Today I earned a BJJ blue belt under Shane Rice, who is a black belt under Rickson Gracie. It took 19 months. Here is a picture.
For those of you wonder what a BJJ blue belt means, I’d consider a BJJ blue belt to be roughly equivalent to a first degree judo black belt in terms of difficulty of getting one and how good a fighter is. I regularly beat the crap out of Judo black belts in Judo tournaments before starting BJJ and then got the crap kicked out of me by blue belts when I started BJJ. My gi record in tournaments in white belt was 5-1.
I’ve done three combatives sports pretty seriously, wrestling, Judo and BJJ and I can honestly say that BJJ is superior to the other two both in terms of its fun level during training and the fun of competitions.
Next step on the path is the purple belt.
December 26, 2011 at 10:33 am |
You regularly beat judo blackbelts in judo tournaments?
December 26, 2011 at 1:25 pm |
No. I haven’t competed in Judo since around 1998. But the first match I had in my first tournament ever was against a black belt who won the bc championships in my weight class the year before, and I won. That year I competed in 4 different tournaments and I won two of them, and ended up 4-1 against black belts and 3-1 against brown belts. The one I lost to the brown belt I got “penaltied out” for shooting too much. The one I lost to the black belt I got ippon’ed with an arm throw. There is a huge bias in Judo against wrestlers, the refs really didn’t like wrestlers in gis who would dummy their best guys. I entered into a few more torunaments after that but wasn’t enjoying the way the rules work and the obvious ref biases, so I quit and started playing beach volleyball.