My Last-Minute Travel Buddy

Meet Greg. Greg showed up at our gym a few months back with absolutely no grappling experience whatsoever. Greg kind of wandered in and out of the gym on an irregular basis for a few weeks before he decided he would accompany me to a Clark Gracie seminar down in South Carolina. On the way down to the seminar, Greg asked me what he thought Clark Gracie would tell him he should do to get better at Jiu-Jitsu. Lol. Of course I told him that Clark would probably tell him that he needed to train way more often, keep coming back and all the standard Gracie propaganda everyone has heard ad nauseum already.

I’m not sure if Greg ever got the chance to ask Clark his question, but all I know is that Greg started showing up and training. Despite only having a few months’ experience under his belt, he’s by far one of our more seasoned white belts, and has entered at least 3 different tournaments already.

When I first bought my tickets I announced my trip to my team. Greg said that he really wanted to go and he would start looking at tickets as well. I didn’t hear anything from him for a while, but just the other day he up and actually bought round-trip tickets to Bucharest. So now I’m stuck with this crazy guy, haha. All the slots for the camp in Bulgaria were taken already, but Tudor from Absoluto found a spot for Greg after all. Nice!

Coincidentally, Greg is scheduled to leave for Madagascar in September with the Peace Corps. I think it will be really cool for him to see the evolution of the BJJ program I helped set up over 10 years ago, and hopefully he can do something similar in Madagascar. Regardless, I’m looking forward to having a travel buddy, last minute or not!