I was always interested in martial arts since I was a child, but my parents wouldn't let me take any lessons because they "thought I would kill someone"! Finally, in 8th grade, I was allowed to take Tae Kwon Do. You have to keep in mind that when I was in junior high, that "Karate Kid/ninja craze" was going on. I was really excited to be doing TKD I took it for a few months and got up to a yellow or orange belt. I can't remember exactly. However, I do remember not being to happy with the lessons because I felt the pace at which the instructor taught was far too slow for me.
When I went to high school, I didn't do any martial arts until my senior year. The Karate Kid craze was over, but now Steven Segal was popular. As you can tell, I like watching movies. So I didn't want to do TKD because now I wanted to wristlock people! I found a Japanese style of jujitsu that did a lot of that standing grappling, wristlocking stuff. I studied that art for about a year. I was extremely enthusiastic and thought about training all the time. Within that year, I got up to brown belt in that style of Japanese jujitsu and was ready to test for black belt. I was one of the fastest people to have ever gone up the ranks of that system. However, right before testing for black belt, I graduated high school and left for college.
I went to college at UC San Diego. I was attending summer school at UCSD just before my freshman year and wanted to continue my martial arts training. I wanted to continue doing the same style that I studied in high school, but there wasn't any club or class that offered it. So, I checked out all the different martial arts classes that were offered at the university. I didn't find anything that I liked, so I just took a class entitled "Self-Defense", thinking I could probably incorporate some of the techniques I knew into whatever was being taught in the class since a single specific style was not being taught.
In the UCSD Self-Defense class was where I met my first BJJ instructor, Roy Harris. Roy was a blue belt at the time and also a Jeet Kune Do instructor. Meeting Roy was a very eye-opening experience as was my first exposure to realistic self-defense. I had never seen or experienced anything like Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, stick fighting, knife fighting, boxing, kickboxing, etc... Roy was very nice and never really commented on the arts I had studied, however, after a few months of training with him, I realized that all that I had learned in the past was pretty much worthless when it came to self-defense.
Because of Roy's JKD background, I had the chance to learn a little of many different styles of martial arts. Of all the arts that I sampled, I seemed to catch onto Brazilian Jiu-jitsu the most quickly. I was very impatient in that I only wanted to learn techniques which I could utilize in action right away. With BJJ, because I caught onto it quickly, I found that I would execute the techniques in action with a very minimal amount of repetitive practice. So eventually, my interest in the other martial arts faded and I began solely focusing on BJJ.
When I first met Roy, he was training with Rorion and Royce Gracie. After training with Roy for about a year, he began to bring me with him to train with the Gracies. Within a few months training of training with Roy at the Gracies, Rorion awarded me my blue belt.
We eventually had a "falling out" with the Gracies and Roy began to train with the Machado brothers and Nelson Monteiro. I took privates lessons from the Machados and Nelson, but a majority of my instruction still came from Roy. Well, guess what? Roy later had a "falling out" with the Machados and Nelson.
These unfortunate series of events eventually led Roy and I to Joe Moreira. I was eventually promoted to purple, brown, and then black belt by Joe.
