Ladies Fight Night Fiasco

Currently on my way to Montana to corner an MMA fight 

How and Why?

Who knows! 

This girl got KNOCKED THE FUCK OUT. 

And I mean that with every ounce of gravity that can possibly be transmitted through capital letters and curse words.

Not only did she get knocked out. It was her second loss to the same girl. In her own gym’s promotion, a promotion known for feeding its fighters with quick wins.

When PRVT left Curitiba Priscila and I both left the team but 

We would still see each other occasionally at the boxing gym 

in my neighborhood. 

Luciana Pereira from the famed Nova Uniao team is a giant. Pleasantries aside (cause let’s keep it real she was always a bitch to me anyway) the girl looks like she’s been guzzling steroids for a couple years. Unfortunately, it didn’t help.

The much shorter, less muscular Priscila Souza ended up taking home the belt after catching Luciana with a wild right hook off. She went down. Hard.

When I went up to congratulate her on the victory she was still hyped up, wiping sweat from her forehead. She had the belt thrown over her shoulder and a bag of something that looked like Funions clutched in her arms, but none of that stopped her from giving me a huge hug when she saw me!

“You need to come to Curitiba!” she said, “Parana can get you a fight for sure!”

I’d met Priscila once when she came up to Rio with her MMA team. She trained at PRVT (Parana Vale Tudo) with Jessica Andrade from the UFC. PRVT is a shit show and that’s another story all in itself. It would be a stretch to say that me and Priscila were friends at that point, so I was shocked at her warm greeting and the fact that even in the height of her victory, she was even thinking about my fighting career in any shape or form.

It was touching and ultimately the reason I decided to leave Nova Uniao where I was training with Claudia Gadelha. It was a hard decision considering Claudia was one of the main reasons I decided to move to Brazil to train, but the fact of the matter was I wanted to fight… and Nova Uniao wasn’t making that happen.

My boxing, Coach, friend Poliana, and Me 

and my first MMA disaster... I mean fight.

I fought one time at Nova Uniao. It was a couple of years ago around Christmas time. It was finals for Claudinha and the middle of her fight camp for her UFC debut… but she managed to find some time to get me a fight. She made all the arrangement, helped me with my training camp, and advised me during my weight cut, all while preparing for her own fight and finishing her last year at college.

One of my first nights living in Curitiba. I stayed in the gym with Priscila 

for awhile. She lived there in the back and eventually brought her two daughters from 

Rio. Like I said the team was a shit show so we eventually all ended up leaving. 

She couldn’t go to my fight to corner me because she had a final, but my other coach from Nova Uniao had no excuse. He bailed on me the day of the fight. So, a couple of hours before my fight I ended up going to the pharmacy to buy tape to wrap my hands and catching a bus out to the middle of friggin’ nowhere.  In the end, Claudinha managed to get my boxing coach and another teammate to show up for me. but I was blown. Nova Uniao is like that. They’re a factory and they give zero fucks about their fighters.

Random places in Curitiba where I spent a lot of random time. 

So last week, I’m a work…  Like real work, like after 6 months of fucking around I actually have a real job… So I’m at work and I get a message.

“Yo I’m coming to the U.S. to fight. My visa got approved. If my coach can’t go you’re going to go to corner me”

Then  

“Ok what’s your full name. You’re going!”

I was shocked to say the least but this kind of last minute, drop everything and run stuff happens all the time in Rio.

Claudinha apparently got her this fight.

And when the promotor tried to tell Priscila that they couldn’t change the plane ticket and she would have to go alone… Claudinha raised hell.

Training with Claudinha and Master Claudio

So now, I’ll be working till 9. Running home to grab my trusty red suitcase, catching a bus to Jersey at 11 and then getting picked up in the morning by Claudinha and then taken to the airport to fly out with Priscila.

Priscila will be fighting Roxanne Modaferri who is one of the veterans of women's MMA. She was on the ultimate fighter and is currently signed with Invicta (I think). 

Size Matters: From 100st Rio to 11th St D.C.

3 years ago 

In the courts at the entrance of Pavao... 

Outside of the first place I used to live in the favela 

On the way home after post training food at Bil's <3

Some weird shit happened Saturday night at the place I was living in the Cantagalo favela which led me to the decision to find a new place to call home. As soon as fucking possible. I had been in the favela for about 4 months and in Brazil for about 7 months, but it would be the first time that I had ventured to live on my own.

The main vein of Galo

One of the friendly favela residents introduced to me to a guy that sat on a couch surrounded by a rampant pack of children. She introduced him by one name and he gave me another. It was shady as hell, but whatever, I need a place to live and he had a room for rent. A day later I called him up, met him on a corner, and replaced the wad of cash in my sports bra with the keys to my freedom.

The place was a piece of shit, tiny as hell, and had a wall that was perpetually damp.

Daily Occurrences. 

Corner boys are friendly, familiar 

faces. Cops not so much. 

On the bright side, it came with an armed doorman
(I’m being facetious. I mean there was a dealer outside). 

I didn’t realize until a couple of months later that it was located in one of the most dangerous parts of my side of the neighborhood. A place called the Gaza Strip. I probably should'a gathered as much after hearing a crackhead get nearly stoned to death in front of my door.

The room was tiny as hell. There was only enough space for fridge, a sink, my two plastic drawer sets, and then there was a small area for me to throw down a mattress to sleep at night. During the day, I had to throw the mattress up against the wall. It was that tiny.



But the room had a small balcony attached to it which was hands down the best part. I’d sit out there after training looking at the ocean and talking to the lookout. He had really good stories. He told me about how my house used to be nothing but a shack made out of wood, that my landlord, who had just recently been released from prison, had built up on his own. He told me about how my house, located at the top of 26 flights of stairs was one of the main entrances to the favelas. Crackhead and cops would ascend the stairs in search of the boys with backpacks at the tops and apparently, my new landlord was known for having some crazy shootouts with the police.

When I moved back to D.C. I found myself in a similar predicament (I minus the guns and drugs). I found myself needing a place to live, and since I didn’t have a car, my options were limited to the city. I had a choice between two small rooms or moving back to Philly to my father’s house (which was not really an option!). One of the rooms was located right across from the perfect parking lot for interrogating and murdering someone… so yeah, that mean I was pretty much left with only one viable option.

Luckily it worked out and here I am. I managed to find the perfect living situation… and then the perfect job.

On the perfect living situation

If I finesse it, there’s kind of enough space for me to lay on my floor in between the door to the hallway and the door to the balcony. It’s that tiny.
I’m reluctant to let people into my personal life, let alone my personal space and the one time I did, they were….

They were curious.

Curious to know why, If I now had a job, would I not look for a better living situation. Americans love to supersize everything.

But riddle me this?

Why the hell would I increase my expense by $300 for more space at home if I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and go to the gym, train, sleep on a crash pad, then go to work to teach till 9 P.M.?

I’m never home, so the fact that my room is smaller than a jail cell is really irrelevant, expect when it comes to acquiring a lot of useless shit… then it becomes highly relevant because I don’t have any space for all that nonsense.




I mean I could TOTALLY spend 300 dollars more money every month on rent so I could have a bigger room but I would prefer to spend 25 bucks on a bus ticket to NY and go lay down in the Bronx or spend 500 on a ticket to the west coast so I could visit Cali, Colorado, and Oregon.

Moral of the story: Perfection is Relative & Size only Matters in Some Situations (to some people). 

This was my first front yard in the favela. 

The Entrance to Pavao or the Left side of the hood

Favela Tour Fridays with the Connection Rio Guests.

Proceeds from the tour went to helping fund miscellaneous projects

at the Project. I'd take them around to Terere's house and show them 

where kids from the project play soccer. 

Grappling Industries: Making Jiu Jitsu Great Again

Pre-training 

The night before the competition it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, it would have been a good idea to practice my shots (take down entrances) seeing as that’s my preferred method get to the “jiu-jitsu” part of the fight. There are some people that spend a good portion of their fights holding on to each other’s gis and staring longingly into each other’s eyes as they vie vainly for takedowns or throws but I’m not about that life. My game plan is always to get to the ground as quickly as possible whether it be pulling guard or shooting in for the takedown.

Things not to practice before (or after)

a competition. 

So since I haven't competed in awhile, it occurred to me that I should have probably drilled  a little bit more before my next competitions (which is this Saturday in Virginia beach).

Pre-competition training didn’t end up at all like I planned. I’ve recently taken a job teaching at a night school, which leaves me free to spend my morning's training, writing, and subbing at two different GED programs in the city. I unexpectedly ended up working all day week, so I missed out on a considerable amount of training and countless hours of drilling. A couple of years ago I might have been concerned about the lack of preparation since these damn competitions are so expensive and I’m out of glutamine, the money I got from working was more than welcome.

They say jiu jitsu is about technique over power, but it’s actually the philosophy that has saved my tiny ass on multiple occasions. This being one of them.



When I went to interview Vedha Toscano, Erin Herle, and Dominyka Obelentye in New York about dealing with the pressures of competition. There was one thing they said that made sense. “Don’t worry you do this every day”

So anytime I worried about anything leading up to the competition I just thought about that. Even though I wasn’t able to train during the week and had to work late the night of the tournament, I didn't need to worry. I do this every day, I've done these everyday for a lot of years now. Their advice has turned into a kind of calming mantra for me any time I worry about whether I should be training enough or not.  A few days off wasn’t going to make me any less lethal (plus I was doing a lot of pushups at 5 a.m. before work).

Pre fight 

When we showed up to the fight I discovered two things. The first being that there were a ton of other people there from Beta competing which was dope because its always better to have people from your team to support you.  The second was that I would have several more fights that I had expected adding up to a grand sum of 10 fights (6 in a gi and 4 nogi). I’ve never fought so many times in one day but again, I just have to revert back to the first mantra. I do this every day!

When you have 10 fights with only a couple of minutes in between fights there is no time to worry.

 I try to get all my worrying out of the way a day or two before the tournament. Seriously, I try to visualize and feel just how nervous I’m going to be. The feeling of looking around a room at every person that is your size and wondering if you going to fight them, the nervousness of not know how to get to the ground, worrying about my grips or my sweeps. I think of any and everything that might potentially go wrong beforehand so that, on competition day I can be confident, worry about warming up, and just go with the flow instead of stressing about the “what ifs”.

Through competing and training you find your weaknesses (if your paying attention) and I’ve become familiar and started working on each one of mine. I know where I like to be and I know where I don’t like to be. I know where I can sweep from and I know where I can pass from. I know where I can finish from and I know where I’m going to just be fucked and fumbling around… like with the stupid collar choke that everyone learns day 1 of jiu-jitsu. I try it every competition and it never works (except to tire out my fingers and forearms). So real talk, if I’m trying to collar choke you, I’m just stalling for time.

When we finished taking pictures and realized we 

had no medals! 

Stalling for time is somewhat an important strategy I use as well. 

It’s VERY HARD to fight 10, 5-minute rounds. That like almost an hour of fighting. But chilling… anyone can chill for an hour, so it’s important to learn to chill during rolls. Your ability to chill during a roll is generally contingent on your willingness to sacrifice chill time during the week and actually take your ass to the gym and train… better yet, DRILL!

I’ve spent what has to be at the very minimum 5 hours drilling passes from half guard thanks to Isaak. There was a point where my face was rubbed so raw from having someone’s kimono grinding across my face as they pressured down with their shoulder on across the bottom of my chin and forcing me to look away and then we'd start the next class and he would teach THE SAME DAMN PASS.I got sick of it, I wanted to cry in a corner, or better yet, chuck something at Isaaks's bearded head because apparently the extra layer of hair was protecting his face from the same torture that I was being subjected to.

Couldn't find Isaak for a pic but I did score 

one with Master Nak. I have gotten 

substantially better since I started training with these guys! 

In the end, it was worth it. Ain’t nobody bout to keep me in half guard. No way no how. And if they try, well, instead of fighting,  I’m just chilling, applying the right pressure, and focusing on getting my breathing back to normal and my nerves calm while waiting for the right opening.

Tthe time I spend in top half guard I consider to be chill time. It’s the best time to feel your opponent out… literally… because generally they are trying to wiggle out and will wiggle open the perfect attack, BUT if you’re going bat shit crazy trying to rip your foot out of half guard you miss the perfect kill and end up in a sloppy scramble.

Rules are Meant to be Broken (by athletes not refs)

No matter how well you prepare. A bad ref will make or break you! 

Apparently, if you’re not fighting IBJJF people give zero fucks about the rules... They vary substantial depending on who you ask, to say the least. There were several discrepancies between athletes, coaches, and refs when it came to scoring. Luckily part of “Favela Jiu Jitu” means making sure that you don’t get robbed, so I definitely have the habit of getting my points, securing the positions, and then waiting for the ref to make the call. When your mid fight and you have the time to look a mofo dead in the eyes, for 3 seconds until he holds your points up, they generally get the message that you’re not fucking around and are quick to start giving you the rest of your points in a more timely fashion.

This tournament was so bad that I had to stop and actually talk to the ref. I got my pass he didn’t give me the points so I looked up and asked about it. No points for passing half guard?!?!?! Ok but what about knee on belly I said (literally I was having this conversation with him during the fight) nope not that either! WTF! Had I not been paying attention to the score and time I would have thought I was up by a lot when I was winning by a lot more than I actually was.

In another match, due to the ref’s randomness, I was down on points in the last 10 seconds attempting to push the girl from turtle to side control. I heard a combination of things from my coaches which caused me to look up and see the score and the time. When I saw I was down with barely anytime I stopped pushing and jumped for her back and won the fight.

Make friends don’t break them 

I won all my fights except one in NoGi. I lost to a girl from MD who was running through her gi division submitting everyone. I knew she was going to be strong so I went in quick and hit her with some kind of twisted nogi freak variation (safadinho variation/ one of Terere’s takedowns). From there she was able to get guard (I believe) and ended up twerking my arm from a triangle.


It was a good fight. It was actually a fight. The other 9 fights were me meticulously working through what I wanted to do. There is a point with each opponent where I established control and kept it, even when my opponent was able to get to a more advantageous position I was able to protect myself, and mentally work my way out without feeling too threatened.


With Johanna, it was just a whirlwind. We went at it and there was no mental calculations, just pure intuition. The ref said we had one of the best fights of the day (she ran through her opponents just like I did expect she was finishing them and I was winning on points) and most definitely the best bracket.

Several people came up to me and told me my takedowns were beautifully terrifying! My wrestling ability is based solely on some highly ridiculous but super productive privates that I took with at Torryn and his wifey at Connection Rio almost 2 years ago.


There is probably a pretty way to end this blog. But i'm currently on a bus on my way to Virginia Beach to compete again tomorrow so....

The End.

EuroPeans Part DeuX: StranGers With CanDy

Facebook Friends

As with most problems in my life, a solution was soon found via Facebook. Roque needed a place to stay and had already spent the majority of his money and I was too busy working at Europeans to be looking around for hostels.  So, I put a message up on Facebook and within an hour a solution was found somewhere in Switzerland.

Tuesday morning, one of my Facebook friends offered a free room in her Airbnb from Saturday-Monday. I accepted! Afterwards, I went about figuring out who our host actually was.

(to what will probably be my dad’s dismay, I meet a lot of strangers off social media). 

So we had a hella nice place in down town Lisbon to stay for the week.

But that still left us with figuring out the rest of the week...

To complicate matters even more, when I got home from the tournament around 10 P.M. on Tuesday night, Kidd sent me off to stay with his cousin. It was somewhat chaotic but my new accommodations were pretty fucking sweet. The decked out apartment was inhabited by the young King Tay who holds shit down for his aunt and uncle who work in Angola. Since Kidd was my brother's friend and I didn’t know him or have any idea who this Tay kid was, Roque got sent to stay with some guy who was working at the tournament who apparently had a house full of kids from the City of God favela. 

Kids from the city of God

Is this making sense so far?

Just as Kidd has promised on the long car ride from Playboy's house in Moscavideo to my new accommodations, King Tay lived literally two minutes away from the tournament. He also turned out to be an amazing cook who spends his free time watching Fresh Prince of Belair and Prison Break on Netflix. 

Other fun facts: 

• Tay is a white belt whose preferred submissions are the Americana and Guillotine. 
• He can do a ridiculous amount of pull ups and 4 pushups with me on his back. 

On to the Next One...

Unfortunately, all things good must come to an end. Friday night Tay took a road trip to watch a soccer game and I hopped in an Uber and went to stay with Moicano and Thomas at the Bengali guesthouse. 

The only way to survive the night at the guest house was to bundle up in sweatshirts and gi pants and wrap yourself meticulously in blankets. Thomas and I have both gone through winter… but for Moicano it was an extra shock.

I stayed there one night with them, two nights with the swiss girls then went back to the guest house once on Monday when everyone else had gone home. 

Other fun faces of Lisbon:

Summarizing Vlad

Vlad is a Ribeiro black belt from Fortaleza and another familiar face from my first months in Rio. We moved into the favela around the same time in 2013 and to this day, he is probably the only person that has a more chaotic and unpredictable life than I do. I have no idea how exactly Vlad ended up in Rio, probably to train with Terere or something like that, but a lack of financial solvency soon saw us living with the same Peruvian family in their house in Pavao.

I slept on a mattress on the floor in the den with their 18-year-old son and Vlad slept on the roof in a lawn chair (and got locked up there several times).

Vlad loves to talk, which is perfect because I love to not talk. Vlad talks to such extent that he is the only person that I know that actually uses the phrase “in summary” in his spoken vernacular. Generally, that’s something that I’d only expect to find in school on a list of popular transitional phrases to end an essay, but for Vlad, it’s a necessary part of his conversational repertoire.

Vlad is always supposedly going somewhere. He had some intricate way of finessing plane tickets that was beyond my scope of understanding. On any given day he would have pending plans to go to compete in England, teach in Poland, or go back home to train in Fortaleza. He told me he was leaving so many times that we finally came to the agreement that I would refuse to believe him until he could produce an actual ticket. I’m not sure if he’s in Poland or South Africa right now. The dude is pretty hard to keep track of…

Three years ago I thought it was irresponsible and unorganized and that maybe he should look for a real job. Now, I see that that is just part of the jiu-jitsu lifestyle… and that jiu jiteiros (like myself now) don’t take real jobs.

Hywel formally known as HT

(Because Hywell is unpronounceable in Portuguese)

I’m pretty sure if I knew how to do math and I worked it all out that HT would prove to be a good 10 or 20 times more useful and 100 to 200 percent more cost effective than the entirety of my post-graduate education. Its amazing the things you can learn at Starbucks or eating acai along the beach. Since moving back to the U.S. I’ve met up with HT a couple times to do work with Flograppling in New York and now in Portugal. 

Moicano 

You should know who he is already... but if you don't... click

Moicano and Mastwo 

IBJJF Europeans: Live From Lisbon

2017 Europeans in Lisbon, Portugal

Working with Flograppling

“The effortless, lazy, and safe has nothing to do with heroism. The hero is one who beats the odds, who chooses to not take the conventional road just because that’s where he’s expected to be”

At 10 A.M. on Monday morning, I was outside of a Bengali guest house frantically pushing buttons, kicking the door, and trying to peer through the cracks. Europeans had finally ended and I had reserved my last day to try to explore some of Lisbon, but in actuality, all I wanted to do was find a warm place to sleep. 

The Bengali guest house was definitely not that, but my suitcase which I had left with Thomas and Moicano was locked inside. So there I was, at 10 A.M. with two bags and a bad attitude trying to reunite with my belongings. Three years ago I probably would have been a little more concerned about my own welfare or that of my belongings, but considering that I have my life spread out between Virginia, D.C., Philly, and Rio and always have a bag or two stashed at Terere’s, in Curitiba, or with a friend in New York, the fact that the majority of my possessions were currently unobtainable and the owner of the house unreachable was nothing out of the ordinary.

3 years ago I probably would have accepted defeat, maybe cried a little out of frustration, and then sat around waiting for the guy to open the door. That was before I started working with kid’s in D.C. though. One time after almost peeing myself trying to find a bathroom driving around with one of my students, he made a comment that changed my perspective on handling problems. He asked me why I didn’t just ask to go to the bathroom before we left his house. I did I told him, but he didn’t hear me.

“You should have made me hear you,” he said.

So that’s what I did, I turned around and I made the first person I saw get me inside of the guesthouse. It took about 5 more minutes of button pushing and several phone calls but then a freshly dressed Bengali man came strolling down the street and let me in. 

The guest house cost 12 Euros a night and was a veritable piece of shit that retained no heat what so ever, but I was only staying there until I left for my flight at 4:30 in the morning and after a short nap I knew I would be out wandering the streets until late that night.

Had everything gone according to plan I would have spent 5 nights bundled in blankets trying to deal with the unbearable draft (for some reason people always leave doors and windows open to air things out and maybe try to catch pneumonia.

But things didn’t go as planned, they never do. Instead of spending the week with Moicano, who I had spent month raising money to get him to Portugal in the first place, I ended up in taking care of an unexpected addition to my crew: a kid from the first social project that I was involved in when I lived in Barra da Tijuca.

Roque (Pronounced Rocky)

Brotherly love just without the city

Somewhere between London and Lisbon, I started getting text messages from Roque, a 17year old blue belt that I know from Rio. He wanted to know where I was staying.

I met Roque 3 years ago at a Kyra Gracie seminar when I first moved to Brazil. For my first 3 months, we trained together at Gordo Jiu-Jitsu in Barra da Tijuca and two days a week I would go over to the Gigoia Island where he lives to train at a social project with Perninha, a black belt. Because of his long blonde hair, it took me about 30 minutes to determine his sex and about 3 minutes to pass his guard. Now I’m 100% sure that he is a guy and about 25% sure that I can still pass his guard. Puberty is a son of a bitch.

Frankly, I wasn’t too sure where I was going, so I took my time in responding. I had an address with no house number, a Whats App number for a guy named Kidd (that’s for texting), and a lot of faith in Terere (who had arranged our accommodations with a friend). I got picked up by one of Kidd’s students at 7 P.M. after almost 24 hours of traveling. We hopped on the metro and headed back to Kidd’s house… Or at least that’s what we thought. In actuality, we ended up at the kid’s house waiting for Kidd to get home from training (and seeing his girlfriend). In the morning, Kidd went off to train and left me at home with Playboy who gave me a quick rundown of how to get around in Portugal. Sound confusing... it definitely was, especially considering the differences in the Brazilian and Portuguese pronunciation. After about twenty minutes of trying to decipher Playboy's Portuguese I finally found the best way to meet up with Roque. 

It turned out that 17-year-old Roque had managed to acquire the sponsorship necessary to travel to Portugal, but he failed to acquire a chaperone or to tell his parents about said detail. His mom took him to the airport only to find out that his sponsor and supposed travel buddy was nowhere in sight. He wanted to know where I was staying because he didn’t actually book a room to stay in until he arrived in Lisbon. I found this all out the next day when we met up with each other. I would have caught a proper ass whooping from my dad had I tried to pull something like that.

I met Roque when he was 14 years old at a Krya Graice seminar when I first moved 

to Rio. It took me about 30 minutes to determine his sex because of his long blond hair. 

A black belt from Gordo BJJ used to take me over to Gigoia island to train with people my size.

Now I'm 100% sure of his sex and about 25% confident in my ability to pass his guard. 

Moral of the story: Puberty's a bitch. 

If it wasn’t for Roque I would have spent Monday, and one of my only days off of work sleeping, playing GTA and moping because my suitcase was lost in transition somewhere on my way to Portugal.

 To be continued....

Kunta Kinte, Castles, and the 2017 Europeans

~oss~

“The answer is to let go and move with the chaos that presents itself to you- from within it, you will find endless opportunities that elude most people”

I was training with Kunta Kinte’s father in New York when it occurred to me that I could hustle my way to the 2017 Europeans in Lisbon, Portugal.

 I’ve spent the last 5 months in a transitory hell trying to find pieces of sanity in between D.C., Virginia, New York, and Philly. It only seems natural that I would escape this chaos by booking my first ever trip to Europe.

If I could make it to New York. I could make it to Portugal. Right?
and if I was going to Europeans, why not compete?

zf

The 2017 IBJJF Europeans is historically one of the biggest jiu jitsu competitions there is with the exception of IBJJF Worlds. I say historically because now the growing number of super fights, sub only events and the rise of competing federations like ADCC are slowly beginning to cloud the once omnipotent presence of IBJJF’s point based tournaments. There's going to be a lot of people from around all over Europe and the U.S. there to compete so it should be an interesting week. Normally this is the kind of competition you spend months training for but I'm just kind of going with the flow.

When you drink and philosophize about jiu jitsu. 

#drunkendarce

So, like I said, I was training with Kunta Kinte’s father in New York when it occurred to me that I could actually make it happen. I was in the city to work the IBJJF New York Pro with FloGrappling and I stopped by Fabio Clemente's gym to interview his daughter, Vedha Toscano and a lot of time World Champion, Dominyka Obelentye (I think I can finally spell it without looking it up!) for an article with Digitsu. Both of those endeavors were financially gratifying but due to the fact that its about time to file taxes I'm just going to insert a commercial break instead of actually explaining how I'm financing my trip...

Mr. Kinte's insight on training jiu-jitsu

You can find Kunta Kinte's father (aka Babs Olusanmokun)  teaching at Jiu Jitsu For the People 

in New York

And then pick up back here.

So, I'm getting to Portugal the same way that I got to New York with the added bonus of actually getting to compete. I might not be able winning double gold like Vedha and Dominyka had done at the BJJ Pro, but at least I will have half the European jiu-jitsu community there to console me if I don't win. More importantly, Fabricio and Moicano would be there from the social project. Terere and I have spent the last couple of months raising money to get these two to Europeans. We raised over a thousand dollars and with the help of some sponsors and companies like I Ain’t No Saint Tattoo Studios (in England), Fightland Vice (with the favela jiu-jitsu articles, and Tatame we were actually able to make this happen.

"Your opinion of yourself becomes your reality. If you have all these doubts, then no one will believe in you and everything will go wrong. If you think the opposite, the opposite will happen. It's that simple." 

Never. Never in the constant turmoil of my daily life would I have thought that I would compete in Europeans. I mean, it's Europe. That's far, so far it seems almost impossible. And, of course, I have shit to do here, important shit. I lost my license last month and still haven't replaced it and my winter jacket doesn't even zipper. I could, maybe/should invest in a better coat before traversing a whole ocean, but that would have been using fear as an excuse to turn down a free trip to Europe.

The next step on the path to living the dream was to tell at least 3 people. Most ideas sound good in your heads but when they are actually articulated by other people. When your crazy ass ideas that you think about after one too many beers are actually manifested, not as unsubstantiated ideas, but as facts, it becomes more tangible.If everyone else thinks that you can or you are, then you either start to do or be or you're going to look like an idiot. This method worked for me when I was planning on moving to Brazil, and trust me, the first time I heard coach Issac say it in front of the entire class, I was no longer able to hide behind poles and try to avoid rolling. Once other people started asking me about the trip, I had no other choice but to get my shit together and go to Europe because trying to explain to all those people why I was NOT in Portugal would be worse than any apprehension I had about actually going. So yeah, I fly out on Saturday. Hopefully, I'll win a medal, see a lot of friends, get to visit some castles, and eat some good food.

The whole favela will be watching Moicano and Fabricio compete next Saturday. O bicho vai pegar. It's about to be LIIT.

and I'll be mat side

with my new camera.

= )

Fabricio at Brazilian Nationals in 2015. Moicano, Moleza, Fabricio, and I took a bus down to Sao Paulo. It was the first trip outside of Rio that the project sponsored with food, registration, and transportation all paid for from donations sent to TKP. Watching Fabricio eat his victory acai after winning gold for the first time (after many attempts) is definitely something I'll never forget. Fabricio has changed a lot in the three years that I've known him, he's an amazing teacher, a great friend, and a father of 3 beautiful children. 

Last year the project sponsored Moicano to travel 

to San Diego to compete in IBJJF PanKids

It was a long, stressful, crazy, amazing, humbling, 

experience.