This interview barely
scratches the surface on one of the UK’s most prominent Jiu Jitsu coaches and
an inspirational person to many in the UK and beyond; I was fortunate enough to
grab some time with Simon on a recent trip to the London based main academy and
managed to cram in as much as possible within such a short space of time. A long time in the making, due to Simon’s
hectic work schedule, I hope you all enjoy this interview as much as I did
interviewing him.
Simon,
at long last and not before time, where the hell do we start (laughs)? We have to start somewhere and where better
from the beginning, the background of Simon Hayes the martial artist. When did you begin martial arts and what
circumstances brought you into the world of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu?
Carl, it was a long, long time ago; when I was seven years old I decided I
wanted to learn how to punch and kick, but my parents didn’t want to back me
up, they didn’t want to get behind me and take me to a karate or a kickboxing
club, so they met me half way and took me to what they thought was more self defense
oriented, which was the local Judo club.
In an amazing turn of fate, the Judo club was run by Syd Hoare, who is now an
8th Dan and one of the premier Judo coaches in the UK; he was a coach at the
Budokwai (Europe’s oldest Judo club and home to many great champions past and
present). Syd was also running the small church hall Judo club in South West
London, to which I was taken. The fact
my parents didn’t take me to a karate or kickboxing club was fantastic as I was
able to train with one of the UK’s leading judo coaches, a man who had spent a
lot of time living in Japan, studying Japanese culture. A man who was obsessed by martial arts self defense
and close combat, he had a very vicious style of Judo as well; many years later
I heard tales of him choking people out from standing and he was an inspiration
and someone I looked up to, he was certainly a man of honor and respect and a
man who was tough and not to be messed with, a man’s man. For a seven year old
boy who was a little unruly, getting into trouble, I had a martial artist I
could look up to and wanted to be like and someone who was going to lead me
down the right path.
I spent from age seven to eleven doing Judo with Syd and, when I was eleven Syd
closed the club and moved onto other things, as he started the British Sumo
Team, travelling around Europe and Japan, trying to get that off the ground.
There were some very tough Judo players on Syd’s team at that time. It was also a time I went into the wilderness
with regards martial arts; I tried training at a few other Judo clubs, the
Tokai for example, which, incidentally was where Brazilian Top Team started teaching many
years later and is now where Eduardo Carriello (DuDu) teaches BJJ. I did Judo there sporadically for about a
year in the early eighties, but my interest waned as it was a long way to
travel to the other side of London, then as a coincidence, a friend of mine
told me his father was a Judo Instructor.
Well as a kid everyone’s Dad’s a Martial Artist so I took it with a
pinch of salt until I met him and when I mentioned Syd Hoare’s name, this man
let me know he was one of Syd’s friends and a chairman at the Budokwai and his
name was Dickie Bowen, who sadly passed away a few years ago.
Dickie was another Judo scholar; his life’s work was chronicling Judo since
Kano invented the art, especially the history of Japanese and UK Judo and his
work now sits in Bristol University, which is where the High Performance Judo
team of Great Britain spend their time studying Judo.
Dickie was inspirational to me because he taught me submissions. As a seven year old, Syd wasn’t allowed to
teach me any submissions and in fact during the eighties, submissions weren’t
really taught until late blue belt or brown belt level and at fourteen years
old and many left it until sixteen years old.
The more forward thinking clubs taught submissions at fourteen but Dickie
started teaching me submissions privately at eleven; he recognized I was eager
and hungry to learn and gave me a lot of books on Judo and taught me juji
gatame (arm bar) and hadaka jime (choke) and from that moment I was hooked.
I then gave up for a while and took up other sports, I raced BMX bikes and
travelled the world during my late teens doing that. I had sponsorship and was
reasonably successful. I won the
European championship in 1985 in Barcelona and that was where my sporting
career was going, but not long after that BMX racing kind of died of death and
I naturally found my way slowly but surely back to martial arts, where I
decided I did still need to learn how to kick and punch. During my time off I had forgotten just how
effective Judo was and the catalyst that got me into striking was by getting
involved in a street fight.
Some friends of mine got themselves in some trouble and I decided to step in
and sort the trouble out and I ended up having a fight with a guy who was a lot
bigger than me and I couldn’t throw him, he was too big, his base was too good,
so I decided to stand and trade with him and I kicked him in the balls and
broke my ankle. I was unable to stand
anymore and ended up losing the fight quite badly and woke up the next day with
a cast on my ankle and a badly broken nose.
It was then I realized I needed to be trained in striking, and that
grappling alone just wasn’t enough, you need to be able to fight in every phase
of the fight. I had phase’s two and
three; stand up clinch/ grappling and the floor work from Judo, but I didn’t
have phase one, the kicking and punching phase and in those days there wasn’t
the Internet, so to find a good club was trial and error.
At the time it was kickboxing in London, it was massive and I hadn’t heard of
Muay Thai; in Manchester Carl, your home town you have a very solid background
in Muay Thai, thanks to Master’s Sken and Toddy. London doesn’t have the same Thai tradition,
it has the kickboxing tradition, in conversations in London we spoke about
kickboxing which as we know now is full contact karate; kickboxing has more in
common with full contact karate than it does with Muay Thai, no matter what
kick boxing instructors would like you to believe.
I tried to look for kickboxing so I sent a mate of mine to look around and he
phoned me up and said he’d found this place, it is a type of kickboxing, but
it’s called taekwondo, so I said I’ll come down and give it a go. I turned up and it was a very good
competition club, but I couldn’t understand why they didn’t allow punching to
the face. What did resonate was just how hard the training was, how the
sparring was full contact within the rules.
In other words you could kick someone in the head and knock them out,
but you could not punch them in the head; I was told this was because it was
first and foremost a kicking art and because if they allowed punching to the
face, as soon as two fighters got tired ie half way through the first round, it
would turn into a slugfest. Discouraging
punching to the face, it would encourage fighters to look for high quality
knock out kicks, which was true to full contact Taekwondo, WTF Olympic
Taekwondo.
The problem I found out a few years down the line was that it was not effective
in a no rules situation; as an Olympic sport, it keeps you extremely fit,
teaches a degree of self defense and is a devastating kicking art. The
practitioners are without doubt superb athletes but the problem was that due to
the lack of punching to the face, people’s guards dropped and the fight was
broken by the Ref as the clinch occurred.
Clinching was illegal.
A common thread running through all my training though was that I have, by
luck, always had fantastic instructors and ended up with Kwok Wan, who was the
Seoul Olympics British team coach and as a consequence I received very good
Taekwondo tuition. The best. It was very
tough sparring and after two years training, I found a kickboxing club and
started cross training, so I could test my Taekwondo skills and I learned very
quickly that I had virtually no hands at all and so started to add hands to my
training. My hands are still my weakest
part, my kicks were OK and my grappling and Judo were at a nice level and
that’s why I went to the kickboxing club to develop my hands. I continued there
until I eventually found Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Nice
easy start to the interview Simon (laughs) which leads us nicely to the next
question, how did you find Brazilian Jiu Jitsu?
What happened with Jiu Jitsu, I was working with a friend of mine in the film
industry, Guy Ritchie. I’m a sound recordist and Guy was making his first film,
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, I was his sound man and he was a third Dan
Shotokan Karate man who trained at the Budokwai. He said ‘have you seen the UFC?’ and I said
that I had and had seen UFC 2 in 1994, nine months after it was released, I
managed to get a VHS copy of it. I put
the fact that Royce Gracie had won down to a fluke and thought the guys doing
stand up were rubbish, that had he met some decent stand up guys, he would have
got beaten. I kind of put to the back of
my mind the fact that Jiu Jitsu had won, because I was training hard in
Taekwondo and kickboxing and didn’t want to admit that I might be going down
the wrong path. It takes a very brave
man to admit he’s on the wrong path, because you have invested a lot of time,
energy and money in trying to get somewhere, only to be faced with factual
evidence that actually what you’re doing might not be effective, it was very
difficult to take.
Some people will hide from the truth; they will hide in their own little
comfort zone, standing in the front line of their karate class or kickboxing
class; obviously there are some very good karate and kickboxing clubs, some
clubs even cross train in MMA and BJJ and that’s fantastic, because they have
forward thinking Sensei’s. That said
there are others that won’t admit the truth and hide behind premises like ‘MMA
has rules and if we were allowed to eye gouge, we’d win, because our techniques
are so deadly’.
I’ve had students say ‘well if I was allowed to use pressure points and eye
gouges…..’ and I’ve always said so use them and just remember when I’m mounted
on you I can use the same eye gouges and pressure points from a dominant
position and it won’t be very nice for you.
Striving for dominant position will always beat dirty tricks.
I was working with Guy Ritchie and he said he’d seen the UFC and that he was
going to look for BJJ, but he never found any in London in 1998; but what he
did find out was that the Budokwai was doing a ne waza (groundwork) only
session at the club and not only were there some very good Judo players there,
some of them had seen a little of the UFC and were starting to think more along
BJJ lines. They weren’t looking to fight
for pins; they were more interested in finishing the fight with a
submission. So we were using Judo
techniques with the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu ethos and at the end of the day that’s
what Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is.
The difference between Judo and BJJ is only a set of rules, the two arts came
from the same place and so effectively we were training our own Brazilian Jiu
Jitsu in 1998 at the Budokwai and I thank them for my start. The Budokwai has had a huge impact on the
growth and the start of BJJ in the UK and continues to this day; I did that
training for eight or nine months and then I started training seriously for my
Taekwondo first Dan. Two years later I met
up again with Guy on the film Swept Away and that’s when my Jiu Jitsu career
really started.
As soon as I arrived on the set in Malta, Guy approached me and said he’d been
training with the best people, Renzo Gracie in New York and Rickson Gracie in
LA, because his career had changed course; he was no longer just a west London
boy making small low budget movies anymore, he’d met his new wife, was living
in America and was training with the best in the world. He received his blue belt from Renzo and was
training full time at Rickson’s academy and had met a purple belt under Rodrigo
Vaghi by the name of Todd Fox (now a Black belt) and he had come to Malta to
work as a Security adviser and continue teaching Guy. The film crew were all
offered the chance to train at lunch time and after work and I embraced this
opportunity.
Whilst sparring with Todd in some friendly exchanges, I was trying to use my
kicking skills and he was trying his Jiu Jitsu skills, he absolutely demolished
me; not in a nasty way, but he showed me every time I went to kick him in the
head, he’d single leg me, take me down, mount me and got into position where he
could choke me or ground and pound me, should he wish to.
After doing that, I decided the twelve weeks I had in Malta where going to be
very productive for me, not only was I away working and earning money, I was
also getting free Jiu Jitsu training with a very good purple belt. He taught me twice a day during the course of
the film and I came back to England with a huge appetite, a small amount of
skill and a lot of heart so I started to look for BJJ in London. Again, the common thread of the Budokwai
keeps cropping up, as by that point we had the internet and I searched for BJJ
and I learned of a character by the name of Chen Moraes was teaching Jiu Jitsu at
the Budokwai.
I arrived there and it was like a mad house, completely mental; the downstairs
room which is quite small was rammed with all sorts of street thugs, Karate and
Japanese Ju Jutsu black belts, bouncers, football hooligans, Eastern European
soldiers, no normal average man off the street, everyone in the room was
completely and utterly mental and Chen was running his class. To give Chen his due, every single class
would have heavy emphasis on sparring; Chen would quite regularly have people
fight from standing in the middle of the room with everyone else watching and
cheering them on and he never missed a class. On Sundays we had the upstairs
dojo and that would be no gi training every single week. With Jiu Jitsu I always train no gi at least
once a week, I truly believe no gi Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is fifty per cent of the
game, you have to have both.
Without no gi BJJ, you don’t have Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the same way without
gi Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, you don’t have Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, you can’t have one
without the other. They are two pieces
of a puzzle; you can only complete the puzzle if you have both and I find it
just as demoralizing when I see people who want to train only in the gi as I do
when I see people that only want to train no gi, it’s a very blinkered view.
The Budokwai gave BJJ in London its start. Ray Stevens* was the general manager
of the Budokwai and is a silver medalist at the Barcelona Olympics and an
outstanding Judoka to this day; he has a very strong ground element to his game,
which he’d developed from training with Neil Adams. Ray and Neil had spent a lot of time together
and Neil had passed a lot of techniques on to Ray and Ray had seen the UFC and
was a good friend of Guy’s. Ray really
got behind the idea that they should employ a BJJ coach and when Chen Moraes
walked through the door, unlike the politics he had come up against in other
Martial Arts clubs, Chen was shown around the Budokwai and was asked, ‘when
could you start?’
*Incidentally Ray Stevens went on to be awarded his BJJ Black Belt by Roger
Gracie in 2008
The Budokwai, since day one, has supported and encouraged the BJJ community in
the UK and encourage their Judo players to go and train in the BJJ
classes. Chen Moraes started
The BJJ there, followed by Alliance’s Roger Brooking and now Roger Gracie
Academy runs the classes there, Roger Gracie can also be seen training Judo
there regularly.
That’s
quite a journey Simon and we all know that you were then drawn to the Carlson
Gracie way of Jiu Jitsu; what was it about the team and the training that you
found so appealing?
I trained with Chen for four months before he left for Barcelona and whilst I
was with Chen there was a very big purple belt training with Chen called Wilson
Junior; Wilson was the best student in his class and a very nice man, whereas
I, at the time, was a very aggressive individual, trying to kill anyone I
sparred with, that was the ethos at Chen’s gym, hard sparring.
I had a lifetime of weight training and athletic ability to try and get me by
and I tried to use that one hundred per cent every time I sparred; once I
sparred with Wilson, I went a hundred per cent and slowly, without hurting me
and using complete technique, he slowly decimated me piece by piece and in the
most gentle way possible, taught me a valuable lesson, that Jiu Jitsu is about
technique.
When Chen left the country, some of his students went off to train with
Mauricao Gomes at Gracie Barra and some went with Roger Brooking, who was
Alliance and they were the two big clubs.
Wilson decided he wanted to start Carlson Gracie London with the help of
Luca Menagacci who was a blue belt. Carlson Gracie’s club in Rio was where
Wilson trained in his homeland and so obviously that was the team he wanted to
represent when he set up in London. Wilson left to train in Rio and talk about
the possibility of setting up the London Club.
While there he was promoted to his very overdue Brown Belt. When he arrived back in London, he started
Carlson Gracie London with a hardcore faction of Chen’s old students. These were Luca Menagacci, Walid Tadjouri and
Rob Lawlor, two of Chen’s best students and terrors on the matsl and Luiz
‘Manxhina’ Ribeiro, Dickie Martin and me.
Wilson and Luca ran the club and the rest of us were the students that started
with Wilson; we started with him because we liked his manner and he had
devastating Jiu Jitsu and we were all friends and wanted to continue training
together. We moved to the basement of a
hotel in Earls Court and in that time we started full time Jiu Jitsu training;
I believe we were the first full time club having lunch time and evening
classes in London. During this time, I did train in some other clubs and was
unaware of the politics at that time, the Gracie family to me were the Gracie
family and I thought that Carlson Gracie and Gracie Barra were all in the same
club. It was only later that I learned
of the competitive nature between the different teams and that team points were
awarded in Jiu Jitsu competitions and has created a competitiveness between the
teams that’s healthy and pushes teams forwards.
Consequently, it means that there comes a point in every man’s Jiu Jitsu
career, where they need to make a decision and what team they fight for and
that’s the point when people start to compete.
You can’t be going to the other club and fighting the same guys in the
club and then on the mats in a competition at the weekend, showing them your
techniques and your weaknesses and finding their weaknesses as well.
This was brought home to me when Carlson Gracie moved to the original Boiler
Room in 2002, there was a four month sabbatical as Luca and the other guys
prepared the room to be a matted Dojo.
During this time I trained at Gracie Barra and met Jude Samuel and Kevin
Chan who were taking classes followed by Felipe Souza who joined them from
Brazil. I had a great time there, they
welcomed Dickie Martin (my training partner) and myself into their club and
allowed us to train, knowing we were from another team and were temporarily
club less.
Braulio was also training there at the time and i got on very well with him; we
had Paul and Alexis from London Shoot coming to train with us and it was a
hotbed of activity at that time and Felipe taught me and Dickie some great
techniques during our time there.
Mauricao Gomes arrived at the club as leader of Gracie Barra UK and was the
catalyst who basically said ‘Simon, it’s time to make a decision; he asked me
if I wanted to join Gracie Barra and I really didn’t understand the politics of
training at two different clubs, as I’d said before.
I politely said I wanted to continue training at the Carlson academy as it was
nearly ready and Mauricao as an absolute gentleman explained that Gracie Barra
and Carlson Gracie would be fighting each other in competitions. I had to make a decision and it was at that
point that I realised my decision was an
important one because wherever I chose would be the place I was going to
continue my training for good in the UK.
I chose Carlson Gracie team as that was the team I had always been with
and I had already found my Jiu Jitsu instructor, Wilson Junior. I knew from the first day we met and trained
that we would be together and that I was with him, I knew he would be my mentor
in Jiu Jitsu, someone to guide me in my martial arts path.
During the four long months that Carlson Gracie Team was closed to relocate
with no classes for me to attend I also trained with Roger Brooking, who was
teaching at the Seymour Leisure Centre in the West End of London and he
welcomed me with open arms, but I felt my home was with Carlson Gracie and
that’s where I stayed.
Who
awarded you your black belt?
Wilson Junior awarded Dickie and me our black belts and we are very proud that
we have been with Wilson from white belt all the way through to black belt;
this is not always possible
For students to stay with one teacher due to geographical reasons, people
moving from country to country for work etc.
The pursuit of the black belt in BJJ takes a long long time, a lot of
effort, a lot of hard work and during those years, people’s circumstances
change, people’s team and lifestyles change.
Dickie and I have been blessed that we have been quite settled and have
seen our careers go from white to black with Wilson and because of that we have
unbroken lineage and are very proud that we have been ultimately recognized as
being of black belt level by the same teacher who oversaw our progression from
the beginning. We were on the mat with
Wilson every class, he saw us have good days and bad, he witnessed our triumphs
and tribulations and was there to guide us when the going got tough and there
were plateaus to break through. He is
responsible for the fighters we have become.
Wilson Junior awarded us our belts and in time honoured Carlson Gracie
tradition they were blessed by the heads of Carlson Gracie Team and BJJ
Revolution Team Carlson Gracie Junior and Rodrigo Medeiros who have both
maintained a very tight relationship with us and the London Team.
Many
tales have been whispered about the infamous Boiler Room dojo, can you shed
some more light on this BJJ point of interest?
The original Boiler Room was underneath a youth hostel in a very tough part of
London, called the Harrow Road, Royal Oak in the middle of a council
estate. It was like a rabbit warren you
had to walk up some stairs and down some stairs and down some dark alleys and
many people who came to the club never made it inside, it was too frightening
just to get to the front door. It was
originally a rubbish storage room and a place to house the boilers for the
youth hostel and Luca, who had connections with the people that owned the
hostel, asked if he could clear out the room and put in some showers and some
mats.
It was a confined space, about enough room for sixteen to eighteen people;
there were pipes everywhere. The entire
hostel’s sewage used to get pumped across the pipes above our mats and you
could hear people flushing toilets and having showers and there’d be a leaking
pipe and you didn’t know if it was shit leaking out or dirty shower water. It was rough and ready.
The way we got the name Boiler Room was from an internet troll from the now
defunct ‘Submission Fighting UK’ forum who said he’d heard that Carlson Gracie
team had moved into a boiler room; we said ‘yea you’re right Mr Internet Troll,
you’re right and we fucking love it, that’s where we train and do our
thing. We don’t care where we train, we
just want to do Jiu Jitsu.’
You
are now in Hammersmith; is this Boiler Room Part Two?
The ironic thing was when we first moved into the new place here, there was a
huge boiler in the middle of the room, which we had to get rid of, so for the
first six months we had to train with the boiler there and the students called
the place Boiler Room II. It’s now been
removed and the room has the same fighter spirit as the original boiler room,
it looks like the old place only bigger. We have the same Judo Tatami on the
floor, the same yellow mats around the walls and anyone that came to the
original boiler room, that’s been away for a while and has come back to the new
place and walk through the doors and says ‘it’s just like the original place
only bigger.’
You can smell fighter’s blood in here, it’s not a Fitness First gym, we are
developing fighter’s talent and whether it’s BJJ or MMA or Muay Thai, this is a
place where people come to learn martial arts and to fight.
You
wrote a very popular article on the forums a while back about the dreaded
affliction known as ‘beltitis’ care to elaborate?
What I realized was Jiu Jitsu over time is actually a battle with your inner
self; it’s not a battle with your training partners or people you meet in
competition. It’s a battle with the
inner self, your ego and he’s a funny little fellow. Lots of people go through their whole life
not recognizing their ego and are pulled from pillar to post by him, day in day
out; they react to everything he says because they actually believe that their
ego is them. Recognizing your ego is
step one, it’s the voice in your head that tells you not to tap when your arms
straight and is ready to be broken. Your
ego is the voice in your head that tells you not to tap out when you’re caught
in a choke and you’re about to go to sleep.
Your ego is also the voice in your head that tells you when a tough
fellow enters the gym, that tonight you should take it easy and give yourself a
rest. It’s the voice in your head that
tells you, when this tough fellow starts to train full time at the gym, that perhaps you should train lunchtimes
instead of evenings. If you listen to
your ego all the time, all it will do is hold you back, not just in Jiu Jitsu,
but in life in general; recognizing who your ego is and learning not to listen
to it is part of the journey in Jiu Jitsu.
The ego can manifest itself as ‘blue beltitis’, then ‘purple beltitis’,
followed by ‘brown beltitis’ and the big one, ‘black beltitis’. It’s all very
well when you’re a white belt and you’re trying to tap out the blue belts, as
there is really no pressure on you. When
you step up and get the first belt, the pressure increases and that pressure
doesn’t come from anyone but yourself and more to the point, that little fellow
again, the ego. It tells you that now
you are a blue belt you shouldn’t tap, but the only way to learn how not to tap
is to come to the gym and train harder and get better, but the ego will tell
you to take the easy way out and not go to the gym, you might get tapped, so
have a night off. Or it might say after
a few weeks, the wife fancies a night in watching the TV and you’ve had a hard
day at work, so give yourself a break and have the night off.
So that’s what ‘beltitis’ is really, it’s your ego telling you not to go
training because of the added pressure that a new belt puts on to you. The correct way to deal with it is by
smashing it and you do exactly the opposite of what the ego is telling
you. When it says stay in tonight, pack
your bag and go training; when the toughest guy at the gym walks in, make sure
you spar with him. That way you start to submit your own ego and when you do
that, it’s when you know that you’re truly on the path in Jiu Jitsu.
The fight is just to get on to the mat and train, if you get tapped out, you
know what, that’s good for your ego and good for your Jiu Jitsu. We learn more from our losses than our
victories, both in Jiu Jitsu and in life.
You
have a strong connection with your brothers in Budapest, Hungary; how did you
guys meet?
Right at the start of the team in the UK, there was a guy named Lajos Varga who
was living in the UK at the time and he brought over his Thai instructor, who
ran the toughest, most hard core Muay Thai gym in Hungary. In 1996/97 he had started his foray into MMA
and BJJ and his name was Mihaly Straka and he had travelled to the US in search
of the best Jiu Jitsu instruction in the early nineties and ended up training
with guys like Chris Brennan and Tito Ortiz and training Jiu Jitsu with Marcus
Vinicius of Beverly Hills Jiu Jitsu Club.
In the US, there weren’t a lot of truly outstanding Thai instructors; it
mirrored London in as much that there were more kickboxing instructors than
Thai instructors. In the late nineties,
they realized that Thai was needed for MMA, it was a devastating art and they
were searching for Thai instructors and Mihaly was approached and asked to show
his skills in Thai in return for Jiu Jitsu skills.
Later on in 2002 and Mihaly turned up to Carlson Gracie London and started to
train with Wilson, Dickie and myself and he would come over regularly and
Wilson went over to Hungary and taught seminars on a regular basis as
well. Mihaly stopped teaching Muay Thai
and turned his club in to a Jiu Jitsu club and an MMA club.
Mihaly and Wilson regularly made their respective trips and Mihaly went through
the belts with Dickie and me. There was
a point when I was a purple belt I got a job in Hungary and lived in there for
three months and that was when our relationship blossomed as brothers and
martial artists. He took me under his
wing and spent a lot of time training me in some very diverse techniques, he’s
a very skilled leg lock player and taught me a lot about leg locks. I also got to spar with his blue belts every
day and they were a nightmare, there wasn’t anyone who was less than 100 kilos,
they were huge and my purple belt was severely tested every day by his five
blue belts, as well as all the other white belts. That was certainly a time for me to keep my
beltitis’ in check and for sure I had five hungry strong blue belts chasing me
and my purple belt, but I went to the gym and took them on every night. Mihaly was eventually awarded his black belt
from Wilson and he was Wilson’s first black belt, a very tough and fierce
competitor and I’m proud to say he’s more than a training partner, he’s like a
brother to me.
You’re
a very vocal supporter when ever your students compete, people know you’re in
the room, firing your students up and motivating them; how much importance do
you place on competition? Do you think
all students should compete, regardless of association and should it be a
factor when promoting a student?
Jiu Jitsu is for everyone, it will do everyone in life a lot of good, they will
encounter a more positive side of their character when they train Jiu Jitsu;
it’s going to build your positive aspects and break down your negative aspects
as you face your demons and fears every time you step on the mat.
It should never be felt that Jiu Jitsu is only for competitive guys, some guys
don’t want to compete, that is fine, we encourage them to train none the less;
some guys because of injuries or because of work or family commitments can’t
compete and some just don’t want the pressure of competing, again, that’s fine,
I would never try and hold them back, they would be welcome at the club
regardless.
If you really want to be the best you can be and see yourself excel at the art
and the sport and see yourself develop physically and mentally, then you need
to compete and for anyone who wants to compete, I am 100% behind them.
A guy who competes regularly is going to progress through the belts faster than
a guy who doesn’t because as a competitor he’s going to learn more about
himself and his Jiu Jitsu is going to develop at a greater pace. We learn more from our losses than our
victories and every time a guy loses a competition, he’s going to come back to
the gym and analyse what he did wrong and he’s going to work on it and his game
becomes stronger.
Do
you feel the general public and other martial arts practitioners do not
appreciate the skill levels of each belt within BJJ? They see a guy in BJJ who’s a purple belt,
for example, and they think he’s not that good because he isn’t a black belt
yet?
The general public and certainly some traditional martial artists are
conditioned to view the black belt as the Holy Grail and it doesn’t matter what
the black belt was attained in, what matters is the belt itself. The black belt is a huge achievement, whatever
art you get it in, it’s one that should not be underestimated; however there is
a difference between a black belt in BJJ and any other martial art. I am a Judo 2nd Dan and was told by my
instructors at the Budokwai, when I got my 1st Dan, it means you are not a
beginner anymore, it’s not a certificate of excellence, it means you have
finished your basic training. That’s what
a first Dan is in most martial arts.
In BJJ, the black belt is a certificate of excellence in the art, the blue belt
indicates you have finished your basic training and at most good clubs this
would take around two years average to achieve and some guys never get the belt
at all, they are just not good enough.
That’s how the belt system differs between BJJ and martial arts, when
you have the black belt in BJJ, you have indeed become an expert.
Many
people on the UK forums are more than familiar with your ‘CGJJ Stories from
Abroad’; an interview would barely scratch at the surface of these very popular
tales, so could you give the readers a quick rundown on them?
The stories were inspired by a couple of things; the inspiration to write them
down, was after reading a book, Angry White Pyjamas, a true story of a young
Englishman who went to live in Japan and
underwent the Riot Police Training Course, one of the most hardcore
Aikido schools in Japan. You basically
become an uchi deshi, a live in disciple and train eight to ten hours a day,
every day, it was brutal, not many people get through the course, it lasts for
twelve months and when you finish you are qualified as an Aikido
specialist. Reading that book inspired
much of my martial arts path and when the goings got tough and felt tired and
injured, hit plateaus, I’d often re read the book to give me inspiration.
The second bit of inspiration was BJJ Black Belt Roy Dean’s superb internet
writings of his life as an uchi deshi, when he was a Japanese Ju Jutsu disciple
living and cleaning the dojo of a very good instructor in the US; he went on to
live in Japan at the Kodokan, the centre of world Judo and his stories inspired
me. Because of my job as a sound
recordist, it involved a lot of travelling and I always knew I had to carry on
training on my travels and I decided to chronicle the things I had seen at the
different dojos, the styles of training and the characters I met along the way.
When you travel to a new dojo, it’s a test of your bottle, a test of your
honour as you are there to represent your own club and instructor and you do
that through the belt you wear around your waist. It’s also a test of the ego and it takes an
awful lot of bottle walking into a foreign dojo, whether you are in a different
part of the UK or another country completely.
It’s going to be full of people not your team mates, who may want to
smash you because you’re not their team mate.
I wanted to write about my meetings with these dojos and individuals, but more
so of the battles I had with my own ego whenever I travelled and trained in
foreign dojos.
Simon,
sadly time has beaten us yet again, it’s time for the evening class; many
thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure to interview you, this could have go
on for hours and hours and still not scratch the surface of Simon Hayes
(laughs).
Carl, my pleasure mate; let’s get changed and train!
More info available from www.carlsongracieteam.org.uk
