No one can say John Danaher is one of the world’s greatest grapplers, a title typically bestowed on the likes of Rubens Charles Maciel, Marcelo Garcia or Roger Gracie. And rightfully so.
Because Mr. Danaher does not compete. In 2015, he had major hip surgery. Soon, he’ll also need to replace a knee. Walking is painful, nevermind grappling.
Nor would anyone call Mr. Danaher a prodigy. That title goes to BJ Penn, who earned his black belt in 3 years, commonly thought to be the record for the fastest legitimate black belt. Danaher started training at 28-years-old, after coming from New Zealand to New York City to do his PhD in the 1990s. After four years of study, Danaher received his purple belt from Renzo Gracie. No small accomplishment, but not prodigy-level, either.
Danaher wasn’t even the best student of his time to grace the sacred mats of Renzo Gracie’s Academy. That honor belonged to others, including MMA legend Matt Serra.
“Renzo was competing in Japan,” Danaher said. “The best students, including Matt Serra, had moved onto other schools. Renzo asked me to teach because there was no one else.”
Despite all of this, John Danaher’s elite roster of students, dubbed the Danaher Death Squad (or DDS) are currently the most feared Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioners in the competitive circuit. A list that includes seasoned grapplers like, Garry Tonon, Gordon Ryan, and Eddie Cummings, as well as a precocious Nicky Ryan. Ryan recently became eligible for his purple belt at the age of 16, but has already built a notorious reputation, with three submissions at the 2017 ADCC 2017 West Coast Trials.
Even Eddie Bravo, founder of 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu and the Eddie Bravo Invitational Tournament, admits that Danaher’s students are the ones to beat at the moment. “Whoever’s number one right now — hey, the DDS guys are fucking most people up — we got to get them.”
How did Danaher — a man with bad hips, bad knees, who started training at 28-years-old and never competed — create a breeding ground for the best BJJ practitioners?
He did it by taking the game into deep, dark waters, in a direction relatively unexplored for most of the sports ~120 year history.
“A fascinated jiu jitsu community could see that there was something new being done here – these were not desperation attacks done when nothing else was working; nor did they rely upon the naivety of the opponent to succeed – opponents could know what was happening, know the standard counters, and still be crushed from any position,” Danaher said.
Let’s explore how Mr. Danaher evolved his thinking with three themes: debunking leg lock myths, hunting for the elusive obvious, and creating the Danaher Death Squad.
Discovering a new perspective: Debunking leg lock myths
Mr. Danaher is renowned for the leg lock system he developed, passed onto the squad, and the squad now implements with devastating effect. Yet in his own training, like most BJJ practitioners in his era, he mostly ignored leg locks as a white and blue belt, sticking primarily to the upper body game that’s taught in classical jiu jitsu.
Essentially, there were three reasons proponents of the classical game gave for not developing a leg lock game: First, that it was too dangerous. Second, leg locks would never work on high-level grapplers. And third, that it was positionaly unsound — if you miss on a leg lock, you end up in a terrible, disadvantageous position.
“The reasons given for this dismissal of leg locking were strange and even self contradictory,” Danaher explained.
“Leg locks it was claimed, were ineffective, yet at the same time, too dangerous to be trained safely. They would prevent students from learning to pass guard, even though many leg locks could be applied from positions that had nothing to do with guard passing.
“People were constantly warned that if a leg lock failed, the result would be a loss of top position that could be disastrous – even though exactly the same logic could be applied to many armlocks and strangles.
“Leg locks were even dismissed as cowardly, a form of cheap shot in the noble art of jiu jitsu – even though no other form of submission suffered from this perception, a very odd perception, given that the whole purpose of the sport was to submit people.”
Danaher spotted the contradictions, and realized none of them made sense. So why did so many masters of the game adhere to this dogma? He realized it was because leg locks didn’t fit inside the classical architecture of the game, it was essentially a Hail Mary. A cheap shot.
“To use a leg lock was to admit a failure in your ability to apply the system of jiu jitsu. As such, they were to be seen as desperation moves to be pulled out of the hat when nothing else was working.
This was the status of leg locks when I entered the sport.”[note]https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=142658496149876&set=a.114389678976758.1073741828.100012171787528&type=3&theater[/note]
When Mr. Danaher was a purple belt, 2-time ADCC champion Dean Lister visited Renzo Gracie Academy in Manhattan. Mr. Lister was known for his Achilles lock — he had developed it into an effective tactic, but a far cry from the refined system of leg locking we know today.
Danaher made it a point to ask him about his Achilles lock, and admitted he hadn’t spent much time working on that part of his game.
“I didn’t spend much time with Dean Lister, only a few minutes. But he changed my life. He said to me, ‘Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?’ He didn’t teach me a technique, he taught me a point of view.
If you give a man a POV you can change his life.”[note]Joe Rogan MMA Show #11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkBXzkD6tis[/note]
What is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu? The hunt for the elusive obvious
For Mr. Danaher to evolve his understanding of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, he had to return to the very basics of the game, and understand how the current fighting system developed. When he did, he realized he could break down jiu jitsu into four steps:
- Get your opponent to the ground and control them from the top position
- Get past their dangerous legs
- Pass through the body, through a hierarchy of pins where each one is ranked by how efficiently you can do damage by striking
- Go for submission
Let’s walk through it one step at a time.
The first step was to get the opponent to the ground.
Why? Because when you put your opponent on the ground, you’re able to control him, and there’s less potential of you getting hurt. Mr. Danaher compares it to one of the most explosive events in the Olympics, the javelin throw:
“They’re able to generate all of this power with the use of the legs and their hips. Put them on their knees, though, and they couldn’t throw it ten feet.”[note]Joe Rogan MMA Show #11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkBXzkD6tis[/note]
The second step is getting past a person’s dangerous legs. The legs are a person’s best weapons to attack you from the bottom, or to get back to his feet. If you pass the dangerous legs, you further your control and further bypass danger.
The third step is working your way through his body, through a hierarchy of pins, ranked by how efficiently you can do damage by striking. For example, in side control, you have good control of the opponent, but can’t strike effectively. Advancing to knee-on-belly is a significant improvement for striking, full mount even more so. Finally, the back mount — when you’re on your opponent’s back, and they are completely unable to defend themselves from your attack, or even see where the attacks are coming from, is the pinnacle of control.
The last step is to go for the submission: a joint lock, choke, or crank.
To anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the game, this all sounds obvious, but I’d argue it’s an elusive obvious. If it was blatantly obvious, someone else would have reached the following conclusion before Mr. Danaher, and that is:
Leg locks didn’t fit into this classical jiu jitsu system.
And that’s why it was ignored.
Everyone’s game developed with the idea the top position was the dominant position (see step one). Danaher started thinking about starting his game from the bottom.
They looked to pass the legs. Danaher realized, what if he didn’t have to pass the legs at all?
Instead of passing through the body in a hierarchy of pins, what if he abandoned the hierarchy completely? What if he gave up his back, but used that as a new point of entry for his leg lock game? Suddenly, he didn’t have to worry about giving up position — he was already in a bad position.
Plus the hierarchy of pins implied there was only one way for a grappler to move to advance position in jiu jitsu. BJJ was a mono-directional game. By incorporating a system of leg locks, Danaher realized he could turn it into a two-directional game. While his opponents would only attack from legs to head, he could attack in either direction.
By breaking down and analyzing classical jiu jitsu’s core components, then rebuilding it from scratch, Mr. Danaher irrevocably altered the terrain of modern jiu jitsu.
Creating the Danaher Death Squad
Even as Danaher developed his understanding for this new approach, it’d be years before it reached a level of rapid experimentation and development. At the time, none of his students were competing, and Danaher was mostly known through his coaching of MMA fighters.
“The circumstances and emphasis were very different [in MMA],” he said.
“When my focus on MMA diminished due to the encroaching retirement of Georges St-Pierre and less involvement with Chris Weidman after he moved further out into Long Island and opened his own school, I began to focus more on pure grappling competition.
“I had the immensely good fortune to meet Eddie Cummings, Garry Tonon and Gordon Ryan. These three were definitely interested in competition and unlike my MMA students, lived in the area so they could train twice a day seven days a week year round. I immediately put them on a development program that was heavy in submissions and in particular leg locks.
“Such gifted and hard working students quickly learned the main concepts and gained greatly in confidence with early successes in local competition. Soon they developed a very unique style that had people talking and they were pushed into higher levels of competition.” [note]https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=142658496149876&set=a.114389678976758.1073741828.100012171787528&type=3&theater[/note]
It wasn’t enough for Mr. Danaher to have cracked this new system. He needed the right athletes, with the right level of focus, to accelerate the development of the leg lock system and change the sport.
And it wasn’t enough to have both naturally gifted and hard working athletes. They needed a teacher who was willing to devote himself to the study of the game as much as they were, two times a day, seven days a week, all year long. Plus the athletes needed each other, to run their experiments on, to learn and push one another to the next level.
The Danaher Death Squad would not be the elite team without John Danaher. And John Danaher would not be the wizard of leg locks without the squad.
So what can we take away from Mr. Danaher? I’d sum up three lessons:
1. Paradigm > Strategies > Tactics. Dean Lister didn’t change John Danaher’s life by showing him a new and improved achilles hook. He changed it with a question, a new point of view. To change the game, we have to start at the paradigm level. Everything else is just an optimization.
2. Return to first principles. This is a lesson echoed by Elon Musk and hammered home by Brian Balfour: Don’t just accept the system for what it is. Revisit the fundamental concepts or assumptions on which a theory, system, or method is based.
3. The sum is greater than the parts. You’re only as good as the people who surround you. Choose wisely.
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