Dave Bautista is a professional wrestling icon, who has made a legendary name for himself in the WWE.
However, not many WWE fans know that he’s been training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for a long time…
And he was promoted to the rank of a BJJ brown belt las June.
Bautista was full of emotion when he shared the news on Instagram:
Very proud to be posting this.
I started training BJJ with Cesar Gracie in 2010 and even though I got my ass handed to me by everyone at the academy, I immediately fell in love.It’s a puzzle I’ll never solve and if you know me, you know I get obsessed with things I can’t figure out.
His work schedule was extremely demanding and he didn’t train much from 2014 to 2021.
And yet, he persevered and got the prize in the end:
It’s been a challenging process with my work schedule, in fact I barely trained from 2014 when I got my purple belt to 2021.
Last fall I dedicated myself to progressing and this week it finally happened.
Bautista was recently interviewed by Matt Arroyo and talked about how he started training:
“I officially started training grappling around 2010. I was an amateur wrestler, I wrestled in high school and obviously I wrestled professionally. So there was always a little bit of grappling involved.”
“I started training with Cesar Gracie in 2010. I wanted to learn, I wanted to put on a gi. I wanted to get some belts and really kind of figure out what I was doing because up until then I was just kind of using basic wrestling to get by with guys who were real grapplers. I was training a little bit, I just wasn’t officially training in Jiu-Jitsu.”
Bautista finished with an empowering message to everyone who trains:
Good days and bad days, there’s only truth on the mat. You’re exposed one way or another.
f you know what I mean then you know what I fucking mean.Respect to everyone willing to put it all out there. Let’s finish what we started.
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