In jiu-jitsu you do not call it sparring. You call it rolling. If you have ever stepped on the mats, you know exactly what those four words mean. You want to roll? It means let us play, let us go a few rounds, let us play chess with our bodies. And that is the thing I love about it. Jiu-jitsu does not care how strong you are or how big you are. It cares about technique, about what you actually know. A smaller person who understands leverage and timing will tie up a bigger, stronger one who does not, every single time. The art is like a tree that has been growing for a very long time, branch after branch after branch, and you could spend an entire lifetime climbing it and never reach the top. That is the whole appeal. It is endlessly difficult, and the difficulty is the point.
I started rolling around 2015, out of a gym in Atlanta called Helix. My instructor there, Justin Parsons, is a phenomenal teacher, and he taught me a lot more than submissions. He taught me patience. When to attack, how to set it up, how to wait for the thing to be there instead of forcing it. I have always loved chess, and jiu-jitsu is chess, just played with grips and hips and the weight of another human being. You never know what you are going to get when you start rolling somebody new. Someone from another academy moves differently. Someone from another state, differently again. And someone from another country, that is a whole new language. That uncertainty, that puzzle, is exactly what keeps pulling me back to it.
If you want to test your mind and your body against the best, you go to the source, and there is only one source for this. If you follow MMA, if you watch the UFC, if you have rolled even once, you know the Gracie name, you know the family that carried it, and you know that all of it traces back to Brazil. Brazil is the mecca. So this September, for my birthday, I am going to roll where the art was born, on the mats that produced the people who taught everyone else. There is no better way to challenge myself than to walk into a room full of strangers, in the one country that does this better than anywhere on earth, and bow in.
Let me be clear about what I am going there to do. I am not going to win. I want to get humbled, genuinely humbled, by some eighty-year-old who can still roll circles around men a third his age, because that is the moment that teaches you everything. I am going to learn, and I am going to get better. I do not train jiu-jitsu to beat people up, and I do not train it for self-defense. If I ever truly needed it, it would be there, but that is not why I do this. I do it because it is the hardest, most honest game I have ever found, and I am a competitor to my core. Gear on and gear off, the gi and no-gi both, I want all of it. I want to see what the art looks like in the hands of the people who never left home.
Here is the part I am still working out, and it might be the best part of the whole trip. I have not settled on a city yet. That is the luxury of how I get to travel now: I do not have to choose one academy in one place and stay put. I can move, from a big-city gym to a quiet town to some out-of-the-way academy a local swears by, and roll in every one of them, letting the trip write itself as I go. The not-knowing is part of the adventure. The whole battle, and the whole joy, is in the choosing.
This is a tough one, and I am doing it for exactly one reason: I want to. I want the challenge. I do not know who is going to tie me in knots, or what I am going to learn with the gi on and the gi off, or which corner of Brazil I will end up in when it is all said and done. But I know it is going to be one of the best things I have ever done. So I am taking you to the home of the gentle art with me, and we are going to find out together what it does to a man who thought he understood it. You want to roll? This September, my answer is finally yes.
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