What's the history of Rock N Roll Fight Company?

It starts in 2007, at Hostility MMA on the west side. That was the first MMA gym in Ventura, and I was brought in to teach no-gi jiu-jitsu and the grappling side of MMA. Hard to explain now how strange that was here at the time. People still thought jiu-jitsu was something you did in pyjamas, and half the guys who walked in wanted to know what you did if the other man had a knife. That room is where the local scene actually started, and more than one gym in this county traces back to it.

In 2008 I opened my own and put the name on the sign: Rock N Roll Fight Company.

The first rooms were small and we moved more than once. Every move went the same way. Find a building, price out mats, do most of the work yourself, open, fill it, outgrow it. The last one was downtown at 817 E Thompson Blvd, and that is the room most people in Ventura remember. A hexagon fight cage. Twelve heavy bags, every kind: bananas, uppercut bags, doubles, the lot. Classes most nights of the week. Kids. Women only. Adults at every level, from a man who had never made a fist to somebody eight weeks out from a fight. Fighters only. Camps and cornering.

The part that lasted is not the equipment. It is who came through.

Six of them reached The Ultimate Fighter and the UFC. Tony Ferguson went furthest, and I was part of his early work rather than all of it, which I will say to your face the same as I am saying here. Hundreds more never had a fight and never wanted one. They got fitter, calmer, harder to push around, and then they got on with their lives. That second group is most of eighteen years.

Some nights the room was thirty people. Some nights in winter it was four, and those four got the best coaching of the week. I never worked out how to explain that to anyone thinking about opening a gym. You are not really running classes, you are running a room where the same people keep turning up, and the ones who keep turning up are the ones it is for.

Thompson Blvd has closed.

Nothing dramatic happened. A room costs money every month whether anybody walks through the door or not, and downtown Ventura is not cheap. When it was time to go it was time to go. A new space is being built.

I could have gone quiet for a year and waited. Instead I put the mats in the truck and started driving, and now it is private one on one sessions across ten Ventura County cities.

That was meant to be the stopgap. For a lot of people it turned out to be the better version. No drive, no class times to fit around a job, no room full of strangers to walk into on a Tuesday night when you are already nervous. Some of the people I coach now would never have made it through the door of the Thompson room, and that is not a small thing to have found out. See why I coach out of a truck.

On the new space, there is no date and that is deliberate. I have fitted out rooms before and I am not hanging a countdown clock on this one. See when the new gym opens.

The name has not changed since the first sign went up, and the reason for it is not a marketing reason. See why it is called Rock N Roll Fight Company.

Eighteen years, three or four buildings, one coach. See the fighters and more about me.