Things We Don’t Do at Sabre: #2 Nonsense Names

NOT an athlete! (speaking for myself)

One of the things I find most entertaining about BJJ is the number of impressive-sounding names we’ve invented for ourselves.

Professor. Coach. Athlete.

I’m not convinced we need any of them.

Let’s start with Professor. I understand where it comes from. In Brazilian Portuguese, professor is a normal term for someone who teaches, and it has become an established part of Brazilian BJJ culture.

But when that term is imported into an English-speaking country, it means something rather different. In Britain, if someone tells me they’re a professor, I assume they have spent a considerable amount of their life in academia. I picture a university, a research department and probably a tweed jacket.I don’t picture a bloke who teaches BJJ on a Tuesday night.

And that’s where I think things get slightly uncomfortable.

If a British BJJ instructor calls himself Professor because it is the traditional Brazilian term for an instructor, fair enough, I guess. But if he’s deliberately adopting the title because of the additional prestige it carries in English, then I think we’re edging into ego territory. There is, after all, a difference between respecting Brazilian BJJ culture and borrowing the bits of Brazilian BJJ culture that make us sound more important.

I have a good example at Sabre.

There’s a 14-year-old Brazilian lad who trains with us. He doesn’t speak much English, I don’t speak Portuguese, and somehow we’ve settled on Spanish as our common language.He calls me Professor. And I think that’s entirely appropriate.

He’s Brazilian. I’m his BJJ instructor. In his cultural context, Professor is a perfectly normal way to address someone who teaches him. I’m certainly not going to correct him and insist that he call me Matt.

I also have a 35-year-old electrician who trains at Sabre. If I asked him to call me Professor, I suspect he’d laugh directly in my face. And quite rightly. Context matters.

I’m also not particularly keen on the increasingly common use of coach and athlete in BJJ. Again, neither word is inherently ridiculous - though, to me, they are out-of-place Americanisms. If someone asks me what I do at Sabre, I might quite reasonably say that I coach BJJ. I wouldn’t say that, but I could.

I’m just not sure when coach became an honorific.

I’m Matt. I teach BJJ.

And then there’s athlete.

This one really makes me laugh.

If you train BJJ twice a week, work full-time, have a mortgage, raise a family and occasionally enter a local competition, you’re a BJJ practitioner who competes. You’re probably not an athlete.

At least, calling yourself an athlete is pushing it a bit.

There are obviously genuine BJJ athletes. People who train twice a day, structure their lives around competition, monitor their nutrition, strength and conditioning, travel internationally to compete and make enormous sacrifices to perform at the highest level. They’re athletes.

The bloke who trains Wednesday evening after finishing work at 5pm, then has to get home because he’s got work in the morning? He’s probably a BJJ hobbyist who occasionally competes.

And that’s absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with being a hobbyist. In fact, that’s what most of us are. We don’t need to inflate what we do to make it sound more impressive.

Having said all that, I’ve once been guilty of this myself.

I went to a Mallorca Yoga and BJJ camp with Daniel Strauss, my NoGi instructor and friend. We travelled together, and Daniel was teaching at the camp.

At one point I was light-heartedly venting to him about my frustration with the whole “coach and athlete” thing.

He actually understood my point and,with a wry smile, agreed.

Later that evening however, Daniel introduced me to a group of yoga girls, looked at me with the same wry smile and declared:

“This is my athlete, Matt.”

There wasn’t much I could do about that. I’m certainly not going to interrupt Daniel Strauss and explain my objections to the terminology while he’s introducing me to a group of lovely yoga ladies. So I suppose I’ll allow it.

At Sabre, my students call me Matt.

I can’t seem to stop my old school friend Danny from calling me Boss, but that’s less a matter of BJJ tradition and more a character flaw on his part.

And that’s really the point.

You don’t need a fancy title to be a good instructor.

You don’t need to call yourself Professor.

You don’t need to be “Coach Matt”.

And you don’t need to call yourself an athlete because you entered the local competition last Sunday.

You’re allowed to just be a person who enjoys Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I’m Matt.

I teach BJJ.

My students train.

Sometimes they compete.

And occasionally, Daniel Strauss sarcastically calls me his athlete.

I’m comfortable with all of that.