There's much to be said about the benefits of training jiu-jitsu. Or so I read on some blog written by a dude who thinks having access to a purple belt and a word processor means he has something profound to say about anything really. A blog post about jiu-jitsu. Such hubris. Such an utter lack of self-awareness to believe that anyone at all cares about your opinion on a niche sport. Anyways, let me tell you what to think when it comes to a certain elephant in the dojo with respect to our beloved sport of violent cuddling. In regards to the rampant sexual deviancy and occasional pedophilia... Wait, that's not it. Why you should be cautious placing your trust in a person whose only demonstrable life skill involves violence... Shit, wrong notebook. Why the mouthbreathers on Reddit's r/bjj should be nuked into an ethereal cloud of threads bitching about warmups and the abject uselessness of seminars and instructional videos by world-class athletes... Nah...
On showing up. Trees Hall is an old building that sits on the very apex of the aptly named "Cardiac Hill" at the University of Pittsburgh. It's called that because, should an unfortunate soul have a previously unknown heart condition and try to scale it, they'll more than likely drop dead before they reach the Burger King in the Pete three-quarters of the way up. It's to the top of this mountain I would trudge on Sundays, past the strewn clothes and occasional bodies of drunk college kids, to a musty basement in an old building. In that basement was a magical place called the Multi-Purpose Room. Now, the uses of that room truly were legion. Some nights it would be filled with wrestlers, kickboxers, dancers. Other nights it would be a place to study, swing kettlebells, and practice esoteric martial arts that were obviously invented in that very place the day before by a group of guys with access to fake weapons and a...