Thiago
black belt
I came to New York because my dad retired and decided to bring the family here. He had lived here in the ’70s. We were supposed to be five people: my dad, my mom, and three brothers. But my older brother didn’t get a visa. They denied it because they figured we were moving here, so he stayed behind. We had an aunt who lived in Woodside, Queens. She moved in with someone else and gave us the apartment.
I was 17 years old.
Q: Did you speak English then?
None whatsoever. Portuguese only. My dad spoke English, but he was the only one who did. My mom didn’t speak English. My brother André didn’t speak English.
My dad started working in a restaurant. My mom worked in a nail salon. I worked in a few different places, but mostly with shoes—shining shoes.
So we arrived in July, right? Middle of summer. We’re used to summer. It’s amazing. Everything feels great. Then November comes, it starts getting cold, and my mom starts freaking out. “Oh my God, this is not for us. It’s too cold. It’s too cold. We have to go back to Brazil.”
I fucking loved New York. All the languages. The energy. It felt like the place to be.
So we lived in Woodside for about six months before my aunt needed the apartment back. My dad rented a spot on 9th Avenue and 51st Street. I’ll never forget that place. It was a studio. No joke. It was tiny. Something like twenty by twenty. It was me, my mom, my dad, and my brothers in that space. And the contrast was insane, because we had a great life in Brazil. A huge house, like five thousand square feet. Big backyard. Everything.
Q: America was that important?
It wasn’t about importance. It was an experience. Let’s put it that way.
That’s when I started shining shoes, actually—when we moved to that place. The reason we moved there was that there was a restaurant on 9th Avenue between 50th and 51st called Rice and Beans. Very famous Brazilian restaurant back then. My dad worked there.
He was making good money. Eventually became the manager. He was very good friends with the owner. By April, my mom said, “We’re done. We’re leaving.”
So we broke the lease, packed everything, and left. My brother André stayed, but my mom didn’t let me because I was underage. She wanted me to go back to Brazil to finish high school. I still had my senior year left. She said, “You go back, finish school, and then if you want, you can come back.” So we flew back to Brazil around May 2000.
A couple of months later, I met this girl. We fall in love. She gets pregnant. And my life just goes completely in the opposite direction of what I expected.
We get married. My son Lucas was born in July 2001. You’ve met him before—he’s been here a couple of times. The marriage was bound to end eventually. We were kids. Two kids trying to raise a kid. She came from a great family. I came from a great family. It wasn’t about that. We were just stupid. Our parents probably should have intervened more, but they didn’t.
When we broke up, it was really bad for me. I took it really hard. But I still had the US visa.
My brother André had returned to Brazil by then. And I said, “Man, I want to go back to New York. Do you want to come?”
We bought tickets. We still had visas, but no money and no plan. Very little perspective on anything. We only knew one guy whose parents lived here. He had a place for us to stay for a couple of weeks. That was it. Almost no English. Nothing.
My brother had stayed behind the first time, so when we returned in 2003, immigration pulled us aside. They sent us into a little room. Six, seven hours sitting there: “I know you’re here to work. Tell me the truth.” Finally, they called us outside, stamped the passport, and said, “You have six months.”
A couple of weeks later, I started working at Biscuits & Bath.
I worked at the one on First Avenue between 80th and 81st Street. I was a dog handler. The guy who cleans, walks the dogs, and shows them to customers. I did that for almost three years. Twelve hours a day. Six days a week. $4.45 an hour. You do what you gotta do.
Then my older brother Felipe finally got his visa. He hops on the plane and comes to New York. This is 2005. As soon as he gets here, he’s like, “Nah, I’m not working with dogs. This is not for me.” He meets these Brazilian guys and gets a job shining shoes at 388 Greenwich Street, the Citibank building. There’s a store there. The owner is Brazilian.
By then, my English was a little better. I could answer the phone and talk to people. So I go to work there. They start me in the store. The owner liked me and gave me an opportunity. I worked there from 2005 to 2007. About a year into it, I started going to the trading floors. That’s where the money was.
At the same time—this is important—my brother Felipe had already trained jiu-jitsu in Brazil. I hadn’t. I trained maybe a couple of months when I was 16, but that was it. So we’re both working at Citibank now, shining shoes. There’s this carpeted area in the back of the store. Every lunch break, Felipe would say, “Come here, man. Let me show you this move.” He was training at Renzo HQ. He had been training for a few months. For a while, I still beat him up. I was bigger, stronger. I didn’t know jiu-jitsu, but I would just power through everything. Then one day, he tapped me.
And I was like, “Fuck. I need to learn this shit. This little guy is tapping me. What the fuck?”
That’s when I started training jiu-jitsu.
I started at Renzo Gracie HQ. This was the old HQ—31st Street. Same address as the methadone clinic. Basement only. No elevator. Just stairs. The main guys teaching were Igor, Gregor, and Z. Rafael was the manager. Danaher was there, but he wasn’t really Danaher yet. He taught the noon class. Nobody went. Empty class.
The main classes were already big—40, 50 people—but there weren’t many black belts. This was post-UFC boom, the GSP era. Jiu-jitsu was exploding.
I trained a lot. Six times a week. Twice a day if I could. From 2005 to 2007, I trained constantly. I competed. I won Worlds. I won Pans. I traveled a lot. Flew to California for tournaments. Did local comps in New Jersey and Washington.
A friend of mine, Wagner, calls me one day. He says, “Man, I have an opportunity for you, but you need a driver’s license.”
I asked, “What kind of work?”
He says, “Private driver. My boss has a friend who’s looking for a driver. No experience needed—just someone trustworthy. I know you’re loyal. I know you’re honest. But you need a license.”
I found out that Maryland would issue a driver’s license without a Social Security number, so I got one and started working as a private driver for this Venezuelan billionaire. They had a place in the Bloomberg building on 59th Street. When I began working as a private driver, things changed. You’re on standby for that job. In the car all day. Waiting for the family and waiting for the boss. I’d sit there all day. So I didn’t train much.
By 2009, my dad called me. Our relationship is complicated, but he calls me and says, “What are you doing with your life? You’re going to be a driver forever?”
I’m 27 years old. Undocumented. No papers. Dating a girl who also doesn’t have papers. Living together. And I start thinking, “Man… what the fuck am I going to do? Is this it? Is this just my life?”
My dad says, “Come back home. Bring your girl. We have space. Go to college. Get a degree.” I talk to the girl. She says, “No. Fuck that. I like New York. If you want to go, go.”
I think about it for a while. And eventually, I decide to go back. I packed my shit, grabbed my dog, and went back to Brazil. My visa had already expired. Doors closed. No coming back.
And that was that.
So I went back to Brazil at the beginning of 2010. And man… horrible. I don’t know if I would say it was an awful decision, but it was a challenging adaptation.
Readapting to Brazilian life was really hard. Everything felt slow. Everything felt smaller. And mentally, I wasn’t in a good place either.
I enrolled in computer science. I loved computers back then, so I thought that made sense. But I just didn’t see myself there. Sitting in front of a computer all day. Writing code. That wasn’t me. Around that time, I started dating this girl, Vivian. Brilliant girl. Really smart. She tells me, “Thiago, computer science is not for you. You should do civil engineering. You’re good with numbers. You’re practical. This is a real profession. You can get a good job.”
Her parents were both civil engineers. Very successful in Brazil. So I thought I’d listen to her. At that time, I was 30 years old and had nothing in my name. No house. No car. Nothing. Still living with my parents. Or sometimes with my son. I applied again to a private college, passed a test, and started civil engineering. The first semester went really well. Second semester too. I’m like, “Okay. This actually makes sense.” Meanwhile, I’m training jiu-jitsu again. I’m training at a gym in my neighborhood. That’s where I met Mathaus for the first time. He was an orange belt kid back then. Tough as nails. Just relentless.
So I keep training and I keep studying. Civil engineering in Brazil is a five-year course. Very long, very hard. Toward the end of 2016, I got a call from Wagner. The same friend who helped me get the private driver job in New York years earlier. He calls me and says, “Man, what have you been up to?” I tell him I’m graduating at the end of the year. I’m working at a construction company as an intern. Hopefully, they’ll hire me as an engineer. Things were lining up in Brazil. Not perfect, but okay.
He says, “I’m working at this bar in New York—Smith’s Bar. 8th Avenue and 44th Street. Right across from the Row Hotel. I’m a manager. Making good money. We need another manager. Are you interested? Do you want the job? If you want it, I’ll make it happen.”
The next day, I went to work at the construction company to talk to my boss, who was the owner. I say, “Marcel, I need you to be honest with me. I’m graduating in December. You can’t keep me as an intern. Are you going to hire me as an engineer?” He looks at me and says, “I’m going to be honest. I’m not going to hire you. I’m going to hire Bruno.” Bruno was another intern and the guy who helped me get the internship.
So I say, “Okay. Then can you fire me?”
He’s like, “What?”
I say, “Can you lay me off so I can get severance?”
He fired me. I got the severance money, and I bought a ticket to New York.
See, back in 2012, Vivian had said to me, “I want to go to Disneyland. Do you want to come with me?” So I had applied for a tourist visa again. I was convinced they would deny me. Why wouldn’t they? I overstayed for seven years. I gather everything. Bank statements. College enrollment. Car insurance. Even my Maryland driver’s license. Every document you can imagine. I go to Rio for the interview. I’m from Belo Horizonte, so I have to fly there.
The interview setup was like the DMV. Glass booths. Lines. I’m waiting. And the officer who calls me is a young woman. Maybe 25 years old. That already felt strange—usually they’re older. She speaks Portuguese. Very friendly.
She asks, “Why are you applying for a visa?”
I tell her, “I’ve been dating this girl for a while. She wants to go to Disney. I thought it would be a great opportunity to propose.”
Total bullshit.
She goes, “Oh my God, that’s so cute.”
She asks a few more questions. What do you do for a living? I tell her I’m studying civil engineering. I work at a construction company. All true. She never asks about my past in the U.S. Not once. She looked up from the screen and said, “Your visa is approved. You’ll get your passport back in five business days.”
We never even went to Disneyland. We broke up a few months later.
Now it’s December 2016. I’ve graduated. I bought the ticket. I reached out to a friend in New York, Karina. I asked her, “Can I stay with you for a couple of weeks until I find a place?”
She says, “Actually, I’m moving in with my boyfriend. You can take my apartment.”
So I land on December 28th, 2016. She moves out on the 30th. By January 1st, I had my own apartment in New York. Fully furnished. Everything inside. I didn’t even wait to get my diploma. I had to give my mom special permission to pick it up for me.
Q: What did you do first?
I went back to working at a restaurant. The bar Wagner helped me get into—Smith’s Bar. The owner, Charlie, is a brown belt under Rolles. It’s a few blocks from Renzo HQ, but I’m not training yet. I’m working a lot. Making good money. Life feels stable for the first time in a long while.
A few months later, Mathaus texts me. He says, “Hey man, I saw you’re living in New York. I want to move there. Can you help me?”
He’s young. I want to say he’s 18 or 19. Old enough to travel by himself. Utterly obsessed with jiu-jitsu.
I tell him, “Come. Stay with me. I have a room.” It was a two-bedroom apartment.
He comes. And this kid—man—he lives at the gym. Eight hours a day. Training nonstop. And he keeps saying to me, “You need to go back to training. You can’t stay away from this.” I’m like, “I don’t know, man. I’m making money. Life is good.”
But he’s right.
So I go back to HQ. I walk in and see Renzo. He looks at me and says, “What’s up?”
I tell him, “I want to start training again, but I’m working a lot. You think you can help me?”
“Of course.” No hesitation.
He gives me a year of free membership. He tells me to go to the front desk. Says they’ll take care of it. At the same time, Mathaus needs money. So I helped him get a job at the bar with me. He starts as a busboy, then becomes a barback. He had worked there for maybe a year before leaving to work at another gym. Watching him, something clicks. I’m a brown belt at this point. He’s a blue belt. He’s teaching. He’s coaching.
And I think, “Why can’t I do this?”
So I started helping with privates at HQ, not really making money. Twenty bucks here, twenty bucks there, but I’m learning.
Then Wagner gets fired. A few months later, I started having issues with the general manager. She’s dating the owner, so it gets messy quickly. So I go to Charlie and give my two-week notice.
Charlie calls Rolles. He says, “Hey, Thiago is leaving the bar. I don’t want him to be without a job.”
Rolles calls me and says he has a gym in Old Bridge, New Jersey, that needs a front desk guy. So I started working for Rolles. Every day, I meet him in front of Renzo HQ. We get in his car. We drive to New Jersey. I’m a brown belt, but I don’t teach at first. I work at the front desk. Leads. Phone calls. Memberships.
A few months in, he starts asking me to cover classes. So I teach. Then I start teaching more. Eventually, I’m opening the gym by myself. I take the train to Jersey. Grab Rolles’s car. Drive to the gym. Open. Teach. Close.
One student—Nino, purple belt—comes to me and says, “My cousin has a gym in Fort Lee. He wants to add a jiu-jitsu program. He needs someone to run it.” The gym is called Fight Lab. Palisades Avenue. Right by the bridge. It’s good money. I thought, “This is the dream. Just teaching. No front desk. No driving to South Jersey.” But I told him I needed Rolles to approve it.
That was the hard part. Rolles is intimidating. Big guy. Looks scary. But he’s a sweetheart. One day, we’re driving to Jersey, and I say, “I need to talk to you.” I explain the opportunity. He says, “Take it. I can’t pay you what they’re offering. And you need this. This is what’s next for you.”
I’m shocked. I wasn’t expecting that level of support.
So I go to the interview. At the same time, I had just gotten married and was waiting for my green card interview. Fight Lab tells me, “We’ll hire you as soon as you have your papers.” The next day, immigration sends me the letter. Green card approved.
Everything lines up.
So I started working at Fight Lab. Monday to Friday. The commute is brutal. I don’t have a car. Bus from Astoria to Manhattan. Take the train to the George Washington Bridge bus station, then another bus to Fort Lee. An hour and a half each way. So I bought an electric scooter and started crossing the George Washington Bridge on it in January. It was freezing.
I do that for about a year. Weekends, I go back to Renzo HQ. I keep helping with privates. Learning. Asking questions. Teaching is different from training. You need to understand why. You need to answer “what if”.
So, one Saturday in 2019, I’m helping someone with a private, and I say to him, “Man, I want to work here. How do I get a job at headquarters?”
Back then, that was the dream. Prestige. Killers. Privates. Money. Everything. He looks at me and says, “I’ll be honest with you. Getting a job here is almost impossible. There’s a long line. A lot of people are waiting.”
Then he says, “But you might have a better chance with Luca. Luca is opening a gym. I don’t know exactly when, but it’s going to be on the Upper West Side.”
As we’re talking, Luca walks by. Like a movie.
I grab him and say, “Luca, I need to talk to you. Is there any chance you can give me an opportunity? I’ll do anything. I’ll clean bathrooms. I’ll mop mats. I just need a chance.”
Luca looks at me and says, “You’re teaching at Fight Lab, right?”
These guys know everything.
He says, “Meet me tomorrow. 72nd and Columbus. Ten a.m.”
So we come here. The gym is still being built. No mats yet. It used to be a nightclub. The floors are done. Walls painted. AC is being installed. He says, “This is the place. We’re opening in March. I need someone to be with me the whole time. No days off. No vacations. A lot of work.”
I say, “Okay.”
Then he says, “The pay is going to be shit.”
I say, “Okay.”
He asks, “How much do you need to pay your bills?”
I say, “If you give me $400 a week, I’m good.”
He says that he’ll think about it. He needs to talk to Helio.
A week goes by. Nothing.
I think, “Fuck. It didn’t work.”
Then I say, “What do I have to lose?” I text him.
A couple of days later, he replies: “Tomorrow I teach at noon at headquarters. Meet me at Starbucks at 10.”
We meet. He has a piece of paper with rules.
Rule number one: don’t fuck the students. Rule number two: if you ever leave, you can’t teach in the neighborhood. All that stuff. But do not fuck the students.
He says, “You good with this?”
I say, “I’m good.”
The gym opened in March 2019, and we didn’t take a single day off. When I say that, I mean 365 days. From 6am to 9pm. Every day. Luca and I taught everything. Morning classes. Lunch classes. Kids. Evenings. We would come in early and leave late every single day. After about eight months, Luca says, “We’re going to die if we keep doing this.”
So we split shifts. I do mornings. Go home. Rest. Come back for kids and evenings. Later, Mathaus starts teaching nights. Sapo comes in. Then Fred. Then Sean and Fernando. The gym grows.
Early on, I realized something: this gym was different. It wasn’t built for killers. It wasn’t built to produce world champions. It was built for families. For the neighborhood. For regular people. You can have a tough guy here and a fragile 60-year-old who wants to learn a skill. That was Luca’s vision. He doesn’t talk about his vision. He lives it. He’s extremely smart. Has business experience. The Founder of Gracie Magazine. He understood all the bad parts of running a jiu-jitsu academy and eliminated them.
This place feels like a family. I saw it very early—especially with kids. Kids on the spectrum. Kids who wouldn’t look at you. Wouldn’t speak. Years later, those same kids are high-fiving you on the street. There’s a child here—Nathan—the superintendent’s son. When he first came in, head down, silent. Now he’s confident. Standing up to bullies on behalf of other school kids. That’s when I knew this was a good place to work.
One day, Rolles called me. He says, “Come to headquarters. Robson Gracie is teaching a seminar.” I go, and at the end, Rolles gives me my black belt. I think Luca had something to do with that. So now, black belt. Opening a gym. Full responsibility.
Q: Someone described you to me as a “giant.” How tall are you?
[laughs] I’m like five-seven.
But I get it. That’s a huge compliment. Perhaps it’s because of presence.
Q: You’ve said you can learn from anyone—even white belts.
One hundred percent. I don’t learn jiu-jitsu from white belts. They don’t know it yet. But I learn about people. About ego. About patience. About compassion.
I have extremely successful students—doctors and very wealthy people. They’ve won at everything in life. They struggle to learn jiu-jitsu. Why? Because they can’t let go of their ego. So what do I learn from them? How to deal with people. How to be patient. How to understand that people come in with problems that have nothing to do with jiu-jitsu.
Jiu-jitsu teaches me compassion. Patience is everything in teaching. You hear the same question a thousand times. You learn to stay calm.
Q: But you’ve been training for 20 years. Have been a black belt for six years. Competed at Worlds. What does someone like you still have to learn?
Everything. Let me explain with an analogy: A white belt is like learning the strings of a guitar. You’re not playing music yet. Blue belt is learning chords. You still can’t really play a song. At purple belt, you start playing songs. You sound good to people who don’t know music. At brown belt, you can play anywhere. Bad acoustics, noise, distractions, it doesn’t matter. But you’re not a rock star. By black belt, you can play, sing, talk, and check your phone. It’s automatic. And then you realize you still don’t know everything. You’re still learning riffs. Timing. Feel. Groove. That’s jiu-jitsu.
Q: How does jiu-jitsu help outside the gym?
It teaches you how to handle bad situations. Pain. Anxiety. Grief. Think about how much suffering you endure on the mat. You learn to breathe. To wait. To survive. Jiu-jitsu makes me a better father. A better friend and partner. A calmer human.
But not always. One time, after Covid, Mathaus and I were driving home. A crazy guy threw a chair into traffic on Lexington. Then he started harassing four women having brunch outside a restaurant on the corner. Mathaus asked, “Should we do something?” I got out of the car. Mathaus got out on the other side.
The maniac was huge, but I confronted him, “Why are you doing this? Why are you bothering these people? Leave them alone.”
Mathaus nudges me aside and kicks the guy in the chest, 300-style. Boom.
The guy goes flying. Game over.
Mathaus rushes towards him on the ground, but I hold him back.
Everyone claps.
That was a great day.
This is part of a weekly series on the people who make up jiu-jitsu culture.
