On the frontier.
It’s been three months since I arrived in Nanjing, China and set up Frontier Asia BJJ. Now that we’re fully established, I thought it might be nice to take a look back at what we’ve achieved since our big move.
September, 2011: The first month was the hardest – I couldn’t find anywhere to train. Even with a translator, gyms didn’t understand what BJJ was all about. They didn’t want anything to do with people rolling round with each other on the floor. I tried to explain that it was a martial art, but it didn’t look like Kung Fu and there was no striking. So they said, “Crazy foreigner” and turned me away.
Eventually I found a space at the back of a gym. The boss held dance classes there and said that if I bought her some new mats and paid an extortionate amount of money per hour I could rent the place from her. I didn’t have a choice, so I got some interlocking yoga mats and handed out flyers in bars and at the local university. I started with only a couple of classes a week, charging the few people who turned up two pounds per session (which I can tell you is considered expensive by many Chinese people here in Nanjing).
I was losing a lot of money. Fast. That’s when I started travelling to Shanghai to train under Bruno Moreira at Shanghai BJJ (www.shanghaibjj.com). The manager, Stan, runs a fantastic academy there and he gave me a lot of good advice. With his help, I was able to get some proper mats from a disbanded martial arts club and I started holding more regular sessions. At this point I was making just about enough money to cover the rent, and I was pretty happy with having a place to train.
Then I had a huge set back.
The boss told me the gym would be closing down at the end of year because a hotel had bought the premises. I figured it gave me a bit of time to save up for a move to somewhere better, so I wasn’t too concerned at first. I felt it was time to leave anyway: since getting the bigger mats, the owner was making me stack them in a long row against the back wall after each class because her dancers preferred the thinner yoga mats. So now I had to come in extra early before every session to set up. Great. Then one day I came in earlier than usual, only to find the Kung Fu class was using my long stack of mats as an obstacle course for warm ups – and they were all wearing their outdoor shoes. Needless to say I had a long word with the boss, but her response was that she couldn’t control what people did in her gym!
And then of course, two days later, I came in to the gym to find that everything had been cleared out. The removal men were just in the process of moving the last few items – my mats. If I hadn’t have come in to train weights that day I would have lost everything. Of course they said they were going to store the mats for me – I just wouldn’t have known where. So then I was stuck on the street outside with a stack of 50 mats. You’ve got to love China.
October, 2011: We’d been without a place to train for a couple of weeks and I was overall pretty miserable. I’d been planning to compete in the Abu Dhabi Pro trails in Shanghai – we’d even had a purple belt from Hong Kong stop by on his way to the competition before we got kicked out of the gym. I gave him a good run for his money and felt confident about entering. Then of course, a couple of days before I was due to make the trip to Shanghai, I found out that foreigners wouldn’t be allowed to enter this year. And guess who won – the purple belt I mentioned. He got all expenses paid to the final. I won’t say any more about that.
But I did have some good fortune as well. Some TV producer had heard about the crazy foreigner doing martial arts in Nanjing. He asked me to come to an exposition about martial arts in the city and we were broadcast across China on live TV. After that the offers started flooding in. I accepted a deal with King’s Fighting Fitness in the Nanjing Olympic Stadium – the site of the coming Youth Olympics. It’s the best martial arts gym I’ve ever seen, fully equipped with all the top brands: Zebra mats, Fairtex punch bags, Twins gloves and pads etc. Needless to say the number of students attending classes picked up dramatically!
What’s more, we’re due to make an appearance in a short documentary about martial arts in Nanjing . . . but that’ll have to wait for another post!
November, 2011: This month Bruno Moreira will be coming to Frontier Asia BJJ to hold a No Gi seminar, and I’m expecting my first batch of Like2Fight shorts and rash guards to kit out the team. More exciting than that (for me anyway) is having Meerkatsu’s Seymour Yang design the new club logo! If you haven’t already, you need to check this guy out – he’s an amazing artist and insightful and funny BJJ blogger: www.meerkatsu.com. Apart from that, I’m working on a new move of the month for you, so make sure you check back soon!
Who knows what I’ll be doing/having to deal with next month, but if my past experiences continue, then I’m sure it will be challenging and exciting. Non-traditional combat sports are becoming more and more popular here, and it seems I got my foot in the door at just the right time! So if you’re involved in martial arts and you think this sounds like something you’d like to get involved in, contact me through my website: www.frontierasiabjj.com! Take it from me, China is the next big frontier for MMA and BJJ.
