Any given Monday: teaching the big Monday afternoon class at RGA is always a source of joy and pride to me. It began mostly as a no gi grappling class that had a strong element of mma ground skills woven in. On any given Monday you could see a large number of MMA athletes mixed with jiu jitsu players working their skills in the floor. One day ace jiu jitsu photographer Luca Atalla was taking pictures at caught this fairly typical scene from years ago – Georges St-Pierre, the great Roger Gracie, Romulo Barral, Gregor Gracie, a VERY young looking Garry Tonon and his mentor Tom DeBlass, along with Shawn Williams and my dear Sensei Renzo Gracie, surrounded by sixty other people in the room. Everyone was getting ready for upcoming matches – some MMA (if I remember correctly this was prior to St-Pierre/condit) some jiu jitsu – but it is great looking at these old images of the titanic wars that were fought every Monday as the athletes fought towards their goals. It has been my privilege over the years to watch so many of the greatest jiu jitsu and MMA athletes test the ideas and concepts I teach and give the best possible feedback that made it easy for me to see what was working, what was not, what could be improved and what should be abandoned. I could not have had a better group of people over two decades to develop ideas and theories and test them in such a harsh proving ground.
