The Most Boring Substack EVER...UNLESS... You Love BJJ!
Yeah...here's my pre-apology for those of you who absolutely have zero interest in strangling other humans.
As a memory it stands as a distinctly memorable one. It had become fashionable amongst school peers, in 1970, to plead some sort of modesty in and around actual achievement.
“Oh, your,” fill in the creative blank: drawing, story, sculpture, “is MUCH better than mine.”
And we’d ape what we had seen adults do. Cross our arms, rub our chins in contemplation and feel some certain amount of satisfaction with our performative “modesty”. Which smelled like what it sounds like: bullshit.
We could be excused for this because we were kids but even as kids it rung falsely to me and so there was a day, clear in my memory now, where enough was enough.
“Oh your drawing is MUCH better than mine,” said my friend Michael Katz.
“I know,” I said. And that was that. Thus began a rollercoaster lifetime of unbridled ego and torrential self-confidence. Buttressed by a desire to also let it be known.
“YOU ALL SUCK AND I’M GREAT!!!”
I had thrown open the door of the Serao Academy of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Luta Livre and screamed precisely that. The thing is I was a perennial morning class guy. Training at a time I used to think was comically ridiculous, I mean who hits the mats at 7 a.m., sometimes 6 a.m.? It had never dawned on me though that classes later in the day would be full of people who I actually had never seen and didn’t know.
“How about him willfully bouncing his balls, that is his testicles, off of the side of your face during a roll?”
“Pretty brutal, eh?”
“No….”
They all looked up at me from where they were on the mats, either trying to strangle someone else or being strangled by someone else, and went back to what they were doing. The gym, geographically, sat at a kind of unhoused/homeless person thoroughfare and so this was not at all the craziest thing that had happened there during my 15 years as a member.
But for my part I straightened up my suit, swung my briefcase around, as I had just come from the HELL Co. that had made me make morning class the only possible time for me to train, turned on my heels and left. My work there was done.
And as common as it has been to see almost 90 percent of the jiu jitsu academies sport some version of “leave your ego at the door,” at the Serao Academy there seemed to be a welcome and standing invitation for ego to be brought in. As it would on a pirate ship. Bring it right on in…so it can be crushed under the tectonic weight of our massive egos and thusly began a tradition of every insult being a compliment and every compliment being an insult.
It was an upside down, topsy turvy world that was hard to explain and even harder to explain to other jiu jitsu players. In Spain where I am now living and breathing and into my second week of training after major knee surgery, a brown belt from Mexico City who is getting his PhD in crash dynamics in Germany (but had dropped in during a visit with his girlfriend), asked me just that. “How’s this compare to California?”
“California? I don’t know. The Serao Academy, I know. And it’s…well…it’s a…pirate ship.”
As he looked for an explanation I smiled and decided to answer his look with a question: “For example, how many times has your coach bitten you during a roll?”
“Um, NONE!”
“Any thumbs to the eye, forearm shivers to the philtrum or punches in the face during rolls?”
“NO.”
“How about him willfully bouncing his balls, that is his testicles, off of the side of your face during a roll?”
“Pretty brutal, eh?”
That suddenly seemed like the wrong word though and I felt a need to correct it.
“No. Not brutal,” I smiled. “Just the most out-of-control control…ever. I miss it.”
And there it was, the Harry Crews-ian gypsy’s curse which, if memory serves, is what happens when you find a pussy that fits you. Jiu Jitsu is that pussy and having been injured out of it since ruptured quad surgery back in April, and even before when I was working with a partial tear from November 2024, it felt like exactly what it was: like I had lost a limb.
Which is hard to explain if your only reference point is the sport that YOU like. I mean tennis equals pickle ball equals racquetball equals ping pong and badminton. But while jiu jitsu shares some space with wrestling and judo, it’s not the same because the culture is not the same.
“Is it true,” and I wanted to ask this question delicately, “and this is just what I heard: that when you lost a video game to one of your students you subsequently chased him down the street with a bb gun shooting him until he escaped around the corner three blocks away? I mean did that actually happen?”
I was interviewing Ralph Gracie, from the Gracie Family and one of the early Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters for an article in Vice’s Fightland. I specifically chose to ask the question last just because I thought I knew the answer and I needed at least a 20 second head start before any sort of shooting jumped off.
But Ralph looked at me. And smiled, slowly. “Yeah. That might have happened.”
Wrestlers have sort of a homespun midwest modesty about them. Judo guys manifest a sort of Far Eastern reverence for all things judo but the jiu jitsu template as set out by the Gracie’s and as explained to me during an interview with Renzo Gracie for my FIGHT book was…different.
“We trained all DAY, and if you did badly that day when you got home, no way were you getting that pork chop.”
You had to fight to eat. Not strangers. Your own family.
Which means there was no time for false modesty, or reason-based excuses/excuse-based reasons. You HAD to do it and do it well enough to be able to get home to EAT. A zero sum attitude that’s fueled this place in space even now and while I love the sport — both for the positive reasons, and the ones that cause average people some confusion (note I do not say “negative”) — I love it for its tribal aspects most of all.
That’s always drawn me. It’s what drew me to bodybuilding, then punk rock, then disco (back when I was a disco dance instructor), then hardcore, then skateboarding. Outlaw cultures where very little has to be explained and what’s not explained is obvious to everyone whose journey has carried them there.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and its frenemy Luta Livre (Brazilian catch wrestling) are the “there” that I was carried to, where I live, and where my head has me housed for the better part of every day when I’m not thinking of eating or making sure my kids can eat. I’ve trained in Italy, France, England. I’ve been beaten by some of the best in the world (Cain Velasquez and Royce Gracie, I see you).
Beyond that there’s my instructional series…think Dorf on Golf but for jiu jitsu, The Jiu Jitsu Breakdown (JJB), much loved, misunderstood and maligned, it’s a marker for the fact that no matter how much you suck this is still the place for you.
Which is why long after having moved on from skateboarding, unicycling, bodybuilding, and other idle pursuits I stick to jiu jitsu. It’s a place where an idiot can feel less idiotic for being an idiot. Who can also kill you.
So ends my love letter for the sport where, g-d willing, I’ll remain to live and mother’s milk, wristlock and heel hook fools another day. And if you don’t know, now you know.
Annndddd……BOMB A LIL JOY is finally HERE…
Eugene Robinson (Buñuel, Whipping Boy, Oxbow) & Christian McKenna (End Christian, Pynuka) introduce BOMB A LIL JOY with their first effort, “BABY BLUE”. Produced by the band’s very own Christian McKenna and featuring Colin Marston (Gorguts), Justin Broadrick (Jesu), Anda Szilagyi (Pynuka), Kevin Hufnagel (Dysrhythmia) & Fred Keller (fancydrinkguys). Mastered by Vlado Meller (Frank Ocean).
For fans of Depeche Mode, Aphex Twin & Muddy Waters.
***This is a Preorder! The projected release date for the Vinyl version is currently December 19th, 2025, but we could get the stock earlier than expected or there could be delays due to manufacturing issues. We will ship these as soon as they are ready and in hand.
PLUS….if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer’s Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
It's always feels great to fuck up a wrestler or Judo guy that's new to jiu-jitsu. Unless of course they wrestle D-1 or have a Black Belt, then you are probably going to have a rough go of it or go for a ride or two. Cheers to good jiu-jitsu in Spain, my dude!