A Little Mean, Honestly

There is a pass I taught on Sunday that I apologised for while teaching. Forearm across the jawline, weight dropping through the elbow, the space opened by making my partner’s face genuinely tired of the situation. “This is not nice,” I said, mid-demonstration. “I’m sorry.” And then I kept teaching it, because it works, because it is legal, and because a school that only teaches the pleasant parts of jiu-jitsu is lying to its students about what the mat contains.

We run this academy on a phrase — kindness over toughness — and a class like this one is where the phrase earns its keep or gets exposed as decoration. So let me think through it properly, because the resolution is not “sometimes kindness takes a day off”.

What the mean pass actually is

Start with what the mean pass actually is. From quarter mount, my opponent crunched small and my knee trapped, I take a control line across the jaw and open it with pressure — circular, patient, unpleasant. I am not hunting a tap and I told the class so; the discomfort is not the goal, it is the lever. He turns flat to escape it, and flat is where my mount lives. Old-school Brazilian jiu-jitsu, from the generation that treated pressure as punishment. It has one honest use case: the clock says fifteen seconds and you need the result now. It is a shortcut, and I taught it as one — labelled, priced, kept in the back pocket.

Then we spent four times as long on the other road. Chest to chest to weaken his shoulder line. And then the Ezekiel — a real one, knuckles placed, thumb as the measuring stick so I keep a base — attacked deliberately on the far side. Here is the part I love: the choke’s first job is not to finish. Whether it lands or not, defending it forces him to turn precisely the direction my pass has been waiting for. The submission is a steering wheel. But it only steers if the threat is true — I told the class to be real with the Ezekiel, because a fake threat moves nobody, and a real one wins twice: if he ignores it, I finish; if he honours it, I mount. Skill, not shortcut. Slower to build, and it never runs out.

The ethics are in the technique

Now the ethics, because they are actually in the technique, not around it. The Ezekiel we drill keeps every grip visible — knuckles where the referee can see them, where the audience can see them, where my partner knows exactly what is being applied. There is a hidden version, fist tucked, single knuckle doing quiet work no one can inspect. We looked at it in class for one reason only: so my students recognise it when someone tries it on them. It is not allowed, and the line between the two is the line I care about most. Discomfort applied openly, within rules, to a partner who signed up for exactly this contest — that is jiu-jitsu, and it can be mean and kind at once, the way a hard sparring round from a friend is both. Pressure applied covertly, designed not to be seen — that is something else, and it doesn’t get kinder by being effective.

So kindness over toughness survives the mean pass, and here is the form it takes: honesty. I will teach you the unpleasant thing, apologise for its unpleasantness, tell you exactly when it is worth using, and spend most of our time on the skill that makes it unnecessary. I will show you the illegal version only so it cannot be done to you in the dark. And when you finally take the mount that all of this was for — the pass complete, the position won — the last instruction is the gentlest one in the class: stay. Three full seconds. Collect the reward you earned before you gamble it on the next ambition.

Meanness, it turns out, is a tool with a label and a shelf. Kindness is the shop it lives in.

— Professor Binish Sukhija