The world warrior

Bill Gates’ secondary school had a really high-tech computer when the Microsoft founder went there. It doesn’t sound like much but, according to a theory laid out in Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, it was of pivotal importance in setting the young man up to conquer the world’s computer industry.
It goes like this – instead of having to fiddle around with punchcards and computers the size of small semi-detached houses, young Gates learned to programme on a newfangled contraption that allowed him to type code, press enter and find out immediately if his programme worked or not.
By the time he’d left school he’d spent nearly 10,000 hours learning the dark arts of computer programming and had a headstart that, several years and billions of dollars later, proved to be an important one.
It’s a simple equation: freak opportunity + bloody-minded hard work = success.
It’s this same equation that has set Brazillian jiujitsu (BJJ) rising star Jake Mackenzie on his path to greatness. While the Canadian martial artist might not have founded his Microsoft yet, he is on the sort of trajectory that suggests that that sort of success is just around the corner.
A black belt in the grappling art, MacKenzie was in Ireland recently training in Clare, Limerick and Cork while he prepared for a tournament in England, one of the many competitions that make up his hectic country and continent-hopping schedule.
How the 25-year-old fighter from the small town of Truro in Nova Scotia ended up teaching in Fight Sports Clare gym in Ennis is just another link in a long chain of events that has taken the young man to the four corners of the world and stretches back to his first BJJ class when he was 13 and perhaps even further still.
It all started with Jake’s father, Gary, who took Jake to his first class, and a Truro businessman and martial arts enthusiast named Chuck Sproule who opened a BJJ school and brought two legends of the sport to Truro to teach.
Thanks to this quirk of fate, Mackenzie’s first teachers included Carlos Gracie Jnr, the son and nephew of the two men credited with developing BJJ, Carlos and Helio Gracie, and internationally acclaimed lightweight fighter Márcio Feitosa. To put it in context, imagine if a soccer academy opened in Miltown Malbay with the likes of David Beckham and Liam Brady as the coaches.
“I liked it right off the bat,” Mackenzie said of his first class. “Márcio was the one teaching us and he was really cool. The first week I think I went two or three times and then the second week I went five nights in a row.”
It was after his first year of training in the gruelling grappling art that Jake had officially caught the BJJ bug. “I told people when I was 14 that I was going to do jiujitsu full time.”
Training like a maniac over the next few years, Mackenzie’s size and youth – nearly all competitions were for adults who heavily outweighed – created problems for him in finding opportunities for competition.
Jake’s father, a seasoned shooting competitor and an avid fan of boxing and mixed martial arts (MMA), instead pushed his son to enter local wrestling and judo tournaments. Not only did it give him the chance to compete but crosstraining in two similar but fundamentally different arts added a further edge to Mackenzie’s game.
Bill Gates had that computer, Jake MacKenzie had his dad and Chuck Sproule.
The quirks of fate that guided and Mackenzie continued after he finished school at 18. Moving to nearby Halifax to train, he began to split his time between Canada and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, spending six months in each.
Competition was now the driving force in his life.
“That was the big reason I went to Rio. I had done well at the Pan-Ams twice when I was younger (2001-2002). I placed in the top three twice with basically no experience at all. I’d been training jiujitsu for a long time but my competition experience was just zero.”
Although he’d stayed in Brazil many times before, living in Vitória in Espírito Santo with the family of an exchange student, Lucas, he’d been friends with in Truro, Rio was an entirely different and unfamiliar world.
With limited Portuguese and only his old school friend to act as a guide, his first night in the city saw him driving around for hours trying to find a hotel he’d been recommended.
As the chances of finding the place – supposedly located just beside a jiujitsu gym Jake hoped to train in – faded, Lucas suggested he bed down for the night with his cousin, Gustavo, and start again in the morning.
It was another case of a chance occurrence shaping Mackenzie’s life decisively for the better as, in the basement of the building he ended up in was a jiujitsu club.
“I walked through the door and the guy I met there, Ricardo Nogueria, is the reason I know Roberto (Abreu) who’s my instructor now; he’s the reason that I’m at the gym I train at in Brazil. I met this guy seven years ago now and he’s my best friend.”
The quirk of fate set Mackenzie up the life he lives now.
He went on to train with Roberto ‘Cyborg’ Abreu – a legend of the BJJ world – extensively in Miami, receiving his black belt from him last June.
That meeting was also the catalyst for Mackenzie’s arrival in Ireland as it facilitated him meeting Fightsports Clare owner and head trainer, John Eustace, on the mats in Miami.
When the Ennis man heard his friend was planning on competing in the European Championships in Portugal, he told him he should drop in for a visit. The opportunity for the Ennis club to host the black belt was a special one given scarcity of top-level practitioners of the art in Ireland – only one Irish person currently holds a black belt, Dublin-based trainer John Kavanagh.
As much as the club benefitted from the chance to train with a black belt, Mackenzie had a lot of praise for the recently opened club.
“The thing I look at in a gym is the students. If you look the students, they’re always a reflection of the teacher. John, as soon as he came to Fightsports Miami, you could tell he was a great guy and you could tell he was really passionate about jiujitsu. So I think all his students are going to be a reflection of him. He’s got a great attitude, he’s really enthusiastic about jiujitsu, he’s got zero ego and he’s very open to learn.”
The Canadian fighter was also taken with the Banner County’s natural beauty.
“It’s beautiful here. It reminds me of home. The landscape, the day I went to the Cliffs, was just gorgeous. I didn’t talk too much in the car on the way there. I was just looking, trying to take everything in. And the Cliffs were beautiful too.”
“I’m in hot weather most of the time so I get to see beach after beach. I get to see the jungle and stuff. But now when I get to go somewhere a little bit colder and I get to see a bit of nature and a bit of the landscape, I think it’s really cool. Wherever I go, I just try to consume the natural beauty.”
With plans to compete in 22-23 tournaments in 2011, Mackenzie will spend most of the rest of the year travelling and feeding his thirst for training and competition. With 10,000 hours of training and fighting has banked already, the Canadian fighter has a return to Clare on his to-do list some time in October and victory on the road between now and then.