COVER STORY Decision,
COVER STORY Decision, Diligence & Destiny David Garmo’s pursuit of excellence BY CAL ABBO When David Garmo makes a decision, he doesn’t look back. This resolute attitude led him to the pinnacle of athletics in the sport of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, where he represents Chaldeans as one of the toughest fighters in the world. It also brought him to the 2023 world finals match against repeated world champion Ronaldo Junior. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) is a selfdefense martial art focused on taking your opponent to the ground and establishing a joint lock or chokehold to force a submission or win points. Its strategy centers on the idea that a smaller and less-powerful fighter can establish a leverage advantage and a superior position through technique rather than strength. Garmo participates in a version of BJJ called No-Gi, where participants wear skin-tight wrestling suits instead of a traditional robe (called a Gi) that your opponent is allowed to grab. In tournaments, a classic BJJ match has a 10-minute timer. Just under half of BJJ matches end early in a submission while the rest are decided by a point system, and, in the case of a tie, a referee’s decision. The Decision At the ripe age of 18, Garmo made the most important decision of his life. Even today, this pivotal moment ripples across time, affecting thousands of martial artists that he competes against and teaches. At the time, Garmo was a normal teenager, getting into trouble and “doing dumb stuff” with his friends, as he said. While he had a few years of martial arts training from his childhood, he hadn’t participated in anything serious since early middle school, choosing to focus on football while he was in high school. After graduating, Garmo signed up for a free trial at a BJJ gym out of general interest and a longing to return to his childhood sport. He received a phone call that confirmed his spot in the course and left for the gym to attend his first class a few hours later. “At the time, I was a smoker. After the class finished, I got in my car to leave. I had 11 cigarettes left in this pack,” he said, reminiscing about the day that changed his life forever. “I remember it very specifically. I took the cigarettes, crushed them in my hand, and threw them out … I never stopped BJJ since.” Garmo prides himself on his remarkable ability to make spontaneous and tough decisions. In fact, throughout his entire life, he’s never regretted any decision he’s ever made. “Once you do it, regret doesn’t help you at all,” he said. “I learn a lot from my decisions, but I don’t regret things. I think that allows me to continue being decisive … I can name quite a few times I made big decisions in only a few moments that served me extremely well.” Pursuit of Excellence From that moment on, Garmo removed himself from his friends and all other distractions. Like something out of a Rocky film, for five years, his schedule consisted of training, eating, sleeping, and competing. “I needed to be away from my old life and focus on my journey as a martial artist,” he said. After this extended period of isolation, Garmo eased back into a normal life, but he would never be the same. He had cultivated and incorporated into his identity a distinguished and elusive motivation that would carry him through both challenging trials and tough setbacks: a relentless and uncompromising focus on the pursuit of excellence. Garmo first heard this phrase, the pursuit of excellence, when he attended Brother Rice High School. “It 20 CHALDEAN NEWS MARCH 2024
was something we heard all the time, in both school and sports, and it really stuck with me,” he said. “I decided that this pursuit has to be something that I enjoy, something I couldn’t be without. BJJ became that thing for me.” When Garmo graduated from high school, he attended Oakland Community College for only one semester. His parents, he said, were always supportive of his career and his choices, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell his mother that he had dropped out. He kept up the lie for two years and spent all his time training; he wasn’t enrolled in college at all. From where he stood, Garmo could see his path from the outset like a divine plan revealed only to him. It’s difficult, however, to explain the vision to others who aren’t living it. A few years later, only after the plan could be demonstrated and his loved ones persuaded of its validity, did he admit his dropout status to his parents. Finally, Garmo saw himself as a success even in the eyes of his most important loved ones. “We have to pursue something to a degree that we would sacrifice our whole lives for it,” Garmo said. “It could be anything for anybody. But for me, BJJ was that thing. So, I decided to pursue this one thing with every fiber of my being.” Now, 16 years later, neither his love for the sport nor the intensity with which he pursues it has waned. If anything, it’s become even stronger. “Obviously, I’ve gotten so much better at it in the last 16 years, and I believe I can still do this deep into my 60s, and even as a professional competitor deep into my 40s,” Garmo said, remembering that he turns 34 this year. “If you can do anything for that long, you’ll become pretty good at it.” In some sports, there are basic physical requirements that act as limitations. Had he dedicated himself to basketball, for example, Garmo, who stands at 5’7”, would fare poorly against the immense wingspan and towering stature of 6’9” Lebron James. In a grappling match, however, the BJJ master would surely dominate the NBA superstar, even though he’s 70 pounds lighter. Despite common perception, outright strength rarely decides the winner in combat sports. Weight classes ensure that fighters of relatively equal size face one another, and even then, the rules and style of BJJ in particular will always favor mastery of technique over raw power. “I believe it’s all about your work ethic and technical prowess,” Garmo said. “You don’t have to be the fastest or strongest. You have to be the smartest in your training, and you have to be driven. Absolutely driven.” Just as important as an athlete’s physical ability is their mindset and outlook. Garmo has mastered his mind in a way that few people in the world can attest. He took a lot of his initial inspiration from martial arts movies that he enjoyed in his childhood and Japanese samurai culture that he experienced while living periodically in Japan. “You might think that martial artists are these big, brawny people who are aggressive toward others,” Garmo said. “It’s really quite the opposite. People who do martial arts were likely the ones targeted by that kind of abuse. They go into a school and transform themselves into what you eventually see as an inshape, confident, capable person.” Just because these people are strong, according to Garmo, doesn’t mean that they’ll use their newfound power against you. “If anything, they’re less likely to do so compared to someone who is untrained, undisciplined, and not confident in themselves,” he said. “They’re getting their energy out every day in the gym and have no interest in using it out in the streets.” Over those fateful five years, Garmo brought his full energy to training every single day and built up his capacity for willpower and grit. These aspects also need to be learned, trained, and maintained. In his own words, he developed a sense of self-respect, a shield that protected him from the unwanted influence of others, even if they are friends, and even if their intentions are good. “I had this overwhelming need to be the best at what I did. All those other things wouldn’t serve me, so I only did that which brought me closer to the goal.” The Best in the World In a competitive one-on-one combat sport like BJJ, fighters come up against one another directly. There’s little room for debate on who is considered the world’s best competitor at any given moment. It’s all resolved on the mat, witnessed by thousands of people, and recorded in the annals of history and video archives. It begs the question: How, then, could Garmo consider himself the best in the world before he became a world champion? “I had convinced myself very early on,” he said, “that I was one of the best in the world. I kept telling myself, hook, line, and sinker, that I was one of the best. I will continue to believe it and work toward it until it’s true.” Because of its extreme technicality, BJJ has several different competitive belt levels that allow martial artists of the same skill and experience to compete against one another. Walking into a gym will earn you a white belt. From there, it takes many years to advance through blue, purple, and brown. Finally, once a fighter has achieved true mastery, they are rewarded with the exalted and revered status of black belt. These competitors are the fiercest and most powerful in the world. There’s no measure of further advancement besides earning your place in direct competition. Garmo earned his black belt in late 2017, nine long years after his quest for world domination began. In 2010, Garmo went to his first World Championship as a blue belt. He won his first match and lost his second, falling many rounds short of a medal, let alone championship status. Even then, “It didn’t deter me at all,” he said. “I continued to train and compete. I told myself again that I’m the best, but I just didn’t have a good day.” Not even the confidence of a topflight fighter is impenetrable. Garmo is human and experiences his fair share of doubt. Some days, he feels the impostor syndrome creeping in. Knowing his confidence, it may seem counterintuitive, but Garmo’s reasoning is sharp. “In a sense, it feels like what I’m doing is not really that impressive,” he said, attributing his success to hard work rather than natural talent. “Which is obviously not the case.” It’s a strange feeling you can have as a top athlete, especially in a sport as divergent and technically oriented as fighting. On the one hand, Garmo has spent half his life preparing his mind and body for an extremely specific purpose, at which he has seen virtually unbounded success, which is obvious given his match history. On the other, and only because of that experience and his own belated beginnings, Garmo is convinced that talent does not come close to settling the issue. “If I could do it,” he said, “then anyone can.” And he truly believes it. In other fighting competitions, like boxing or UFC, top contenders often go undefeated for a long stretch at the beginning of their career, and once they experience a few important losses, they lose their spot forever. Muhammad Ali, for example, acquired only 5 losses in his professional career, and did not lose a single fight until 1971 against Joe Frazier, seven years after he first won the world title. Rocky Marciano and Floyd Mayweather Jr. remained undefeated for their entire career. This is nearly impossible in BJJ. Fighters at the highest level of BJJ experience extreme variance because of fighting style and the sheer number of matches they have. The top grapplers will lose an important match, learn from their mistakes, and come back to win many in a row. “You always go up in weight and experience, and you take tough matches on purpose,” Garmo said, “because it’s good for your progression and for the sport. I’ve lost plenty, but I’ve got a lot more impressive wins than heartbreaking losses.” One of those losses in particular changed the trajectory of Garmo’s career. “I had a match where I replaced one of my teammates,” he said. “I had to compete up a weight class, against an upand-comer who was very good. I wasn’t very confident going into the match because of the weight difference, and he’s bigger, very skilled, and very strong.” Garmo and his opponent had an extremely tough fight. He lost in a quick and unsatisfying way when the two competitors were transitioning between positions. “It was so disappointing,” he said, “because I felt like I was doing well enough to where I could have won that match if I had more confidence before it started.” After the contest, Garmo took the result to the drawing board and learned from his mistake. Most of the time, he said, losses propel him to do better in the future. He began to take his training much more seriously. He found a high-level trainer and started working out with weights four days a week, something he’d never done before. In addition, he focused on prehabilitation, which Garmo described as a form of training that emphasizes injury prevention and recovery. “I can stay in the gym longer, and I’m not getting injured as often,” he said. “I’m much stronger and I can grab and squeeze my opponents until they become fearful. That has taken my BJJ to the best it’s ever been in my 15 years of training, and it manifested in my performance at the 2023 World Championship.” The Chaldean Influence In his early days, Garmo was an aggressive child. Fittingly, he would always try to fight or wrestle with cousins, friends, or anyone who would take him on. One of his uncles introduced him to martial arts movies, and they would go together to see stars like Garmo continued on page 22 MARCH 2024 CHALDEAN NEWS 21
