brvheart
09-20-2006, 11:37 AM
From ufc.tv
Jorge Gurgel had it all figured out. Even as a teenager back in Brazil, he had his mind set on where he wanted to be in life when he was 30, and he was willing to make those feelings known to whoever asked him.
“When I’m 30, I’m going to open my jiu-jitsu school, have a black BMW, and I’m gonna be the best in the world at something,” he said then.
Today, at 29, he chuckles.
“The only place in Brazil that you saw a BMW back then was in the movies.”
But that wasn’t going to stop him. You can call it the power of positive thinking, but he won’t.
“I don’t think it’s a positive attitude, to be honest,” said Gurgel. “It’s stubbornness. I know what I want. I believe a lot of people have a calling and you’re put on this earth to do something. I know I have a lot to offer and I know the road I have to go and I will not stop. I don’t care if it takes me another 13 years or another 13 months or if it takes 13 days to accomplish my goals. I never stop.”
It wasn’t going to be easy for the affable Brazilian, but if you looked at his life back home at the time, you would have to figure it would be.
“I had a great life in Brazil,” he recalls. “My parents were way upper middle class, they had money, and I had two housekeepers living at home. I never did a dish in my life, I never washed my own clothes, I never did anything. I had a great teenage life – I just went surfing, had tons of girlfriends and friends and had money.”
Gurgel’s mother had other plans for her son though, and they began with giving him a little dose of reality when he was 15.
“You’re gonna experience a different culture,” she told him. “You’re gonna be an exchange student in the United States.”
Gurgel laughed it off with the usual teenage attitude – “Whatever.”
Two days later, he was signed up for the program and had to prepare to be shipped off to a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, where he would participate in the exchange program until he was 17. Gurgel learned plenty of lessons about life in America. But they may not have been the ones his mother expected him to come back home with.
“Once I experienced it, you really see a different world,” he said. “You see kids with rich parents, but they work at a Subway. They have to earn their own money and they have to buy their own little beat up car. The independence factor of being 16, 17 years old in high school and earning your money was appealing to me. Being independent and doing your own laundry and actually helping with house chores, for some reason, I kinda liked it.”
So when he went back to Brazil and began his college studies (on scholarship) in International Business, something was missing.
“It wasn’t the same anymore,” he said. “It didn’t move at the speed I like to move. I felt like an American person that was actually born in the wrong place.”
Huh? What happened here? Whatever it was, Gurgel had firm ideas on what he wanted to do with his life, and first on the list was going back to the United States and pursuing his passion of someday opening up a jiu-jitsu school and teaching the art that he had been studying religiously. This didn’t sit well with his parents.
“My parents would not support me,” he admitted. “My mom had two degrees and my dad was a chemical engineer, so when I came home from jiu-jitsu every day with huge bruises, cauliflower ears, or broken bones, they wouldn’t understand why I was doing that to myself instead of studying all the time, even though I was an A student my entire life. They laughed in my face.”
What was Gurgel to do now?
“I lied to them. I told them I was gonna transfer my school credits to the US and finish school in the US and come back to Brazil and have better opportunities. But my plan was never to really do that.”
Not that his eventual arrival in the States was paved with gold, and Gurgel hit hard times in Ohio almost immediately.
“The first five, six years were very, very hard, but it builds your character, right?” he asks. “I couldn’t find a place to teach jiu-jitsu, I couldn’t find anywhere to work out. I bused tables in a restaurant for a long time, and me and my brother lived in an apartment with absolutely no furniture. We slept on the floor for the first two years and the TV set was on the floor because we didn’t have an entertainment center. We just helped each other to make ends meet.”
That even involved sneaking leftovers out from the restaurant just to eat.
“We had to bring leftovers from the restaurant and hide it in a bag,” he recalled. “It would literally be between buying food or paying rent.”
And when Gurgel would call back home, he was forced to tell two different stories, one for his friends and one for his parents. His parents got the ‘we’re doing great’ speech.
“We never told our parents how bad it got,” he said. “We lied because they would have made us come back.”
His friends got the real story though, and the reaction was what you would expect it to be.
“Are you crazy?”
“Are you cleaning people’s plates?”
“Why don’t you come back?”
Going back home wasn’t ever an option for Gurgel, and even when you ask him if there were ever any doubts or low points, he answers without hesitation.
“Never. Freedom is the most underrated thing in the world. Having your own freedom and independence and deciding what to do and making it on your own is priceless. I didn’t want any handouts from anybody. But it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I was embarrassed because I was a 22 year old guy and the girls in the restaurant would look at me and my brother taking leftovers home so we can eat, and we shared a beat up Mazda Protégé, but I was always happy.”
Eventually, Gurgel broke through and began teaching jiu-jitsu. Then everything snowballed. He would open his own school, and another, and another – 13 in all to date. In 2002, he would make his pro mixed martial arts debut, and needless to say, his days in the restaurant business were over.
“I will never have anybody else tell me what to do ever again,” he said. “I had to swallow what I felt many, many times. But it built my character and made me appreciate what I’ve got today.”
In 2005, Gurgel got the call to appear on the second season of the Spike TV reality show ‘The Ultimate Fighter’. Despite being a natural lightweight, Gurgel had no hesitation in accepting the invitation and competing in the 170 pound weight class.
Then disaster struck when he wrecked his knee in sparring three weeks before leaving for Las Vegas to shoot the show. He still went.
“I went into the show to fight one weight class above me with one bad knee and I didn’t think twice,” he said. “I really thought I could win the whole show.”
And though he was game against Jason Von Flue, he would lose a close three round decision and get eliminated. Then it was off to surgery to get his knee repaired, and what the doctors found wasn’t pretty.
“It was every single ligament in my knee,” he explains. “My knee is 95% bionic, it’s pretty much all replaced. My ACL, MCL, and LCL are all donations from a cadaver. I have two screws and a bone transplant.”
The rehab wasn’t easy, and seven months later, whether it was running, trying to train, or even doing simple tasks like getting out of bed or sitting through a plane flight, Gurgel’s knee was swelling or locking up. For the first time, he experienced doubt.
“That’s the first time it crossed my mind, maybe six, seven months into it, that I wasn’t going to be the same person again,” he admits.
But by the time a year had passed (the time frame his doctor had told him it would take to get back to 100%), Gurgel was back and ready to fight at full strength. He got the call to fight his first non-TUF UFC fight against Mark Hominick in June, and in his mind he was about to scratch another lifelong goal off his list – to win a fight in the UFC.
It didn’t happen as he lost a controversial decision to the rising Canadian star, who drew ire from fans for not engaging with Gurgel for any length of time during the three rounder, and even turning his back and running at times.
“I knew that he didn’t want to go to the ground,” said Gurgel of Hominick. “It’s been my thing forever and nobody really wants to go to the ground with me, and that’s fine because I really enjoy fighting standing. But I really never expected to go that far, to the point of embarrassment. If I fought like Hominick did and I came back – I have over 400 students and I have my family – my mom would look at me in the eye and say ‘I am very embarrassed.’ I wouldn’t know how to face my students.”
Almost three months later, Gurgel – who estimates that he watched the fight close to 50 times - is still inconsolable about the defeat.
“I’m disappointed more in myself,” he said. “I really thought I was winning. I pursued as much as I could, but the guy was literally turning his back on me and running from me, four times in a row. If I didn’t know any better, I would have brought my running shoes with me. So when he got his hand raised, and I had been waiting my whole life to get my win in the UFC, I was devastated.”
Gurgel won’t stay huddled in a corner in the fetal position though.
“As you can tell, I have a severe Attention Deficit Disorder, so I’m very hyper,” he jokes, so as soon as his fight was over, it was either back to the gym to work with UFC middleweight champion Rich Franklin or out on the road to teach seminars at his schools. It’s an insane schedule, but Gurgel wouldn’t trade it for the world.
“It’s a small price to pay for the life I have,” he said.
Needless to say, he’s made it.
“I’m 29 now and I have 13 schools,” he said. “I just opened one in Canada and I’m opening one up in Munich, Germany right now. I have over 450 students that believe in me and support me that tell me how good I am and how good I can be and what I can accomplish. It’s a great support team. So professionally, I accomplished what I wanted. Financially, I have a good life.”
And if you haven’t guessed already, he’s not content yet.
“Fighting is what I need to accomplish for myself,” said Gurgel, who returns to the Octagon at UFC 63 this Saturday against Danny Abbadi. “That’s what motivates me – the competition and the challenge. How good can I get? How good can I really be in comparison to all the fighters in the world?”
“I only have one thing in mind,” he continues. “I didn’t get to the UFC. I’ll only count being in the UFC when I get my first win. My goal is to get that win. That will be the happiest moment of my life when I get my hand raised in the Octagon for the first time. I want to see what it feels like, and that’s the only thing on my mind, nothing else.”
So let’s recap – a teenage Jorge Gurgel had three goals to hit by the time he was 30.
Open a jiu-jitsu school.
Check.
Be the best in the world at something.
He’s on the right track to earning a world title shot at 155 pounds if he can put together a few UFC wins, so this one is pending.
Have a black BMW.
Well?
He laughs.
“I have a brand new decked out black BMW.”
How’s that for living the American dream?
Jorge Gurgel had it all figured out. Even as a teenager back in Brazil, he had his mind set on where he wanted to be in life when he was 30, and he was willing to make those feelings known to whoever asked him.
“When I’m 30, I’m going to open my jiu-jitsu school, have a black BMW, and I’m gonna be the best in the world at something,” he said then.
Today, at 29, he chuckles.
“The only place in Brazil that you saw a BMW back then was in the movies.”
But that wasn’t going to stop him. You can call it the power of positive thinking, but he won’t.
“I don’t think it’s a positive attitude, to be honest,” said Gurgel. “It’s stubbornness. I know what I want. I believe a lot of people have a calling and you’re put on this earth to do something. I know I have a lot to offer and I know the road I have to go and I will not stop. I don’t care if it takes me another 13 years or another 13 months or if it takes 13 days to accomplish my goals. I never stop.”
It wasn’t going to be easy for the affable Brazilian, but if you looked at his life back home at the time, you would have to figure it would be.
“I had a great life in Brazil,” he recalls. “My parents were way upper middle class, they had money, and I had two housekeepers living at home. I never did a dish in my life, I never washed my own clothes, I never did anything. I had a great teenage life – I just went surfing, had tons of girlfriends and friends and had money.”
Gurgel’s mother had other plans for her son though, and they began with giving him a little dose of reality when he was 15.
“You’re gonna experience a different culture,” she told him. “You’re gonna be an exchange student in the United States.”
Gurgel laughed it off with the usual teenage attitude – “Whatever.”
Two days later, he was signed up for the program and had to prepare to be shipped off to a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, where he would participate in the exchange program until he was 17. Gurgel learned plenty of lessons about life in America. But they may not have been the ones his mother expected him to come back home with.
“Once I experienced it, you really see a different world,” he said. “You see kids with rich parents, but they work at a Subway. They have to earn their own money and they have to buy their own little beat up car. The independence factor of being 16, 17 years old in high school and earning your money was appealing to me. Being independent and doing your own laundry and actually helping with house chores, for some reason, I kinda liked it.”
So when he went back to Brazil and began his college studies (on scholarship) in International Business, something was missing.
“It wasn’t the same anymore,” he said. “It didn’t move at the speed I like to move. I felt like an American person that was actually born in the wrong place.”
Huh? What happened here? Whatever it was, Gurgel had firm ideas on what he wanted to do with his life, and first on the list was going back to the United States and pursuing his passion of someday opening up a jiu-jitsu school and teaching the art that he had been studying religiously. This didn’t sit well with his parents.
“My parents would not support me,” he admitted. “My mom had two degrees and my dad was a chemical engineer, so when I came home from jiu-jitsu every day with huge bruises, cauliflower ears, or broken bones, they wouldn’t understand why I was doing that to myself instead of studying all the time, even though I was an A student my entire life. They laughed in my face.”
What was Gurgel to do now?
“I lied to them. I told them I was gonna transfer my school credits to the US and finish school in the US and come back to Brazil and have better opportunities. But my plan was never to really do that.”
Not that his eventual arrival in the States was paved with gold, and Gurgel hit hard times in Ohio almost immediately.
“The first five, six years were very, very hard, but it builds your character, right?” he asks. “I couldn’t find a place to teach jiu-jitsu, I couldn’t find anywhere to work out. I bused tables in a restaurant for a long time, and me and my brother lived in an apartment with absolutely no furniture. We slept on the floor for the first two years and the TV set was on the floor because we didn’t have an entertainment center. We just helped each other to make ends meet.”
That even involved sneaking leftovers out from the restaurant just to eat.
“We had to bring leftovers from the restaurant and hide it in a bag,” he recalled. “It would literally be between buying food or paying rent.”
And when Gurgel would call back home, he was forced to tell two different stories, one for his friends and one for his parents. His parents got the ‘we’re doing great’ speech.
“We never told our parents how bad it got,” he said. “We lied because they would have made us come back.”
His friends got the real story though, and the reaction was what you would expect it to be.
“Are you crazy?”
“Are you cleaning people’s plates?”
“Why don’t you come back?”
Going back home wasn’t ever an option for Gurgel, and even when you ask him if there were ever any doubts or low points, he answers without hesitation.
“Never. Freedom is the most underrated thing in the world. Having your own freedom and independence and deciding what to do and making it on your own is priceless. I didn’t want any handouts from anybody. But it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I was embarrassed because I was a 22 year old guy and the girls in the restaurant would look at me and my brother taking leftovers home so we can eat, and we shared a beat up Mazda Protégé, but I was always happy.”
Eventually, Gurgel broke through and began teaching jiu-jitsu. Then everything snowballed. He would open his own school, and another, and another – 13 in all to date. In 2002, he would make his pro mixed martial arts debut, and needless to say, his days in the restaurant business were over.
“I will never have anybody else tell me what to do ever again,” he said. “I had to swallow what I felt many, many times. But it built my character and made me appreciate what I’ve got today.”
In 2005, Gurgel got the call to appear on the second season of the Spike TV reality show ‘The Ultimate Fighter’. Despite being a natural lightweight, Gurgel had no hesitation in accepting the invitation and competing in the 170 pound weight class.
Then disaster struck when he wrecked his knee in sparring three weeks before leaving for Las Vegas to shoot the show. He still went.
“I went into the show to fight one weight class above me with one bad knee and I didn’t think twice,” he said. “I really thought I could win the whole show.”
And though he was game against Jason Von Flue, he would lose a close three round decision and get eliminated. Then it was off to surgery to get his knee repaired, and what the doctors found wasn’t pretty.
“It was every single ligament in my knee,” he explains. “My knee is 95% bionic, it’s pretty much all replaced. My ACL, MCL, and LCL are all donations from a cadaver. I have two screws and a bone transplant.”
The rehab wasn’t easy, and seven months later, whether it was running, trying to train, or even doing simple tasks like getting out of bed or sitting through a plane flight, Gurgel’s knee was swelling or locking up. For the first time, he experienced doubt.
“That’s the first time it crossed my mind, maybe six, seven months into it, that I wasn’t going to be the same person again,” he admits.
But by the time a year had passed (the time frame his doctor had told him it would take to get back to 100%), Gurgel was back and ready to fight at full strength. He got the call to fight his first non-TUF UFC fight against Mark Hominick in June, and in his mind he was about to scratch another lifelong goal off his list – to win a fight in the UFC.
It didn’t happen as he lost a controversial decision to the rising Canadian star, who drew ire from fans for not engaging with Gurgel for any length of time during the three rounder, and even turning his back and running at times.
“I knew that he didn’t want to go to the ground,” said Gurgel of Hominick. “It’s been my thing forever and nobody really wants to go to the ground with me, and that’s fine because I really enjoy fighting standing. But I really never expected to go that far, to the point of embarrassment. If I fought like Hominick did and I came back – I have over 400 students and I have my family – my mom would look at me in the eye and say ‘I am very embarrassed.’ I wouldn’t know how to face my students.”
Almost three months later, Gurgel – who estimates that he watched the fight close to 50 times - is still inconsolable about the defeat.
“I’m disappointed more in myself,” he said. “I really thought I was winning. I pursued as much as I could, but the guy was literally turning his back on me and running from me, four times in a row. If I didn’t know any better, I would have brought my running shoes with me. So when he got his hand raised, and I had been waiting my whole life to get my win in the UFC, I was devastated.”
Gurgel won’t stay huddled in a corner in the fetal position though.
“As you can tell, I have a severe Attention Deficit Disorder, so I’m very hyper,” he jokes, so as soon as his fight was over, it was either back to the gym to work with UFC middleweight champion Rich Franklin or out on the road to teach seminars at his schools. It’s an insane schedule, but Gurgel wouldn’t trade it for the world.
“It’s a small price to pay for the life I have,” he said.
Needless to say, he’s made it.
“I’m 29 now and I have 13 schools,” he said. “I just opened one in Canada and I’m opening one up in Munich, Germany right now. I have over 450 students that believe in me and support me that tell me how good I am and how good I can be and what I can accomplish. It’s a great support team. So professionally, I accomplished what I wanted. Financially, I have a good life.”
And if you haven’t guessed already, he’s not content yet.
“Fighting is what I need to accomplish for myself,” said Gurgel, who returns to the Octagon at UFC 63 this Saturday against Danny Abbadi. “That’s what motivates me – the competition and the challenge. How good can I get? How good can I really be in comparison to all the fighters in the world?”
“I only have one thing in mind,” he continues. “I didn’t get to the UFC. I’ll only count being in the UFC when I get my first win. My goal is to get that win. That will be the happiest moment of my life when I get my hand raised in the Octagon for the first time. I want to see what it feels like, and that’s the only thing on my mind, nothing else.”
So let’s recap – a teenage Jorge Gurgel had three goals to hit by the time he was 30.
Open a jiu-jitsu school.
Check.
Be the best in the world at something.
He’s on the right track to earning a world title shot at 155 pounds if he can put together a few UFC wins, so this one is pending.
Have a black BMW.
Well?
He laughs.
“I have a brand new decked out black BMW.”
How’s that for living the American dream?