Big Will

brown belt

I set a lot of little traps. That’s kind of my jiu-jitsu. There are archetypes: There’s the juggernaut. There’s the wonder kid. There’s the Joker—the guy with the weird shit. That’s me. I play off my back, triangle with no arm in, stuff like that. I’m always trying to make people think they’re safe when they’re not. If I’ve got a grip around someone’s neck, I don’t want them to know until it’s too late.

Q: What brought you to jiu-jitsu?

I was working nonstop. I’m an engineer, and I also run a construction company. My wife and I were just getting started—engaged, not yet married. I was working my day job, then construction every night until seven or eight. Eating pizza, drinking beer, and never going to the gym. I was 265 pounds when I started. Soft.

When I first began training, I started getting these brutal migraine headaches. It turned out I was so out of shape that the sudden spike in blood pressure triggered them. I went to the doctor, got an MRI, and they found a tumor on my pituitary gland. A benign microadenoma.

After I got in better shape, my headaches went away. Then, right before I got my purple belt, another MRI showed the tumor had quadrupled in size and was growing into my optic nerve. I needed brain surgery. They went up through my nose, cut the base of my skull, and removed it.

I wouldn’t have known otherwise. Jiu-jitsu literally saved my eyesight.

Q: You’re a brown belt in a gym that has been open for five years. So you must’ve started somewhere else?

I started at Modern Martial Arts. That was seven or eight years ago. It was me, Cuervo, Mark Saliba, and Nick the Ukrainian. He doesn’t really train anymore. He’s a blue belt. We all started together.

Q: What brought you here?

Our professor had immigration issues and had to go back to Brazil. There was a vacuum when that happened. It was basically six or seven white belts and one purple belt named Rico. He used to just beat the shit out of us. At the time, I was like, Why is this guy here just smashing white belts?

They brought in karate black belts who also had some jiu-jitsu and started teaching, but they weren’t great. Goofy is fine if you’re razor sharp, but they weren’t. It was random. One day you’re learning single-leg X, the next day something totally unrelated. As a white belt, I didn’t even know how to get out of side control.

Then we saw the balloons on 72nd Street—Renzo Gracie had opened. We looked at each other and said, “Dude, we’ve got to get out of here.” Cuervo went to a trial class and returned like, “You have to come.” So we all left.

I’d been training for about a year at that point.

I remember my first day—I had like three stripes on my white belt. Luca was hesitant to let me roll. He wanted to see me move first. So I rolled with Thiago, and he triangled me five or six times. Then Luca was like, “Okay, you’re good.”

The gym back then was full of white and blue belts. A few upper belts would come in from 30th Street. We built this community together. And Luca is a special teacher. He doesn’t just gravitate toward the naturally gifted. He makes sure everyone has a real foundation. There’s a curriculum here. You’ll work guard passing for months, then side control escapes. It’s not random. It fills the gaps in your game. I can drop into any gym while traveling and feel like I belong. That’s fundamentals.

Q: You see lessons from jiu-jitsu in parenting?

Absolutely. You don’t negotiate with yourself. You show up even when you’re tired. Same with parenting. You don’t skip dinner, you don’t skip school pickup. It’s life, just more intense.

You’re surrounded by people whose skills you admire, and the common denominator is commitment. I’ve met incredible fathers through jiu-jitsu. Guys with grown kids asking me about arm bars while I’m asking them about parenting.

Q: Jiu-jitsu is the sort of third place that everyone should have. Work friends are transactional. It doesn’t mean you can’t be good friends with people from work, but they are friends with your seat too. Family is family. You need somewhere else.

Somewhere you don’t think about your mortgage or your phone or Instagram. You’re just present. If you’re not, someone’s taking your arm off.

I used to drink a lot. Now I drink less because I want to train well. I want to feel better in the gym. I used to think exhaustion, pizza, and four beers was normal. At 28.

But that sucked.

This is a weird hobby. I train three to five days a week. I’m 38. Two jobs. Two kids. I make it work because it makes everything else better—time management, patience, being a husband, being a father.

There’s also community. These aren’t just gym friends. These are “no questions, which car are we taking?” friends. That’s what this is.

Q: Is that a product of shared suffering?

Absolutely. And more than that, you learn a lot about someone the moment they touch you. Howard always says that. You can talk to someone for hours, but once you train with them, you know.

Howard mounts me, he’s choking me, I’m suffocating—I trust him to let go. My arm’s going to snap, I tap, he releases. Same the other way around. I’ve got him in a bow and arrow, I’m not breaking his back. He taps, I let go. You’re trusting each other with your safety. That ramps things up.

And then there’s time. I’ve trained with some of these guys for eight years. That’s like two colleges. I didn’t know Cuervo before jiu-jitsu. I ended up as the best man at his wedding. His car is parked at my house right now. He lives on the Upper West Side, he was away for a while—“Hey man, can I leave my car?” Of course.

I once hired a contractor who destroyed a multimillion-dollar apartment. I needed to confront them. I called Howard. I called Tino. They showed up at 8am in Queens. No violence. Just presence.

The contractors thought that because I had been bringing them Gatorades and sandwiches every day, they could walk all over me. So we toured the apartment, saw the damage, turned the corner—and there were Howard and Tino. You should’ve seen their eyes. I said, “Gentlemen, these are my associates. We need to talk about what the fuck happened here.”

The conversation changed immediately. The guys gave me my money back. Problem solved.

Q: So you’ve been a brown belt for about a year now. Six-four, 215lb. Where do you find challenges now?

Everywhere. I’m challenged every day. I want to get sharp. I know a lot about a lot, but I want depth. If I’m working on a grip or a script, I want it perfect. That’s the endless endeavor—it never ends.

And then you run into people where things just don’t work. I have a really good triangle. One of my best weapons. I cannot triangle Howard. It’s not happening. Yesterday we got close, scrambled, and somehow I ended up on top. That’s progress—thinking beyond the move.

Black belt is coming eventually, and everyone says that’s when you really start learning. I remember being a blue belt and thinking brown belts were gods. Now I’m a brown belt, and I realize I’m just scratching the surface.

I recently dropped in on Gregor Gracie’s academy and rolled with their instructor, Arthan, who is the fourth-ranked heavyweight in the world. He beat the shit out of me without breaking a sweat. Same with Gregor. The levels are unreal.

But that’s the point. It turns the ambiguity of life—am I getting better at anything?—into something concrete. Yes. There’s a process.

Beginning jiu-jitsu was the best thing I ever did for myself. What’s great about this academy is the range. It’s not just killers. It’s not just hobbyists. It’s everything. You get real rounds. You get fun rounds. You get hard rounds. That balance is special.

What’s cool is rolling across all levels. Most of the time, I’m playing my third or fourth game because a lot of people are white belts and blue belts. But then you train with someone like Ruben and it snaps you right back into survival mode.

That’s what’s great about our academy. There are skill levels everywhere. It’s not just killers. It’s not just hobbyists. People actually have fun. And we never run out of things to talk about.

Q: Jiu-jitsu self-selects for people doing interesting things. If I had to distill what I’m learning from these interviews, it’s good to be around competent people. I’ve been around a lot of misaligned incentives and met people who have done nothing but fall upwards. But in the gym, everyone is competent. They’re trying to be better parents, better partners, better at their jobs. Even if they’re not good at jiu-jitsu yet, they’re working on themselves.

That discipline creates freedom. There’s a hierarchy. We line up. We shake hands. Higher belts stand in front. You don’t see that much anymore. Society is scattered. No attention span. Jiu-jitsu teaches you that to be good at anything, you have to break complex things into small, achievable steps. You can’t skip them. The mat never lies.

You wear a purple belt and go to another gym? If you’re not legit, you’ll be exposed immediately. Even if you’re older, weaker, slower—people still sense presence. That comes from time.

And the sport humbles you constantly. Early on, I had success just from being big. Then I’d run into a blue belt my size and get wrecked. Now, sometimes I see a purple belt and think, “This guy’s going to smash me”—but then I surprise myself. Oh shit, maybe I am getting better.

Most people outside will just grab your head and squeeze. That’s real-world stuff. I had a recent incident with my dog on the street. Chaos breaks out, and I assess, control, and de-escalate. Fundamentals transfer.

Jiu-jitsu is fundamentally defensive. You see it in people who train—they don’t rage in traffic, they don’t posture. There’s that famous photo of Renzo smiling on the subway while someone else is losing their mind. That’s not bravado. That’s perspective.

Training teaches you how dangerous untrained aggression really is. The guys who think they’ll “see red” don’t know what it feels like to be controlled. They don’t know how little space there is between confidence and panic. Once you’ve trained, you stop assuming. You understand that capability doesn’t always look the way you expect.

That’s kind of my jiu-jitsu. I set little traps. I let people think they’re safe. And by the time they realize they’re not, nothing dramatic happens. They tap. I let go. We stand up. Life goes on.

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This is part of a weekly series on the people who make up jiu-jitsu culture.