John Danaher makes every word count. This is why it was especially interesting to see him give an extensive interview to Bernardo Faria.
In it 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! According to his own account he was dismissive at first.
But after getting familiar with the skill and testing it on a variety of different level students at the time he fell in love with the art.
” Even to see a blue belt back then was unusual. We would all get white belts and started off like that and and that was my start in jiu jitsu. I remember within two weeks I had strangled I think like six people unconscious at work I said looking some pretty good the first time I had I was like wow this is like a superpower this is crazy. “
Danaher added he also started teaching relatively early:
when I first came in and started training the main senior students in our school were Ricardo Almeida Mat Serra and Rodrigo Gracie – roughly at the same time all three had left to open up their own schools and pursue their own careers and Renzo was of course still fighting in Japan at this time… He came to me one night John could you teach. I was at that stage one of the main training partners of the three. I was very fortunate that I had these 3 on the daily basis… I was I think at this stage a blue belt.
You can listen to the entire interview below.
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