Jiu Jitsu Can Brake Your Legs!

I have a quick story for you today. It’s the origin story of this (now sleeveless) T-shirt, and it’s a hum-dinger:

This shirt speaks to the culture of jiu jitsu during the mid-2000s, when there wasn’t a YouTube and there wasn’t a Facebook. These came out in 2004 and 2005, respectively, but it took a few years for either of them to reach a critical mass in the jiu jitsu community.

That’s largely because the tech-forward people who were interested in BJJ were using desktop computers, and just over half of homes had internet access—something unimaginable to me, having been loosely connected since my first exposure to the internet in 1994. That placed forums at the heart of BJJ-themed online discussions for more than a decade.

Forums were a lot like reddit is today, but way more clunky and with a lot less capability. Nevertheless, you could say something, come back and see what other people thought later on. This was really useful if you were trying to gather information about upcoming jiu jitsu tournaments or seminars, for instance.

There was The Underground, a forum for mixed martial arts that was around long before anyone had cable internet. Here was where I first heard a lot of the story of jiu jitsu, along with plenty of rumors and outright lies. This connection was where I first met people in the outside world who were involved in MMA or NHB, as we called it.

There were other BJJ-themed forums that arose over the ensuing years, and one cropped up that I eventually found out had a lot of local participants. This was NHB Gear, a place where Sam provided a platform, Joe helped with the code (I think), and Dave was like a wise older uncle who got into trouble himself from time to time.

There were Richmond grapplers on here, too, and we quickly got involved in plenty of our own drama. Each local jiu jitsu hub had its own strong connections, but it was now possible to become close friends with people in other cities who were just as crazy and just as passionate as you.

These crazy early-adopters had some things in common. For one thing, there was very little respect for traditional humor boundaries. This wasn’t exactly universally agreed, but I would say it was the dominant culture, for better and for worse. One very positive outcome was that there was a ton of brilliant creativity.

It was in this irreverent setting that I first encountered bob s, one of those apparently brilliant minds. You may notice that I don’t capitalize any of his user name, in keeping with his personal idiom. This was someone who was an anonymous user—like, everyone had a screen name, but we knew who most of us were in real life. Nobody knew who bob s was.

bob made outsider art, but for jiu jitsu. His work was similar in style to artists like R Crumb, who focused on horror vacui and a very human, very pimply style of art.

bob s reminded me a bit of Jean-Michel Basquiat, too:

attribution

I was inspired by the simultaneous ridiculous visuals, absurd content matter, and jiu jitsu themes to ask bob s to create the T-shirt I opened with here.

bob s had a big impact on my life for a few years, even though I never met him. We (the esteemed members of the NHB Gear forum) took it upon ourselves to print a couple dozen of these shirts and to sell them to one another in order to break even.

I was the point of contact, and bob s never, ever broke character. This was great performance art.

I’m pretty sure bob s made a drawing of Kenny Florian, who was another prominent member of NHB Gear at the time. He also made one of me competing, but at the moment it’s lost to the dustbin of history.

I won’t comment on the central message of the shirt, except to say: it’s 100% true.