A lot of elite Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes have had to go through earning next to nothing in their early years of training and competition. Even the best of the best.

It wasn’t any different for Tommy Langaker.
As he emphasized in a ONE Championship interview, there’s a lot of time to invest into BJJ – but in the beginning it doesn’t really “pay off” when it comes to money:

I’ve just been very stubborn in what I do. So I put my training and my passion in front of everything else.

I think that’s the biggest adversity when it comes to making this life in jiu-jitsu, because there’s very little income, especially in the early career.
And if you want to catch up with the rest, you have to invest so much of your time.

But Langaker kept training and pushing himself to refine his Jiu-Jitsu as much as possible:

I’m doing it because I always compare it to if you’re a good carpenter.

If you have a nice house, you want to show it off if you’re doing good work. I’m very proud of my jiu-jitsu.
And I know my house is the best house, and I’ll be there if somebody has anything better.

But I’m going to go in there, and I believe my jiu-jitsu is always going to be superior.

Ultimately though, money didn’t really matter to him when he was starting out.
Because he did it all for the love of the sport:

I’m a samurai when it comes to it. I do it because I really, really, really, really love this sport. And this is all I want to do.

This is my calling. So I would just mindlessly go — never a thought about anything like economics.
It [didn’t] matter, it [would] all solve itself. I just pursued it.

 

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