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A universal language: Toronto’s Next Gen Invitational proves Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is for everyone

Usually I’m late to the party when anything of cultural significance happens in this city, but last Saturday (July 23), I could feel I was finally part of something big.

I’m a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Okay, no big deal, right? There are plenty of guys learning the submissions and chokes of a fighting style popularized by the UFC. But I also have cerebral palsy – that’s when things start to get interesting. Actually, both my teammate Stephen Dustan and I are not only the only two BJJ athletes with cerebral palsy in the city that we know of, but also the only two we know training with any sort of disability.

Our professor at Toronto BJJ, Jorge Britto, wanted to change that, so he created a tournament called The Next Gen BJJ Summer Invitational – meant to showcase the next generation of BJJ practitioners, including white belts and adaptive competitors with disabilities.

“I wanted a place for those in the jiu-jitsu community who don’t really get enough opportunities to showcase their skills and even when they do, they might be nervous or too scared of the outcome to really embrace the process of competing. I wanted to promote adaptive BJJ and show the world, once and for all, that jiu-jitsu is for everyone,” says Britto.

He tasked me with finding two BJJ athletes with disabilities who would face Stephen and I in a special four-man bracket where each fight would be a best two out of three rounds. I had my reservations. I knew adapted jiu-jitsu was a niche segment of an already niche sport, with athletes still numbering in the single digits. If we were going to do this, bringing the athletes in was going to cost money. But Britto persisted, assuring me that Toronto BJJ would help cover gas, a flight or anything else they needed.

So I invited Pete McGregor of Edmonton, who fought Stephen in a prior tournament in Montreal, and Brian Freeman of North Carolina, who I’d met in Brooklyn at the first Grappler’s Heart event – the first adapted jiu-jitsu tournament in North America. Both of them are paraplegics: Pete since a car accident when he was eight, and Brian since herniated disc surgery went bad. Both were making the BJJ competition circuit the focus of their lives, while Stephen and I balanced our training with traditional jobs.

Admittedly, neither of us had been training all that much, and I came off a two-week vacation only days before we were scheduled to fight. We were definitely in over our heads, but how can you grow if you don’t challenge yourself? Besides, anything can happen in a fight on any given day.

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We were both handily dominated by our opponents and left to fight it out for bronze. I managed to win it by the slightest of margins. Freeman took home the gold and McGregor came up with the silver, but all four of us got the sense that we are on the ground floor of an emerging parasport primed to take over the world.

“Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is a  new way for people with disabilities to reconnect with and take ownership of their bodies outside of the medical model, while building a community at the same time,” says Dustan.

My BJJ knowledge base had grown stagnant up to that point. Honestly, I was bored and frustrated with my lack of progress. But following the fight we immediately started sharing the techniques that worked for us. Seeing submissions from all kinds of positions delivered by guys who are supposedly hampered by paralysis was enough to make me realize I wasn’t done yet. There is still more to discover.

“Personally, this whole experience has made me realize my obvious weaknesses and only strengthened my personal goals of making myself the best martial artist I can possibly be. That absolutely comes with more training, but also must come with more competitive events, preferably against other adaptive athletes,” says McGregor.

It was like the early days of the martial art itself with a new set of techniques and a new process of trial and error and it all happened in Toronto – a moment few will ever forget.

“We still have a long way to go but we are headed in the right direction. I rolled past some girls at the tournament and I heard one say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know people in wheelchairs do Jiujitsu’,” says Freeman.

“Having a platform like Jorge provided to display our Jiujitsu and how we’ve adapted it is what we need more of to continue our mission.”

website@nowtoronto.com | @Broverman

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