Wrestling With My Father

My father is not a martial artist. He’s also probably the primary reason I do BJJ today.

The reason for this is that I have many memories of us play-wrestling when I was young. I didn’t realize it at the time (and I suspect neither did he) but this lay the foundation for me to choose to start training BJJ when I was in college way back in the year 2000.

Naturally, it’s not a hard measurable set of data. However, the joy I had for years as a child wrestling my father, I suddenly rediscovered when I started doing BJJ. It wasn’t until a few years after that I even made that connection.

How it happened was actually a bit of an accident. I was a second year college guy at a new school (I had transferred to a better school after my freshman year) and as young college guys do, we got the idea to pull all the mattresses off our beds and throw them together in the common room. We then proceeded to wrestle each other for hours. The rules were very vague and never discussed.

Despite being from many different places and backgrounds we all seemed to agree to the basics. No biting or striking. No eye gouges. Nothing that would cause permanent damage. Everything else was up grabs. The win condition was “until the other person gave up.” So I guess kind of like submission only?

Though a good pin and being stuck could get the other guy to signal defeat.

Regardless we thought ourselves all very tough.

Then this guy we jokingly called “grandpa” stepped up. He proceeded to beat all of us with just his legs. No hands. I didn’t know what he was doing, but that was what I wanted. I asked him to teach us and for the next three years it was pretty much just him and I training. We’d have a third join from time to time, but they never stayed.

Turns out he was a student under Royce Gracie and had fought Vale Tudo fights in Vegas.

During breaks he’d go train with Royce and then bring material back to teach. He’d gone back to college to study mathematics and philosophy. Which is why we called him “grandpa.” He was roughly 10 years older than all of us. To this day he’s probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. He’s also a Professor and Director of the Math department at a university so I guess that career change worked out.

It was only after I graduated college and got my first real job, that I found a Pedro Sauer school and trained under an official coach (who I also learned Wing Chun from). BJJ gyms were still rare back then and as far as I can recall, it was the only one in the area where I lived and worked.

Yet, it all came back to my own father. Based on hints and his apparent knowledge I think he must have wrestled in high school. Maybe not officially on a team, maybe as a part of a gym class. I should probably go ask him soon. The point is he has some of the “vocabulary” of grappling. I’m not sure why, but some of my happiest memories of childhood involved those wrestling matches with him.

Today, I wrestle my own children. I like to think we’re a bit more technical, but in the end it doesn’t matter as long as we have fun. I’m not raising champions, I’m raising human beings comfortable in their own bodies and with all that comes from opposing another human being in a body-to-body grappling match, whatever the ruleset.

I’ve tried over the years to introduce my father to BJJ but it’s just not something he’s interested in. There are two gyms close to where he lives and if he was interested I’d visit both to see who’d be willing to take on a man of his age and keep him safe while he learns.

However, it seems it just isn’t meant to be.

Which is fine, he’s been playing with my kids and he commented to me today that my kids seem “really strong.” I had to point out it’s not that they are all that strong, but rather they just know how to use their bodies.

In a sense that is because he play-wrestled with me decades ago. The benefits of him just playing at the oldest human game with me as a child now extend in ways he could never have imagined to a new generation.

Though various forms of grappling have risen and fallen throughout history as a practice it is older than recorded human history. It might even be considered the first human sport. As an athletic practice it is one that spans the world and diverse cultures. Though the ruleset and the equipment changes in the end the principles are the same because it is fundamentally an expression of the human body and how one human relates to another.

It is one of the ways I related to my own father and how I now relate to my children.

So this Father’s Day I am thankful for my father and have a deep respect for the man who chose to play with me in a way that cultivated my physical attributes and set me on this path of pursuing the martial arts.