BJJ Fanatics 666: Jeff Curran

Speaker 1: Welcome back to the BJJ Fanatics Podcast. I'm your host Ryan Ford. My guest today is a fifth-degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He's a retired professional MMA fighter and a veteran of the UFC, Pride, WEC, Bellator, IFL, RFA, and King of the Cage. He was also a Shooto America's Division champion. Uh in grappling competition, he's a two-time Midwest Jiu-Jitsu champion, an ADCC Superfight champion, a Submission Hunter Superfight champion, and also a Gracie Nationals gold medalist. In 1999, he was also an International Perro Pan Am silver medalist. He now runs his very own successful academy in Crystal Lake, Illinois, and he has 12 affiliate schools scattered across the country. Uh he also runs his own submission-only tournament called the Jeff Curran Invitational. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to be joined today for the second time on the show by Jeff Big Frog Curran. How are you today, Jeff? Speaker 2: I'm great. Man, thanks for welcoming me back and having me on. Uh it's been a while, but I think last time we talked, I was in uh Cocoa Beach, Florida. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you were doing a one of your one of your camps, one of your uh one of your retreats. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: That's awesome. Well, it's great to have you back. It's been, yeah, about four years. I think that was 2021 that you and I spoke last. You have been up to a lot since then. In fact, as I read your introduction there, last time you were on, you had six affiliates. Now you've got 12. You got a new tournament you're running. You're still doing the camps. First question, Jeff, what kind of coffee are you drinking these days? That's uh that's a you got a lot of energy going on. Speaker 2: You know, it's weird because I kind of with the exception of my retreat and kind of building my affiliation a little bit, I I kind of got used to being a little more comfortable and enjoying, finally learning how to enjoy retirement from MMA, even though it took me nine years. Uh maybe around the six-year mark, I started feeling like, okay, I can I can dig this a little bit, you know, getting away from that grind. But you know, recently I reignited that that um work or that desire that I have to build stuff and build build things up and I started working on my invitational. Uh so that's been consuming me a lot. And although it's fun, it's a lot of work and at times I feel like maybe I should have not done it, but it's all good, you know, all said and done. Speaker 1: That's great. Well, I definitely want to explore that with you because I know the the the invitational is something you're putting a lot of effort into and you've had you just did your first event in September. Uh congratulations on a successful event. I know the next one's coming up in January. Um before we get into that though, there's something you said there interesting I'd like to zoom in on if you don't mind. You were talking about the idea of kind of getting used to being retired from being a professional fighter. That's something that comes up a lot, especially with guys who reach really high levels of MMA like you did. There's a rush, there's an adrenaline rush and there's a there's a sense of identity that comes with being a professional fighter for that for as long as you did. What were some of the big struggles that you had initially when you decided it was time to hang up the gloves and uh how have you coped with those since then? Speaker 2: I think there's a few there's a few I think everybody deals with some of the similar things, but other people, you know, we all have our our kind of our own unique things I think that we make us struggle with it. Uh first of all, I don't miss injuries and I don't miss some of the like major setbacks that you have to uh or or you know, those those hurdles you got to jump. Although it's that challenge is part of the drive, it's also it's exhausting and as you get older, you're just kind of like, man, it'd be nice to not have to kill myself today. Uh but for me, it was how I spent my time. It was the majority of my day was segmented out. So even though I might have a few hours between a practice or whatever, I knew another training session was coming. So I made use of that time to get business stuff done, to to try to recover a little bit or to work with my one of my fighters or someone like that. Um so the biggest struggle for me was I think what do I do with my time now? But the biggest like letdown to me of having to retire is that uh I felt like there was more to be done. And when I retired for my third time, my third and final time, um assuming I never have a comeback. You know, that was that was back nine years ago in Victory Fighting Championships and Joe Wilk was doing my post-fight interview and it got pretty emotional and you know, he told me he's like, you know, you told me Jeff in your your pre-fight interview that you feel like you haven't done enough and he said, I just want to say from one fighter to another, from one black belt to another that if I had the accomplishments you have, you'd have to strap me down because I'd be flying so high, I'd be floating away kind of thing. And coming from a fighter like him and somebody I respect, like it made me process it a little bit different and go home and think like, you know, I needed to hear that. I needed to know that like ultimately, I feel I was at least like a fighter's fighter, you know. Whether I was a fan favorite or my style was the most exciting in the world, like I was a Jiu-Jitsu advocate and I was a Jiu-Jitsu representative and I was a fighter's fighter. People from the old school days and even some of the more modern guys leading into kind of today's era that are maybe on their outs, I know that if if they've watched me fight, they respect me and, you know, I think that means a lot to me. Um I was it would have been nice to to make that hit that parade that made the kind of money that is being made now. I remember at one time being a featherweight and uh Monte Cox called me up. He's just like, hey, you know, you're like the second highest paid featherweight in the world. I'm like, really? I'm only making eight grand. Like and now the next thing you know, you see somebody who's ranked number one in the world and they're making at least hundreds of thousands and if they're in the UFC and they're a contender or a champion, they're obviously in the millions with with the deals they're in place. So I kind of missed that by just a short margin. So that's a little that's a little rough. Um especially when I still have like medical I wouldn't say medical bills haunt me anymore, but I still have like injuries and chronic issues from things that happened that like I still go see a doctor for, you know, I still go and check up on and it cost me cost me money and stuff like that. So uh it would have been nice to make a little bit more money, but all in all, it's all good. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I understand that. I think one one of the one of the one of the the beautiful but also also harsh things about being a professional combat athlete is that the the highs and lows that you go through. Like when you're playing not not not to take away from team sports or anything, but when you win a championship or when you lose a game with a team, both the good excitement and the the the sting of defeat is kind of dispersed among the group, right? Whereas in combat sports, your wins are completely yours and your losses are completely yours. And it's it's it's there's not really a whole lot of room to distribute that that that sting when you lose or the obviously the euphoria when you win. I can imagine that reaching high levels, becoming a champion of several different promotions, uh and and fighting on huge stages like you had, that euphoria has to be hard to walk away from. And we've seen that from a lot from a lot of fighters. They they they miss that they miss the glory of getting in there, putting it out there on the line, you and the other guy, you win, the crowd's going nuts, your family, your fans, your friends. That's got to be something that's hard to walk away from too, I imagine. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's definitely not easy to walk away from. I think like back years ago, I don't know if you remember Jens Pulver did a documentary and called Driven. And he was just talking about like, you know, the struggles in his life and the things that drove him and it was a really good good film. Um but he's like, you know, I never set I never became famous, I became popular. I think that was like a line he had used in that documentary. Um I want to say that's the way it went. It it wasn't reversed. It had to be that. But like I never set out for I guess the glory of it all. It wasn't but I did set out to represent Jiu-Jitsu. And that was the glory for me. I was out to validate myself among a niche community of grapplers of of the people like the Gracie family and, you know, the Brazilians that put our sport on the world stage through through bringing no holds barred style fighting to America. So like I wanted to be a part of that club, you know, I wanted to be a part of that that crowd. So my goal was from the early days I started wanting to fight was like the after I saw Royce fought, I thought, oh my God, this is actually possible. I know I was training with his moves and things like that and I heard about no rules fighting, but I wanted to do it so bad and the my first experience fighting was a eight-man tournament and I had three fights in one night. One guy tapped out to an injury, the other two I submitted. And my next fight after that, a couple months later, I tapped out in overtime. I did a 10-minute round, then a five-minute overtime and then halfway through overtime, maybe not even. I was so tired. I had four broken ribs. I had a broken orbital, a broken nose. I had cuts. I had a broken hand. Uh I had at one point swallowed my mouth guard and threw it up. Like I I I it was gross. Like it was lodged in my throat while I was caught in a triangle and I I got out and the thing just like kind of comes out. So I don't know. Going through that, like to me there was getting through those moments and coming out of it and then everyone in my life telling me, hey, you shouldn't do this. I I'm glad you did it, but be done with it. And I was like, I'm just getting started. You know, so something about that validation of like, I want to have a fight where I don't break my ribs. I want to have a fight where I don't get cut. I want to have a fight like so you start chasing down this different um result every time. And if you fight a lot like I did, um I had times where I'd fight eight times a year, six, eight, nine times a year. And I was busy and weekend to weekend or month to month is be like, oh, I I cannot let that happen again. I can't be on the bottom. I got to and you just keep making the adjustments. But for me, it was all about being respected in a smaller circle. Because the fan base was on and off. If you if you were a local, you had fans. If you were not local, you had people that didn't like you. And they were always small venues. So as the time went on and the the stands got bigger and the lights got brighter, I know they were as bigger shows when I started, but when I got to that point where I was valued enough to be on those bigger shows, um then I started having a taste of that and then it's just like, okay, now I'm validated. Now I have to stay validated. And I don't want to only validated. I want to be more validated than that guy and that guy. And it just becomes this like obsession. Uh so that consumed my everyday, my every thought, everything I did in my life revolved around it and everybody in my life had to go through that with me, whether it was my students or my fighters or my wife and my my family. They all felt the enjoyment of it, but it never lasted beyond that night because they knew and I got another fight on the schedule and they go right back to being nervous for me. They go right back to being worried about it. Um so it was a those are the things where like I wouldn't change it for the world, but I also don't know if I could ever go through it again. Like that as I got older and my what is it, the frontal lobe? Like once once it starts to uh mature or whatever, you start going, uh this kind of makes me nervous. This I don't know if I could do that. I know I could fight in the street and I know that if I had to, I could do it and if I booked a fight, I would go through it, but it's just like it's crazy to think because when I was younger, I was fearless of it all. I was just ready to go. Speaker 1: Yeah. Jeff, what you're describing is a very common theme I've seen amongst the top guys in Jiu-Jitsu and also MMA that I've talked to over the years. And it's it's it's the pursuit of perfection. And and the constant you described it perfectly. It was the it's the constant uh uh seeking of improvement and progression in every performance. And finding the things that you even if you had a great performance, finding the little details where you were off a little or where you missed something to not do it again in the next one. Um and that can be that can be a uh a great motivator. It can also be something that consumes people if you're not careful. Um and I know that once a lot of guys are retired and done fighting, there's kind of that void that exists. Like, man, what do I do now? Like what this because you have this drive in you to constantly be performed uh uh uh progressing and improving and chasing that perfection. Like you said earlier, there's always something more to be done. Um so it's it's nice that you've been able to find things to to pursue with your time like your school and like this tournament and the camps that you do. Um there's something else you said, you mentioned uh that validation was something that seemed to be a big motivation for you. Is that something that you've had within you your whole life, do you think? Or did that only start when you started fighting? Speaker 2: Hmm, good question. It's probably been there my whole life. I you know, I grew up very poor. I grew up very um unfortunate for compared to I wouldn't say all of my friends, but most of them. There was a couple others that didn't have a great situation. Um and we were maybe sometimes at times closer than the other friends. But most of my friends, um you know, like I had a good friend who like they had everyone in their family had nice cars. Everybody they were my neighbor and they all had nice cars and they had money and they had you know, took vacations and they were seemed like the perfect happy family. Um my family was opposite of that. Like so when I was around certain friends, it was always like, why do I got the cheapest shoes? Why do I got the dirtiest clothes? Why is my jacket older, you know, why is this a hand-me-down and my friends got nice new stuff. So maybe part of that comes from growing up um the way that I grew up. I had a lot of alcoholism and and drugs in my family and screaming and mental abuse and sometimes like some physical stuff going on where it's just like my friends aren't going through that. So I think to myself like, I need to make sure that I'm I I'm fitting in with my friends and they they know that I'm worthy enough maybe to be with them because even though they weren't judging me like that, I was judging myself like that. Um so I think as I get older and I was also in team sports. I was a I played baseball and I played ice hockey. Those were my two like full-time sports. And yeah, like you said, when you I was going to use a different word, you said dispersed, which is I think the best way to put it, but when you lose as a team, the feeling of loss spreads to everybody. Unless you're the person who drops the ball or if you're the person who swings the last strike and you had bases loaded or you had short time on the clock and you took a shot on goal and missed or, you know, or whatever, you know, or if an offensive guy gets around you and scores. Like you feel maybe you feel responsible, but ultimately the rest of the team also let you down and you know that in team sports. But when you're fighting in Jiu-Jitsu or MMA or wrestling or even like, man, even one-on-one tennis. The difference is in tennis, you don't have to go risk injury. You know, I remember Joe Rogan talking and he said, you know, yeah, what's a lot like it's a lot like um like how fit gymnasts are and stuff. He said, yeah, well now try doing a cartwheel while someone's kicking you in the face, you know, because that's like that's MMA, right? You're you're out there having to physically perform in front of people, but also while someone else is trying to severely hurt you. They don't care about you during that 15 or 25 minutes. So the loss it not only hurts usually physically, unless you just it was a quick quick submission or something or even a knockout. But like it hurts. It hurts to go, man, everybody just watched me drop the ball. And I tell the story sometimes like myself as a coach and I know I know there's other people who are coaches and fought and built fighters and did what I did. I'm not the only one, but I'm definitely one of few, especially from our generation that, you know, not only was I fighting at the level that I was, when you fought on the WEC and you're fighting Urijah Faber on this huge hyped-up main event for a title. There's been millions of people seeing that fight. It was free on cable. It replayed. It went into the vault. It went onto Fight Pass. Like it's there. It's never going away. And I have to go wake up about two weeks after the fight and in my rotation of teaching curriculum or teaching like classes, I have to go teach a guillotine defense class. So I have to stand in front of my students and say, hey, trust me. I know more than ever now after getting beat by that arm-in guillotine late in the second round, what I would have done differently and you have to own it and you have to sit there and say, okay, or you have the student that will go um, man, I don't know if I could trust Jeff. He just got beat by a guillotine and he's trying to teach me how to get defend a guillotine. It's like, well, that's good logic, but would you rather learn from the coach who's never been there or the coach who's been there? I'm telling you right now, you don't want to feel what I felt where I'm a Jiu-Jitsu black belt fighting a great grappler, but a wrestler who who is the one and only time I've ever been submitted in MMA had to be on that big stage. And that is literally the example of monkeys falling from trees. And I never said I made a mistake. I never said, um, of course I made a mistake, but I never made any excuse. He just caught me. It was the first time I'd ever been caught in an arm-in guillotine. I will tell you, with the exception of training and and looking for different things through training and not worrying about it, I really don't get caught in arm-in guillotines anymore. Like it's the one thing where like, thank God I learned it then because, you know, it sticks with you. So I'm probably off track a little bit, but the validation is is crucial to and in the distribution of loss is definitely different on on the group side than it is uh individual. Oh, and the last thing I'll say is like, that's where like I have I've had a lot of athletes or fighters that when they lose the fight, they feel so bad for the coach and they feel so bad for me and they they're like, man, Professor, I'm sorry, man. I let you down. I was like, dude, you didn't let me down. You are one of the people that are stepping up and putting it out there. Like, I've been there. I've lost. The difference is I've lost more than you. You know, the difference between Pedro Sauer will say, you know, the difference between a white belt and a black belt is a black belt's tapped thousands of times. A white belt hasn't yet. And it's like, then you get the other person who loses a fight and they point the finger. They don't want to accept that it was them fighting. Why didn't you tell me they were going to go for this? Why didn't you tell me that why didn't you prepare me for this? It's like, man, you know, that's life. So there's there's finger pointers and there's people who cast blame and there's and maybe those people are used to having a team environment and say it's not just me, we should all absorb this loss. And as a coach, I did, but ultimately, when you lose a fight, I got as a fighter, I have to own that. I can't be like, man, well, you know, Pedro never showed me that technique before. It's not my fault. Speaker 1: Jeff, a lot of what you're describing here is kind of the mindset and the mentality of being a fighter and the idea that you're going to go out in front of all these people and possibly get hurt and uh and and deal with all this pressure that comes with it as well. Do you think that growing up the way that you did in kind of a poor and and violent environment helped prepare you for that for that? Because that's something that takes a long time for for a lot of people to get used to is to to mentally go in there over and over and over again, facing that pressure, dealing with the the uh the anxiety and the nerves. Do you feel like your life before fighting prepared you a little bit to to ease that burden a little bit? Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Um I think I was about 10 years old when my my grandpa started teaching me how to box. And you know, he'd boxed a little bit in the military. He was in in the army and you know, looking back now, I realize he wasn't like some polished guy. He was just boxing, you know, they'd put on gloves and do smoker type things. But you know, he would teach me about hands up and chin down and moving my head and moving fading rolling with punches and things like that. So I always like go home hit the bag. And then my as the years go by, my older brother and I was in karate. My older brother come down and say, hey, because my brother my brother liked to party and his friends liked to like to kind of pick on me. So he would make me fight them in the basement. And we had a studded wall on one side where a wall was going up and then we had two corners that were concrete and then a concrete floor with a piece of loose carpet on it. And we would just box until somebody quit with no rounds and everybody would stand on the one side and sometimes I would end up bloody and and hurt and other time and they would laugh at me and pick on me and my brother himself wasn't like picking on me. He just like, oh, I thought you're tough. Come on, why don't you fight him? And I would just other times I would send his his um I would send his friends away, you know, with a broken nose or something. And sometimes they'd chase me out of the house and we'd end up fighting. So I had like that was the fun part of my childhood, believe it or not. But then I have other times where like, you know, I was my stepdad was passed out on the floor. My mom was probably on a beer run for them. There were some guys over and the one dude, I think I was probably 12 years old, maybe something like that, 13. And one of the guys was walking around our basement talking about referring to my stepdad as my dad, saying that he remodeled this he's remodeling the basement. I said, my brother's remodeling the basement with our money that we got from a car crash that we were in. This is not and he's not my dad. And he was like yelling at me all drunk, you know, you got to respect your you got to respect your dad. Your real dad's not here. He's your dad. And my dad had left my mom and moved to Florida. So, dude, I go, I I tell him, you know, whatever that um he's not my dad. And he starts screaming at me and trying to grab me and I run from him and he chases me and my friend into my my bedroom and my friend hides in the corner. He starts smacking me around and like throws me into the closet and starts like beat like punching me and smacking me and whipping me around. And my friend's crying and finally I run out of the house and this other guy stops me and starts trying to throw me back inside the house. So I spit in his face and when he wiped his face, I got on my little mini bike and I drove away. And I ran to a payphone. I called my dad. I said, Dad, uh such and such just basically beat me up and I was crying and he's like, hangs up the phone. I'm like, what's going on? It was he must have got on a the most recent close fight possible because within like six hours, five hours, he was pulling into my driveway. Get in the van. Now, get in the van. And we went up to the local bar and he he told me to go in the bathroom and then he invited the guy into the bathroom and beat the shit out of him in front of me. Like I had never seen anything like it. He he was stomping him in the face and throwing him up against the wall and there was a big like porcelain trough and my dad was pounding on him and and I was trying to leave the room and my dad's grabbing me and throwing me back in. He's like, you don't leave. You can't fucking leave. You watch this. Blah, blah, blah. And then I I was so afraid of my dad at that point. I said, Dad, I I want to go home. I want to go home. He's just like, he I got in the van with him and he's like, if anybody ever puts their hands on your kids, you better do the same thing. Well, that triggered my dad and my dad went back to um Florida, got his ducks in a row and then moved home. And he rented a house about a block away from my house and he's just like, you know, I'm here I'm going to be here to protect you and make sure things like this don't happen. Well, then he got sick and a few years later, he died. So it was like this weird chain of events, but all through my life since I can remember, I think probably from seven years old, I can remember my parents fighting, but from eight years old and on, it was nothing but chaos. And all I wanted to do was get out of my town. All I wanted to do was have my own money. All I wanted to do was like build my own life. And the second that I found Jiu-Jitsu when I was like 14 years old, just about to turn 15. I was like, this checks all the boxes. I can fight people. I can, you know, that this the the chaos was very familiar. And as I got older and I saw the opportunity to go actually fight to go back to your original question with that long rant is that I was ready now. I was like, you know, people thought I was like some because I was I worked hard, I made money. I got out of town. I got out of the I went about 15 minutes away to another small town, but I eventually got out of my town and um I built it started building a decent life for myself and I didn't want to look like the poor kid. I didn't want to be the the the failed person in life, you know. So I just went to work and I made everything happen and I think later on people started thinking that I was uh some rich kid because there's a Curran contractor company in our town where there's lots of money. And I'm like, that is a wrong Curran. My wrong family there, you know. And uh but I just learned independence. Uh I learned to be very comfortable in in those moments of like discomfort or those moments where most people will be discomfort feel discomfort. I felt very comfortable. Um just going and as the more I learned about Jiu-Jitsu and the more philosophy I started getting like from Pedro Sauer when I met him, I was just like, man, you just sometimes got to Jiu-Jitsu life. You got to weather the storm, you know, and look for your opportunities, look for your openings, look for your moment to to make them pay or make the moment yours. And that was just something that over time really started to reflect in me and um yeah. Speaker 1: Jeff, I I appreciate you sharing that. I know that's all very deeply personal stuff and it means a lot that you shared it. You know, something that happens with a lot of people who grow up in homes where there's abuse and addiction and things like that. There's there's like a proverbial coin toss that happens. It's either 50% that they're going to repeat the same behavior in their own life or they're going to go radically the opposite direction. You're so you're obviously a tremendous example of someone that went the opposite direction. You mentioned you started Jiu-Jitsu at 14. Do you do you credit Jiu-Jitsu for that? Do you think that's what made you break the cycle or would you have done that on your own without Jiu-Jitsu, do you think? Speaker 2: Hmm, good question. I definitely I definitely credit Jiu-Jitsu to um making me get through a lot of things in my life. I don't know if I would have had that same support if I was playing team sports with a different team every year and, you know, maybe you know, then you get into I never went to college. So it wasn't like I had college sports to look forward to. So what would I end up doing? You know, with like I did with hockey is like when I was got to the point where I couldn't play in high school, it's like now the goal was to just play in like men's leagues and summer leagues and like late night stuff and pick up hockey and just kind of keep it going and you just don't get the same it just becomes fun. So I feel like and other martial arts weren't as you don't have the physical connection. You're trying to touch them. They're trying to touch you and you're doing a lot of practice on your own. You're not always engaged. And that idea of like physical connection of like physical resistance, just demonstrating a move sometimes and having to deal with a new demo partner or a new Uke, like where they're just not smooth like the person I normally might use. And I have to make an adjustment to their resistance. It's like, there's something so valuable in that because now you're connecting your your mind and your physical, you know, your mind and body get connected. And the competition side and that hard grind that we go through in Jiu-Jitsu where like every day when you train Jiu-Jitsu as a black belt, it's a fight. There's not easy days. Maybe there's technically easy days, but everybody's trying their hardest against you. So I get to the point now where like if there's days I don't feel like rising to the challenge every, you know, for the next hour of my life. I might not even roll. Like I'll roll. I roll every day that that I train, I roll, but I like there's days where I'm just like, I'm really not into it today because like every day is a fight and I've been doing it so long, but that there's so much value that comes with pushing through that and feeling discomfort and putting yourself in those those scenarios, you know. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Jeff, we were talking earlier about the strong motivation and focus that you have as a fighter and then how that really is one of the most valuable ingredients of someone that becomes successful in fighting is is just that that constant pursuit of perfection and and doing the next thing and getting better and better. And we've talked about laser, you know, basically redirecting that focus once you're once you're retired. You've really poured yourself into this new tournament that you've got going on. I think it's really cool. I'd like to talk about that with you if you don't mind. So what what inspired you to do a tournament? Was there anything in particular about being part of a competition organization or leading a competition organization that really spoke to you? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a lots of for many years I've thought about doing um like a grappling show. Um you know, the I don't know which which comes first, but I think you know, I promoted MMA. So I had the experience to promote. And MMA is difficult because you're dealing with athletic commissions and you're dealing with managers and lots of coaches and it's just come to find out this is not the way it is in Jiu-Jitsu. It's so much easier to just deal directly with the athlete. Um if possible. Um and so I thought about it. I kept talking about it. And then my my friend Mike Diaz, he runs a camp in Park City, Utah every July. And he does it's called the Train High Camp, elevation 7,000. It's just you're you're up there killing yourself. It's it's tough. And we he started doing a couple years ago. He's like, hey, man, I want to start doing super fights on Friday after Friday session. What do you think? And it'll just be because it's mainly Pedro Sauer Association people. It'd be like teammates fighting teammates from across the country and across the world. Like, man, that'd be a cool match. Let's put this guy with that guy. So I was like, man, let's do it. So we set up the tables and we put the mat down and then Pedro Sauer comes and, you know, addresses everybody and we have a good sit down and a couple hundred people sit around the mat and then the next day we go back. We have fights and the next day we go back to um the camp. So I was like, man, I'm thinking it got me thinking about promoting again. I'm like, I could I could do something like this in my town, but I would want to, you know, use people obviously from all over, not doing association based thing. So I thought about it then and then I tell tell my kids about it and my son Ty was just like, Dad, you know, quit talking about it and do it, basically. And I'm like, okay. And I went and looked at a venue and thought, okay, this could work. And I started doing math and I'm like, if I'm going to try to build something for the athlete, how am I going to make any money to justify my time and theirs? I'm going to need to do it a little bit bigger. And if I'm going to do it bigger, I don't want to just be like every other show. I want to try to do something special. So there's a bunch of like series of events that led led me to do it. Um but I thought about it like this. Um I wanted to make sure that like the slogan that I'd come up with for my event is athletes first, always. And I think what that means is that I want to make sure that everybody from the lower level all the way up to the black belt level and the good the the higher level of competitor gets an opportunity to have that big stage experience. They get to come out and be on a showcase where it's just them and another person and they're putting it on the line and, you know, do all the things that I wish people would have done for me fairly when I was coming up. And be the person there. So all that kind of stuff triggered me to go, maybe I'll maybe I'll give it a shot. And I just kind of dug in. I started, you know, thinking about should I call it the Jeff Curran Classic? Should I call it I had a couple other names that I was going to use. Um that were more generic. And then I started thinking about it and I'm like, man, I see the Craig Jones invitational, for example. You got all these like amazing athletes and such great matches. But it's being sold on the gimmicks. It's being sold on the this weird almost like disrespectful to Jiu-Jitsu kind of comedy skit in my opinion. Like, so I don't know. I I got to the point where I was like, that the Jiu-Jitsu world might need that too. And I love EBI. I love ADCC. Fight to Win is on their like probably the 300th show. There's Polaris. There's a whole bunch of shows that are they're every weekend. There's shows. So how can I be different? Well, yet to see, but my attempt is to be the organization where athletes feel favored. Um I don't want to be the one big 16-man tournament that has a big payout for one person and that person never gets to repeat that moment for a few more years because there's only so many shows and only so many weight classes. I want to be able to provide that big opportunity, but I want to have like consistent shows where I can go, man, I remember when that guy was like a high-level white belt, took on a purple belt in a and ended up beating him in overtime. And now he's getting ready for his brown belt and he's getting ready to fight on a black belt for a title or something. Like I want to build people up. I don't want to just grab the biggest well-known guys in the world and give them money and have them just feel accomplished. I want to take the person who deserves opportunity to become that as well. So everything all those boxes are the things I'm trying to to check with that. Um my first show, we had 27 matches. I think 19 submissions. Something like that. Uh super exciting. I had some cool matchups like Caleb McCallister, who's like a seasoned vet in grappling, taking on um taking on Josh Neer, who's won a lot of submissions in in MMA and in the UFC and he was but he's also famous for knocking people's teeth out, you know. Yeah, the dentist, yeah. Yeah, right. So like it was it was a cool matchup. Um this this card I got coming up in January. I have eight I have eight female fights out of the 25 matches, eight are girls. And there's some super talented like high-level girls in there. We're talking like purple and brown belt, Pan Am champions and uh ADCC qualif uh ADCC open winners and and stuff like that. So everyone's kind of like accomplished in their own right and yeah, so that's that's kind of where it's at and that's what I'm building. It's a it's a free streaming platform on on YouTube and our metrics from the first from the first one were from scratch were were very impressive and I think we just hit for the 30-day for the 30-day mark, our impression total impressions between social media and YouTube for the invitational after starting from zero, we're 750,000. So we we have eyes on it, you know, we have eyes on our socials, we have eyes on our YouTube channel. Um I don't know, man, that's where I'm at. I'm trying to just do something cool. I I want to be I'm not saying I want to be the best show in the world. I want to be but I want to be among them, you know. Fury is great. Fight Pass invitational. UFC BJJ is cool. Um but we have we all have a little bit of a different angle. My rule set's a little different than everybody's. Uh we have the we have our overtime like a regular match is seven minutes with a three-minute overtime. This is all stuff too that might adjust over time. I I have to get data to prove it, you know, I'm not just making knee-jerk decisions, but the overtime round if it's a draw after seven minutes, the ref flips a coin to see if it's the red corner or black corner to win. Whoever wins the coin toss picks the starting position of overtime. And it's immediate. You can it's and it's either in the closed guard or on top in the closed guard or it's neutral. And then it goes to a 10-point scoring system between three judges and those judges decide who's trying to win that overtime. And man, it was exciting. It was like there was split decisions. There was a couple unanimous decisions. There was some submissions in overtime that took place. For those who didn't get the win, and then here's the here's the other factor there too is that if you're stalling and you're getting warned for no for passivity through the regulation, then the ref has the right to give the coin toss win to your opponent. So if I'm the aggressor and you're being you're being passive and not engaging, you're not trying and you're being, you know, and the ref ref realizes, okay, he's not just being patient and crafty anymore. He's just stalling. Hey, you got to you got to get moving or you're going to get I'm going to call stalling on you. And if you start getting stalling called on you, then the ref has the right to hand the coin toss win to your opponent. So that was a deciding factor in some of the matches and, you know, if you can't pass someone's guard the whole time and you're struggling and then you win they win the coin toss and they're like, I'll put it back in my guard and keep attacking him. You know, whereas like maybe if you can't pass it, but you know you could take him down, you start on your feet. And then if the person pulls guard without connection, then they get not a negative point, but they get looked at from the judges like, hey, he's he's not trying to engage. He's just, you know, sitting down and it just kind of a negative look. We're looking for the person who's trying to scrap. So I think the rule set right now is pretty good. I checked with all my athletes afterwards and we had a a group chat with everybody on uh Instagram. I have like all 54 people. And everyone's just like, dude, it's 99% perfect. Don't change it. You know, there could always be of course somebody who lost and didn't like the call or, you know, somebody who whatever, thought they did more. It's like, just like MMA, don't leave it to judges, but, you know, that so that's where it's at. It's pretty cool. It's pretty exciting. Um and it's free. That's awesome. I want I want everybody to tune in. That's great. Yeah, obviously one of the most common complaints about Jiu-Jitsu events in general is just the rule sets. It seems like there's no there's not yet a perfect rule set that pleases everyone. But it sounds like you you're you're trying to improve it every time and get that data and figure out what what what works best and it sounds like it's going really well so far. I also really like the idea of uh you mentioned the the one of the interesting angles of your event is that um you feature lesser known grapplers a lot. You get to watch the trajectory and the evolution of that person's career rather than always only having events where it's just the names that we all already know. Uh that that's a that's a cool aspect to to your event as well is that you can follow someone's development as a as a grappler. Uh if if you start watching early and continue on from there, that's really neat. Well, think about somebody like Clay Guida. Yeah. You know, Clay Guida, Jason Guida's brother. Jason Guida fought on my XFO and one day their coaches were like, hey, we got this guy Clay that wants to fight. I'm like, has he ever fought before? No, he's wrestled. It's like, okay. Next thing you know, couple three three years later or something like that, he's fighting in a main event pro pro fight against my guy Bart. And next thing you know after that, he's in the UFC. So it's um and then he just now retired with like some of the most fighter of the night bonuses ever. And like I'm not saying Clay Guida wouldn't have become Clay Guida without the XFO, but Clay Guida kind of became Clay Guida because of the XFO. And we just had his he they just had a surprise retirement party for him at the bar down the street from my house. And I went there and I hadn't even seen him yet and he said, man, I hope Big Frog's here because man, thank you and Dan Lardy and Monte Cox for the XFO because without that, man, I wouldn't have, you know, I wouldn't have had my career. So it's like, they're exciting matches. Like I don't care if somebody I think the the second match of the night, the first match of the night was a blue belt and a purple belt. A blue belt of mine from Williamsburg took on a purple belt from Joey Deal's Academy. And they went into overtime and it was it was I think it was overtime, but it was a scrap and there was like it was a great match. The second match of the night was um two two white belts. One guy drove all the way up from Kentucky, which is quite the drive. I think it took him probably I want to say six, seven hours to get here to fight a guy at my gym who's an army recruiter. And um another scrap the whole time was just you would have never known they were white belts if we didn't announce them as their rank on the tail of tape. It was just a good match. And then I had this blue belt kid, Kai Saterno from Georgia. And that's the other thing, bro. We're not local. I'm bringing in I had two guys from Utah. Um remember, we're in Midwest. We're in Chicago area. I had people coming down up from Atlanta from Georgia, from uh way out on the East Coast. Way up north, Fargo, Minnesota, Michigan, different parts. And this kid Kai Saterno came in from I think he's like from Gainesville, Georgia. And he fought this kid from four or five hours north of here. So here they are literally 20 hours apart where they live. A blue belt kid, 18 years old, taking on a seasoned black belt. And I like this black belt Ben that I met because I saw him teach at a charity event. And I offered him a shot at a match and then the black belt match I had for him kind of wasn't panning out. So I said, hey, I got this kid. I rolled with him before. He's super slick. He's tough. And that kid Kai caught him in a flying triangle like early on in the match, like a minute in and his dad and Pedro Sauer put a purple belt on him that night on the on the uh on the stage. So that was a huge moment for him. And now he's fighting another black belt, the guy who fought Joey Deal for the title and lost in overtime, Timmy Carpenter. So like there's just cool stories, you know, and it it just can't be get me all the top guys and everybody else has to go, you know, spend all their time in grappling industries and competing in IBJJF and, you know, you if you want to compete 10 times a year in Jiu-Jitsu, you better be ready to spend a couple thousand dollars and that's only if it's local. You got to be ready to spend 10,000 if you're going to travel. You got to buy an airfare, a couple nights hotel, your entry fee. My goal with my invitational is to put on 20 to 25 matches, have the first half or so be up and comers and prospects and then just start and and some veterans, you know, people maybe that aren't full-time competitors, but um you'd love to see how some of those local matchups happen, you know, some local rivalry, which gets the crowd going. And then some of the big fights that really matter to where I can build in build my champions and stuff. Um yeah, so it's it's going to be a it's a project and it's like I said, it's not perfect, but me being an athlete myself, I can put them first and I can say, let's tell their story. Let's I don't care if he's a blue belt who just had a loss and doesn't compete much. I let's see why Jiu-Jitsu helped this kid come into come in to become the best version of himself and lose 100 pounds and never done anything like it. And now he's up on this big stage in front of a thousand people and tens of thousands of people around the world watching the stream going and putting it on the line in the big stage. That to me is is something cool. That is very cool. You know, a lot of people, Jeff, can't quite fathom the amount of work that goes into running a tournament. Uh I mean, just coordinating and running the event itself is difficult to do. But then when you factor in things like streaming and cameras and production, what what would you say is the most challenging thing so far of running a grappling event? Oh, man. Well, this is uh we know our we know our lineup. I made 27 matchups for the first one and nothing fell through. I think one one fight fell through because a guy had a medical issue about two weeks out. And I had a guy step up from Colorado right out of the gate and come and and fill it in. And, you know, he's a great dude. I made a friend. Hopefully, I get to visit him. And um, you know, it was like, but my partner Chuck, partner in my gym, he used to film all the XFOs and he just was a hobbyist with electronics. He had sold all his stuff. He got rid of all of it. He was kind of stressing going into it. I'm like, look, man, it doesn't need to be perfect, but we need to film it and I don't want anyone else doing it. So I got him and then my student Alexa, she's she's uh she's a big influencer for another company online and she's uh very good at lots of the like the production like run of show type stuff. So I put her and Chuck to talk and I said, hey, I want to do this. And Chuck was a little stressed out and I said, look, guys, we're going to get through this. And I just got to set and I typed up minute to minute how the show should go. We need to make sure we're here. I mean, dude, I've cornered over a thousand fights in my life. I've had 100 fights myself. I've sat through thousands and thousands and thousands of productions in my lifetime. Entrances, fight walkouts and I get to see it all. So I kind of got an idea. I hired a production company to bring all the equipment. This guy came in kind of like, hey, we're going to we're going to do this. We're going to do this. I said, just like, let's listen to Chuck. He's done this before and it just went off without a hitch. People were saying, I mean, it could have been like we have improvements from our first stream like maybe we need one more moving camera. Maybe we need one more a better fixed angle, but maybe we need to uh sync the cameras up a little bit better as far as like contrast and brightness. Um but man, everybody was messaging me like, dude, this is one of the best streams I've seen. It was awesome. It just moved quick. So I have a small team of like really capable people. And then I hired I hired my referees. I called Mark Vives. Mark is like one of the most decorated master competitors in IBJJF. And he was like one of the top seeds in uh Master 4 middleweight, I believe, maybe lightweight now. Um I said, Mark, I want you to be like my my head technical ref. And then I got um Rob Heinz, who's been reffing MMA for 30 years. And he works for the state of Illinois and my my other friend Mark Wallen, who's a purple belt in Jiu-Jitsu, but refs professional MMA for the last 10 years for the Illinois state. And a black belt Bernie Ambuag, who owns an academy and she wants to get get into reffing. So she's been training to be a referee and she's a black belt and so like, okay, you guys are my refs. Let's have meetings. Let's talk rules. Let's talk protocol. Let's talk like what we want to make sure that everything's going on a certain way. And then my commentary. Christian Renoso used to fight for me, a black belt under Jay Valco, has a uh podcast of his own called Renoso Noso. It's a pretty cool little podcast he started. He's been commentating and doing and doing announcing. So I called him. Jessica Penne, you know, black belt, UFC fighter, coach, professional commentator. So those two are my commentators. Ray Flores, who does One FC and Showtime Boxing, among many other big shows, Premier Boxing. He came comes out and does my announcing. He was used to announce for me in the XFO. So he's very very interested in helping me along the way because now because he made it through us. And so just kind of a really tight team of people who know what it's supposed to look like. And we can all kind of jive and get together and go, let's make this adjustment. And there's no big corporate leader, you know, there's no big um corporate machine running it. We're funding it. It's like, we got to do this, guys, or I'll lose my ass. Like, let's let's tighten up a little bit, you know. Um so it's pretty cool. It's like a nice little family. And I told everybody, look, if we take this on the road, which I hope to maybe hit up some other areas at some point once I get my sea legs about me and get better at it. Um man, I want to be able to I got to set up now for a smaller venue and I got to set up for a bigger venue. It's very similar to like the UFC with their big shows and their small shows. So I have like a 26-foot uh uh mat and I have a stage mat and then I have a 32-foot stage mat. And uh we're buying some of our own cameras. We're buying some of our own commentary equipment. That way we can work out some of the kinks, you know, but because some of the stuff we rented was a little not for what we needed, but it worked. But yeah, man, it's fun. It's just a lot of work, but there's no production team. It's just us. That's great. That's really awesome. Figuring it out along the way. Jeff, let me ask you this. Obviously, since you um since you started in recent years, in recent years in grappling, there's been a lot more opportunities for athletes to make money. Uh and and for some for some depending on the stage, it could be pretty big money. Do you think that if if you were a young guy starting your career now, uh with the opportunity to make money in grappling that exists now, that you still would have gone the MMA route? Hmm. It depends on what my first few years of training were because when I got introduced to Jiu-Jitsu, it was because of the no holds barred Vale Tudo stuff. If then I went, oh yeah, I want to fight and then somebody, wait, you don't have to, you could just do this. I think I would still fight. Um I probably would have uh because through all my MMA career for the better part of I wouldn't say about 15 to 18 of those 20 years, I was a three-sport athlete. I was boxing. I had 13 amateur, 13 or 15 amateur boxing and then five pro. I had multiple super fights that I did along the way, including um a tournament here and there. I was never um at my top top grappling as far as offense went because I was training differently for MMA than I was for a Jiu-Jitsu tournament, but it kept me experienced and it kept me moving and I still did well. Um so I was juggling all of them. But again, it was like, hey, do you want to fight on a super fight on Naga? I'll give you 200 bucks. You know, Kip would be like, I'll give you $200. Like, sure, I'll go fight this guy. You know, so it got it kept me in the in the mix. Um or I went and did like the Master Worlds or went and did like a like a ghee super fight against some Brazilian guy. Like I always tried to sprinkle stuff in to keep my self in that realm. Um or I went and did like the Master Worlds or went and did like a like a ghee super fight against some Brazilian guy. Like I always tried to sprinkle stuff in to keep my self in that realm. Um so I have a lot of different mixed thoughts about it. Um I'm all about the evolution of Jiu-Jitsu. I have always prided myself in staying on the forefront of that and making sure that I'm not um I wouldn't say I'm the first one out of the gate. Nowadays, I study leg locks. I work um a lot of leg lock mainly so I could practice counter strategies to prevent getting into the dangerous positions because if you're attacking my leg, I can attack your leg. 99 out of 100 times, unless it's the saddle, right? Like if you can get to my leg, I can get to your leg. But if you're on my if I'm on your neck, you cannot get to mine. If I'm arm-barring you, you can't get to mine. If I catch you in a Kimura, I'm also kind of in a Kimura myself if you have the right angle. But ultimately, I can't Kimura you back. So the percentage of not getting countered and knocked out, for example, like a uh me and you fighting in a phone booth, one of us is going down. That to me is what I see the problem with the long long term of the leg locks is that, you know, you're going to end up or if you have a style like Eddie Bravo, it's hard to teach that style to your 50-year-old guy who starts Jiu-Jitsu for the first time and isn't flexible, right? So the the old school Jiu-Jitsu works for the broader spectrum of the student. The niche areas are what I feel falls into place of the right hands of the right athlete. I don't know if that makes any sense, but it absolutely does. Yeah, yeah. Positional drills, I think are are are a huge um I can credit a lot of my personal development to that as well. Yeah, for sure because yeah, like you said, if you especially if you're in a if you're in a real high-level room, like, man, the odds of getting to work on specific things, you know, are are much less frequent than if you than if it's just part of the curriculum, part of the drill of the day. So, yeah, very well said. Um, guys, listen, if you're wanting to improve the fundamentals of Jiu-Jitsu, uh Jeff has a great course on our on our platform called Fundamental Jiu-Jitsu Course by Jeff Curran. Uh it's available right now at BJJFanatics.com. It's one of our best sellers. Uh this is a great course because it's great for people that are relatively new to Jiu-Jitsu. It's also a great refresher for people that are advanced and maybe have lost some some small details over the years. Uh so definitely check it out. It's called uh again, Fundamental Jiu-Jitsu Course by Jeff Curran uh at BJJFanatics.com. Uh Jeff, man, in closing, what are some of your major goals for 2026? Obviously, you got the next uh the next tournament coming up. It'll be your second one. What are some other things you hope to accomplish outside the outside the tournament next year? Uh, couple things. One of them is to, well, there's more than a couple, but one of them since you're mentioning the invitational, um is that we're going to start releasing this JCI Revealed. And these are going to be mini documentaries on people that have competed for uh competed for me. And I'm going to just try to tell their story in a short seven, eight-minute film. I'll travel around. I'll try to and and do this as much as I can on when I'm on the road teaching seminars and or some specific trips. I want to train with them. I want to, you know, break bread, get to know them and and just hear their story, you know, and let the world hear their story, you know. And um so I'm going to be focusing on that project in tandem with the JCI and building our our presence there. But um I'll definitely be competing again. I did a super fight in May. It was my first no-gi super fight in quite some time. Uh so that was really nice to kind of get get back to that side of that side of me. So I got in shape and I got down to uh 160. Got back to like a lighter weight. I I won my match in about five minutes by submission. Felt good and uh that kind of uh fulfilled me for a while. You know, so I could change gears and focus on the invitational the rest of the time. Um but yeah, that's it really. My focus this year is is to grow the invitational and and I got three three shows set up. Um try to put together some build some champions. Um each show, I want to put some champions on the map and then get them defending their belts. Well, folks, unfortunately, we're fresh out of time. Jeff, it is always a pleasure to get to talk with you, man. It's been uh about like I said, about four and a half years since our last conversation. Uh it's been great catching up and hearing all the cool things that you've been up to since then. I also appreciate you really opening up about your personal story today. I think that a lot of times hearing those kinds of things for people out there listening uh can be very valuable in their own life. So, thanks for being an open book and uh you're always welcome back on the show anytime you'd like to come back. I appreciate it. It was great and uh anytime. Excellent. For anyone out there that wants to keep up with Jeff, it's really easy to do so. He's active on Facebook. It's Curran Jiu-Jitsu Academy. Uh that's the name of the page. You guys can follow there. For Instagram, he's got four different options. You can follow his personal page, which is Big Frog BJJ. Uh his his academy is Team Curran BJJ. And uh the instruct the uh uh invitational, the tournament is Jeff Curran Invitational. And then he's also got BJJ Retreats, uh which is another page you can follow. Uh he does these annual and and actually I think it's more than more than just once a year that you do these, isn't it? These retreats down to Florida. It's been just every year, but now this year I did a second camp in Destin that we just finished up in uh mid-December as well or mid-September. So next year we might do another one of those. Awesome. Excellent. Well, guys, yeah, make sure you guys are following uh BJJ Retreats on Instagram to find out when the next one's going to be. Uh and then of course, guys, uh you can check out his YouTube channel as well. It's the Jeff Curran Invitational. That's where they're going to be streaming the next uh event that's coming up in January. So make sure you have your eyes peeled there. Uh his website is TeamCurran.com. That's where you can get information about his schools and everything else he's got going on. If you guys are ever traveling through Illinois, drop into Crystal Lake, get some training in. He's also got 12 other affiliates around the country. So, wherever you're traveling, try to drop in and get some training. If you can't make it to Illinois to train with Jeff, you can learn from him anywhere in the world here at BJJFanatics.com. We talked today in depth about his uh instructional Fundamental Jiu-Jitsu Course, which is available right now. It's one of our best sellers. Uh he's also got a few other instructionals as well. So, check those out at BJJFanatics.com. And that's going to do it for this episode, everybody. I really appreciate you tuning in. Please stay tuned for the next episode of the BJJ Fanatics Podcast.