John Danaher is the latest guest at Matt Serra’s UFC Unfiltered podcast. During his appearance he explained how he started doing bjj. Apparently during Danaher’s tenure as a professor of philosophy at Columbia he was also moonlighting as a bouncer!
Sure enough one of his friends was quick to suggest bjj to Danaher! All of this happened back in 1993.
Naturally John Danaher who vastly outweighed his friend offered a friendly sparring match. The doors of his Columbia office were locked and the fight was on!
“I was dismissive, brazilian wrestling…. ” Danaher continues “So I lock the door and immediately put him in a headlock and throw him on the ground. So, I now have this tiny guy who has been doing jiu-jitsu for 2 weeks in a headlock on the ground and I’m trying to pull his head off and normally this used to work very well for me in bar fights. “
Much to Danaher’s horror the fellow started wrapping his legs behind his legs and squirming towards his back.
“I was a big guy so I just squeezed my biceps… Minutes went by when finally my arms started getting really tired. Suddenly dawned on me I wasn’t beating him, I wasn’t getting beaten either but a skinny guy who has only been training for 2 weeks.. I was intrigued”
Danaher also mentioned starting at age 28 with a lot of existing physical problems. From there John Danaher quickly met Matt Serra and soon enough he was helping Matt Serra prepare for fights.
Matt Serra and John Danaher went further on the trip down the memory lane recalling what it was like to be Renzo’s guys back in the early days.
They also talked about taking the leg lock game to a whole new level.
Another revealing fact that was revealed is that John Danaher considers the day Renzo assigned him the teaching position as the day he got really serious about the sport!
As for the leg system Danaher says he was taught in a manner without making the distinction between controlling the opponent and breaking the opponent.
“The word described for the most common form of leglocks that we used is Ashi Garami. It means entangled legs it means the two of my legs control a leg of my opponent’s. There are many variations of ashi garami. When we were taught leglocks we were always taught the hold where there was no distinction between ashi garami and the mechanism of breaking the leg. What I changed was I made that distinction and I based my entire leglocks system around the distinction between the mechanism of control and mechanism of breaking so that there could be multiple ashi garamis for one break. Once that started to occur then you could develop a system where you could overcome resistance, you would have a system that had a beginning a middle and an end and took any given scenario to the result of breaking your opponent’s leg in a way that is extremely difficult for opponents to get away from and over time in gained in sophistication… “
To listen to the entire episode and hear John and Matt talk GSP and interview Rafael Dos Anjos press play below or head onto Matt Serra’s UFC Unfiltered and download it there!
(L-R) John Danaher, Gene Dunn, Renzo Gracie, Ricardo Almeida, Matt Serra
