John Danaher

I went from teaching at the big Henzo Gracie Academy to a tiny school in Puerto Rico, and now an even smaller school in Austin, Texas.

And locals would come in and train, and I would watch every day, teaching there twice a day, seven days a week.

And I would see people come in and train, and I would say, this guy has some potential, or this guy has some potential.

And I would recruit people and bring them to another gym where they would train with the professionals.

And if they proved adept and hardworking and someone who can work well in a team, they would stay and build their skills.

As time went by, more and more such people started coming in.

And we had some remarkable people like a young South African purple belt, Luke Griffith, came in.

He had lost in the European trials for ADCC.

And he was down on his luck.

He came into Austin.

He did a show against a local purple belt and lost again.

So he was like...

feeling bad about his performance and his future.

And he came in and I thought he was a lovely kid who worked hard and trained well.

So he became one of the main training partners.

He was similar size to Gordon.

So I encouraged him to train with Gordon whenever he could.

And more and more people started coming in to train under that kind of basis.

One day I got a text from Gordon who was filming an instructional video in Boston.

He said, hey, you know, Nicholas Mirigali was training at this, he was shooting video at the same time as me and we just did some grappling.