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FIRST THINGS FIRST
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Every Tuesday morning I send out a breakdown of the best combat sports action. In less than 10 minutes you'll learn how the top fighters win and anything else fighters, martial artists, and fight fans need to know.
Another influencer is trying to buy their way into combat sports. Derek Moneyberg is paying for privates and, presumably, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.
Pretending to be something you’re not is table stakes today, especially for this guy, and Moneyberg totally misses the point of why a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black is so meaningful in this day and age.
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Now let’s get into it.
What's In Today's Letter?
LIES, DAMN LIES, AND FAKE FIGHTERS
Why A Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt Means Something
Last week I had to carefully tread the waters of a jiujitsu coach’s worst nightmare. An athletic, positive, and well meaning student asked me, “When am I going to get my purple belt?”
It was more of a demand than a question. All I could say was, “When you keep coming to class.”
They rolled their eyes and walked away.
I wanted to say, “Well, you’re really strong and athletic. You have advantages that you exploit to ‘win’ in training. You’re just over powering people that don’t care about winning rounds, nor getting their next belt. And because of that you’re learning bad habits. But when you show us that you’re unlearning those habits you’ll get your purple belt. Maybe even sooner.”
That’s the beautiful and frustrating part of the silly hobby we choose to spend decades doing. There are no tests. You can’t study any answer key. You can enjoy showing up and getting better, or, you can find something else to do.
Most importantly, everyone’s path to their next belt is different. And in that way Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts represent a unique form of self mastery other martial arts don’t possess. They’re supposed to, anyway.
Fortunately I’m not the only one that thinks this way.
“That’s the amazing thing about jiujitsu. If someone has a different opinion than you, it’s very easy to sort out uh who has a better strategy in given circumstances. Very easy to sort things out and have some clear feedback promptly.”
Don’t recognize the quote? I don’t blame you. It’s just a few throwaway lines from Dale Buczkowski’s recent video with Gordon Ryan.
Don’t recognize that name? Good.
Buczkowski is more commonly known by the pseudonym he adopted to make money online, Derek Moneyberg. Moneyberg is the latest (and most controversial) “celebrity” martial artist. I put the word celebrity in quotes because he’s a C list influencer that made most of his money selling courses on picking-up women, real estate, and stock market investing.
Buczkowski crawled into combat sports headlines by receiving his black belt after only 3.5 years of training Brazilian jiu-jitsu. That means Moneyberg joins the ranks of judo silver medalist Travis Stevens, IBJJF Gi and No Gi World Champion Caio Terra, plus UFC and Brazilian jiu-jitsu World Champion BJ Penn.
Unlike those three, Buczkowski does not have a competition record. It seems like he doesn’t have a sparring record either.
Sure there are videos of Buczkowski rolling around with UFC fighters he paid to teach him, but there’s no evidence that he’s ever tested himself and his skills in a live situation against someone he’s not paying to interact with him. And that’s the real problem.
A NOTE ON ALIVENESS
You Don’t Need To Win, You Need To Try
A Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt is valuable for two reasons.
Instructors pretend the piece of fabric is special and force people to put in special effort to achieve it. Let’s quickly contrast Brazilian jiu-jitsu with a martial art like taekwondo. In BJJ, kids have a separate belt system. The highest belt they can achieve as a teenager is a blue belt, which will carry over as they age into adulthood. They can even compete with adult blue belts. But no kid in BJJ can achieve a black belt. That means a BJJ black belt is relatively special. Conversely, Taekwondo does promote children to black belts.
BJJ is real and it works. Everyone who follows combat sports saw Royce, Rickson, and other members of the Gracie family use Brazilian jiu-jitsu in the 90’s to submit bigger and stronger men from different fighting systems.
Do you want to know why Brazilian jiu-jitsu works? Sparring. That’s the same reason wrestling, boxing, and muay Thai work so well at the highest levels of fighting. The practitioners actually practice. They don’t just learn, think, and theorize.
When I say practice and spar, I don’t mean that you have to get in fights or even compete. I mean you need to practice Aliveness.
About 20 years ago the founder of Straight Blast Gym (SBG), Matt Thornton, coined the term Aliveness to mean movement, timing, and energy in martial arts. It’s the act of learning techniques in motion and progressively applying more and more resistance to learn the art as a whole. It’s authentic. And by training Aliveness you learn about yourself in addition to learning how to fight.
If you haven’t heard of Thornton it’s only because he doesn’t seek attention. He has martial arts academies all over the world. Thornton and his black belts have worked with esteemed fighters like Randy Couture and Conor McGregor. The ideas that have filtered through his schools and their system work. And they work because they’re truthful. They’re based in reality. They have been beaten into reality through decades of blood, sweat, and tears on mats across the world.
No one knows if you’re a dog on the internet, but everyone knows if you’re full of shit or not when you wrestle, do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or get in a fight. You can’t hide it. You got it or you don’t. And in a way, that actually makes a really sad reality for Buczkowski.
PEAK EXPERIENCES:
Doing > Having > Pretending
I am Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. That doesn’t make me anything special. It’s literally a poorly constructed piece of cloth that even can’t hold my pants up! It’s useless. And equally useless, perhaps even, sad and pathetic, is pretending you have earned a black belt when you haven’t ever sparred.
Having a belt is meaningless. Doing a martial art, learning, and earning recognition because you got better is the only part of the training experience that matters.
The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with a theory on human development known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy of needs says that humans’ needs get more esoteric and complex as they develop in their life. And, for people to reach their potential, they need to progressively address more and more complicated needs.
Maslow went on to say that when people are achieving their potential they have what is known as a peak experience, or, the feeling of being one harmonious self that is using all their capacities and capabilities at their highest potential with complete mindfulness of the present moment without influence of past or expected future experiences. Sounds like ecstasy to me.
Maslow and his contemporaries recognized athletic achievement as a tried and true path to peak experience. Joseph Campbell went so far as to say
The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you feel that this has told you something, something has come through in your experience of your relationship to the harmony of being. It can come…my peak experiences, I mean, the ones that I knew were peak experiences after I had them, all came in athletics.
Peak experience and self-actualization are about getting closer to truth. About living in harmony with the greater reality. Serenity, zen, the way, or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t matter. You pursue hard things to get closer to an understanding of the universe and yourself. And that is why competition and combat sports are so valuable.
Not everyone can be a world champion. But everyone can train and give martial arts their best effort. Everyone can use combat sports to be honest with themselves. They’re real. And training them is one of the only experiences we have left that is unequivocally objective.
And when you think about that, you can’t help but feel sorry for Buczkowski. This man claims to have more money than he could ever spend and he chooses to pay for private instruction from martial art stars so they’ll promote him rapidly without ever testing him so he doesn’t have to confront himself.
He bought a sports car and pays someone else to drive it while he sits in the passenger seat.
Money can buy you everything but clout. Looks like no one ever told Buczkowski.
BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU IS STILL THE BEST FRAUD FILTER
What Are We Talking About Today?
When asked about people being good technicians without being a good fighter, Thornton responded,
Think about it, how can you be a good technician if you can’t fight? It doesn’t make any sense. You don’t say, Hey, that guy is a good boxing technician but when he spars he just gets mauled every time. Or that wrestler is a good technician, but his takedowns suck, or that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu guy is a good technician, but he cant fight on the ground at all. If you said that you would sound insane but people say that in JKD all the time. It’s another in a long line of myths.
You can be a tough fighter without being technical, due to aggression, size, explosiveness, strength, etc., but you cannot be a good technician without being able to fight. It’s impossible.
It’s similar to when people tell me they think I have taken the art out of martial arts. That it’s all about fighting only with us. I reply, art of what?
The art is in the performance; the doing. Art is in the performance, sharing, and experience of the training itself.
The world needs more doers. Chat GPT thinks for us, Grammarly writes for us, and Midjourney makes art for us. Pretty soon, tech and tools will be playing for us too. (Spoiler they already are).
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate AI and I love modern technology. I mean, I’m writing this on the internet right now.
But I don’t love how we are living our entire lives behind screens and that is allowing frauds like Dale Buckozwki to create characters that are achieving mastery in something they don’t actually do. That’s bad. And you shouldn’t support it.
Derek Moneyberg might be a black belt. Dale Buckozwki is not.
When I started jiujitsu there was a macho quote that fell out of due to cringe. Royce Gracie said, “A black belt only covers two inches of your ass. You have to cover the rest.” And it pains me to read that and realize the same Gracie is giving Dale Buckozwki privates so he can pretend he’s a black belt.
Derek Moneyberg is in our community because he thinks you’re stupid. He’s posting pictures with skilled fighters so you think he’s cool and successful and you buy his course. Don’t be stupid. And don’t be worried about why he got a black belt and you don’t have one. Just keep training. That’s how you’ll get better and that’s the only thing that matters. The belt is just a consolation prize.
HELP DESK UPDATES:
Guillotines, Empty Half, And One Silly Specialist
This past week I went down a rabbit hole on empty half and one of the UFC’s weirdest fighters ever. He still fights (kind of) and his record is 15-11.
But 12 of those submissions were guillotines across TUF & pre TUF fights. The man’s squeeze is so otherworldly he literally has a guillotine variation named after him.
I’m talking about none other than Cody McKenzie.
McKenzie starts out running straight at Stevens. Stevens follows McKenzie’s kick back in and shoots for a takedown. McKenzie catches a front head lock. Stevens does the right defense. He hops cross body. But McKenzie snakes his near foot around Stevens’s leg to get into empty half. Stevens is stuck. McKenzie pushes his fist into Stevens’s neck briefly to choke him unconscious.
Cody McKenzie - Marc Stevens
You can read some quick analysis on his game on the Help Desk.
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LINKS, INSTRUCTIONALS, AND MORE TO READ
Read More About Peak Experiences And Aliveness
THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS (you might have missed)
A bill has been proposed to make changes to the Ali Act. For those that don’t know, the Ali Act provides protections to boxers in the US so they don’t get exploited financially. Click here if you want to know how this bill would change the Ali Act and how that could benefit the UFC’s parent company.
UFC 320 is a super card in the making. Magomed Ankalaev is fighting Alex Pereira, with Jiri Prochazka as the back-up fighter. And in the co-main event, Merab Dvalishvili will fight Cory Sandhagen. Read about the card here.
At UFC 321 Tom Aspinall finally returns against Cyril Gane. Read more here.
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