The rise of Nicky Ryan to the top of the grappling world wasn’t without some twists – and even a bit of deception along the way, according to his mother.

Speaking on The Simple Man podcast, she shared how her teenage son convinced her to let him drop out of school to pursue Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu full-time:

Everybody was hounding me…

“You got to let Nicky drop out of school. You got to let him just waste his time.”
I was like, there’s no way.

Eventually, Nicky offered what seemed like a reasonable compromise.
He promised that John Danaher himself would tutor him to pass his GED, making the leap away from traditional education appear more manageable:

I got the big lie or promise that John Danaher was going to study with him to pass his GED.

So that was the deal.
He was supposed to study with John get his GED.

To make sure he stayed accountable, she tied the deal to something every teenager wants:

I told him if he didn’t do that that I wasn’t going to help him buy his first car.

But the truth came out in the most awkward way possible.
After running into Danaher, she realized the supposed tutoring sessions had never happened:

I saw John and I was like, hey John how’s it going with the GED training?
And he looked at me like, what? What the fu*k are you talking about?

I’m like, I’m going to ki*l these kids.

She stuck to her word and didn’t help with the car.
By that time, however, it didn’t matter.

Nicky’s rapid rise in the grappling world had already started paying off:

I didn’t help him with his first car but I didn’t need to actually.
By then they had their own money.

They had more money than me.

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