December 24, 2020

This one was an absolute pleasure. Carl Fisher is a BJJ black belt and head coach at Wimbledon BJJ. He has a wealth of experience spanning more than twenty years and I sat down with him to hear his journey. Kieran – Okay, so take me back, where did you BJJ journey begin and what got you into it? Carl – My background like most BJJ guys my age started in the Traditional arts; I got the beating of my life in my home town in a notorious taxi rank late one Sunday morning and had to take a week off work. A friend of mine was a Karate black belt and told me I needed to do something to defend myself and so I started Karate and got my black belt in due course. Around 1992, I met Jiu-Jitsu legend Trevor Roberts as I lived near his gym and bumped into him at the local shops. After chatting with him he said, ‘come to the gym and learn some Jiu-Jitsu cocker,’ in his rich Bolton accent and I was opened up to the grappling arts and graded up to 2nd Dan in Applied Jiu-Jitsu. Here I learned about groundwork and Trevor brought me into contact with other grapplers such as Matthew Clempner, who taught me Judo and Sambo and I started training at Atherton Fight Fit and trained with the likes of Darren Morris, Shane and Darren Rigby, Jack Mountford, Barry the Bastard, Dave Barry, Ian Bromley (RIP), to name a few. The training was very hard, just a t-shirt, shorts and wrestling boots, no fancy rash guards and spats and it was full-on submissions from the start. No IBJJF rolling to belt colour. Heel hooks, kneebars, face bars, fish hooks, eye gouges, oil checking, anything went to get the tap. In the early days and when I was training BJJ, I also trained with Roy Wood at Aspull Wrestling Club, together with his daughter Andrea Wood whenever I got the chance. Then in the mid-’90s, an article on UFC 1 appeared in Terry O’ Neill’s Fight Arts International magazine, by far the best UK martial arts magazine. Kieran – The beating sounds terrible. Did you eventually find the people who done it and apply what you had learned or was it a case of it’s done now let’s move on? Carl – It was a bad beating for sure, but Bolton was quite a rough place and I was one of the lucky ones as quite a few people had died at that taxi rank from violent assaults. A few months after the attack, I was at a nightclub with my older brother and the doormen from a pub I was working at. The main attacker was in there and (it was three on one attack, par for the course back then) I recognised him and told the doormen who told my brother and you can guess the rest. Kieran – I guess he didn’t have a good time? Carl – Yes, he did not have a good time for sure. Back to the BJJ journey question, the UFC article was in Fighting Arts magazine so the search was on to find BJJ in the UK. I remember Carley Gracie holding a seminar in the UK around 1994, but I was up North in Bolton and it was very hard to find genuine tuition. There was an underground network of people that shared the same passion and we would swap VHS videos of the Gracie’s in action for example and own the Fighter’s Notebook, as the internet was still in its infancy back then. I hooked up with a guy from Japan during my reporting days when I contributed to GONG magazine, and he would send me the Pride videos and I’d send him the UK MMA events at the time. Having Pride videos in the UK at that time was quite the catch and was such a delight to watch. Nowadays, everything is available in a nanosecond on a download, where’s the fun in that? So I was still training Traditional with Trevor and in 1999, I attended a seminar with John Machado in Hull and after speaking to John he said come on out to LA. So I worked my day job and door job at night and saved up enough and went off and stayed at the Surf City hostel in Hermosa Beach and trained with John and Rigan in nearby Torrance. I also trained with Erik Paulson right next to the hostel, he was teaching at Burton Richardson’s gym, so had an exclusive mix of Gi and No-Gi training for the whole summer. Funny story, on my first class at the Machado Academy I didn’t own a BJJ Gi and was training a lot of Sambo before I left and had graded to 2nd Dan with Trevor. So when I hit the mat, I had a Sambo jacket on, shorts and wrestling boots and my black belt with two stripes on…completely oblivious! I was shaking hands with Brazilians of all coloured belts, all smiles, and happy to be there, not realising these guys thought I was there to challenge them all! Suffice to say, that first session on the mats, the first roll, a huge Brazilian blue belt choked me out with a clock choke and then it began. Every coloured belt was queuing up to roll with me and I got murdered. The next morning, I turned up and bought a Bad Boy Gi and white belt! Rigan and John thought it was hilarious and from then I was known as the Crazy English Guy and all the Brazilians that beat me up the night before became my friends once they knew I wasn’t there to challenge anyone! Kieran – That is funny, at least you became friends after. So you’ve trained in a lot of martial arts, Karate, BJJ, Sambo etc. How do these compare in terms of what they do for