J.D. Daniels is a former actor you might recognize if you’ve watched The Mighty Ducks series where he starred as Peter Mark. But more importantly he’s also an award winning novelist. Here’s a grappling excerpt from his essay titled The Correspondence:

There is no diamond as precious as a tooth, so I shoved a boil-and-bite mouthpiece into my backpack with my cup and jockstrap before I headed for Allston to begin studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It was 5:00 a.m. on a January morning in 2008.

The gym was under a laundromat and it smelled like a sweat sock. I looked around and saw an octagonal cage with its door hanging open, a boxing ring, four heavy bags, kettle bells, medicine balls, a rowing machine, interlocking mats on the floor, and a sign in the bathroom that said HEY GENIUS, DO NOT PUT PAPER TOWELS IN THE TOILET.

I signed a standard waiver promising not to sue the management in the extremely probable event of my incurring an injury. I was thirty-three years old, five-ten, one-sixty.

We ran laps and did five hundred sit-ups, a hundred of this, a hundred of that. Then Big Tony knocked me down and sat on my neck for two hours.

A little later he writes:

Brazilian jiu-jitsu comes in two flavors. There’s the gi, that heavy cotton jacket you may have seen competitors wearing in judo, and there’s no-gi, which is just what it sounds like. You use the gi’s collar to choke your opponent, and you hold his pants or sleeves to control his movement. It’s hard to escape from the grips and the friction. I wanted to learn about that, too, so I went to a Friday-night gi class.

I had expected my gi to be plain white, but it looked like a cross between subway graffiti and a full-page ad in Cigar Aficionado. On its back was a picture of a pit bull encircled by these words: Gameness means that neither fatigue nor pain will cause the fighter to lose his enthusiasm for fighting contact. I put it on and got to work. We did calisthenics and drilled chokes and armbars for an hour, then we sparred with one another.

At the end of the second hour, the head coach came by with a clipboard and a sign-up sheet. He had gray in his Afro and braces on his teeth.

“How long you practice?”

“This is my third day.”

“You fight at tournament? End of February.”

“If you think it’s all right.”

“Listen,” he said. “After three days, is not like you try to kick nobody in ass or nothing. We go. Fight all day. Then big party. Okay?”

You can read the entire essay here!