moving to Hong Kong for a little bit. Having lived in Korea, I was amazed at how much overlap we had in our lives. 

I had no idea what to expect for Team Jucao. Other than footage I’d seen of the notorious Blue Basement, I couldn’t imagine how you would fit a BJJ studio in a city that’s as famous for it’s lack of space as it is for the halal food carts, high fashion and subway fires. Most places I had trained were in strip malls so imagine my surprise when we took the elevator up to the 20th floor of a city tower apartment. I would have had vertigo looking out the window but they were all fogged up from the sweat and cleaning chemicals. 

It was a fairly small class of about 10 or 12 people and we got the drills going right away. As we ran forwards, backwards and started contorting ourselves to be ready for the class I couldn’t help notice a big bald black belt standing to the side chewing gum. There is a trope about upper belts skipping warm-ups but I had never seen that before. As the only white belt there, seeing this guy sitting out while we were all sweating our balls off was quite the novelty.

The class was really just a series of positional sparring. Most people were incredibly relaxed as I started on their back ready to squeeze the life out of them. But they got out of every hold while looking like they were ready to fall asleep. Max has an infuriating habit of whistling while he plays with your lapels like he’s just mowing the lawn while you are trying your hardest.

But then I got to roll with Baldy. He winked and waved me over with a smile. Baldy did something I had never yet experienced. I was in his closed guard and out of nowhere I felt a stinging sensation in my elbow that was gone before it even registered. 

Prior to that day, I had never been wristlocked before. Baldy had slapped my elbow and fist to send a shockwave down my forearm. He didn’t hold it either. He let it go as soon as I felt it. But then as soon as I lifted my arm again, he did it again. It was like being a fish caught on a line six or seven times in a row. 

It didn’t get better from there. Later on I found out that he had been doing martial arts for almost two decades. He told us how he almost threw up the first time he watched a Kyokoshin Karate black belt test. These were back in the days of dojo storms and style show downs. But for him, a tap didn’t mean start over. It meant that he would let go of the submission and fight from there. 

You might read this and think that’s not cool. I don’t really disagree with you. But I think  it’s important to have experiences like this from time to time. Some people in this world can kick your ass and make it look beautiful. Nothing personal about it. Besides, everyone at Team Jucao kicked my ass with a smile and wink. 

Max and I left Team Jucao feeling closer than we had. Remember, we had met each other before, but now we had shared an experience. He ended up moving to Hong  Kong and we still talk Jiu Jitsu. He has been a source of advice and inspiration as I geared up for tournaments and kept the journey going. 

Having people who care about your Jiu Jitsu progress is an important part of the process. Knowing that transcends your gym membership can be even more beneficial.

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If you ever want me to visit yours and write about what it’s like to learn from you, feel free to reach out at [email protected]. You can also follow me @DustMop_JiuJitsu If you want to read my articles as soon as they’re published be sure to subscribe on my blog site!