It was the late 1990’s, I was a purple belt, and my friend Allan had one of those gigantic $3,000 consumer cameras that recorded directly to a book-sized VHS cassette. He wanted to film some jiu-jitsu, and I wanted to show a few friends some material I’d been working on.
So we went down to his condo’s fitness room and shot a 12 minute “instructional” for some of my friends. The running joke at the time was that we weren’t doing BJJ, instead we were practising the Starfleet Academy Self-Defense System (given that I often don a Picard rashguard in my videos maybe I never got over that joke).
It’s kind of a time capsule into cutting-edge North American BJJ in the nineties, including guard passes, leglock defence, omoplata options, and a fairly detailed system for attacking the turtle.
If you’re familiar with my work, then you’ll recognise a few techniques that I still use to this day, but man, the details sure have evolved since then!
Here’s the whole video, shaky at first, then better:
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