Craig Jones just shared a photo of him meeting up with his old coach John Danaher, along with a cryptic message that could have implications for the BJJ world. The two men have known each other for several years now, and at one point Jones was training under Danaher as a member of the Danaher Death Squad. He was actually one of the most accomplished and most popular competitors on the team, and even committed to moving to Puerto Rico with everyone. Moving over a thousand miles didn’t do the team any favors and after less than a year of living there, Danaher announced that the team was breaking up.
When Danaher did eventually talk about the split, he actually attributed some of it to the move to Puerto Rico as well. Although one of the sport’s best teams breaking up was a shock, they have since formed two successful teams as New Wave Jiu-Jitsu and B-Team Jiu-Jitsu. Both teams are located in Austin, Texas but despite their close proximity, the nature of the breakup has left some bad blood between them. Although both sides remained quiet at the start, they have since spoken out about the breakup and have even gone so far as to lay blame directly at each other.
That’s why it’s so surprising to see that the two leaders of the opposing teams, Craig Jones and John Danaher, have had what appears to be a friendly meeting with each another. It’s highly unlikely that they would ever return to training together as one team given that both teams are very successful in their own rights and New Wave are even opening up their headquarters soon. Jones did caption the photo with ‘systematically rebuilding bridges’ though, which is both a nod to Danaher’s popular instructionals on BJJ Fanatics and a potential signal that some sort of co-operation is in the works.
The most likely reason is that the second edition of the Craig Jones Invitational is coming up soon. It will be a team grappling tournament and as Jones is the man behind the promotion, he is a big factor in determining what teams will be represented at the event. He already stated that his goal is to find out who the best team in the world is and it doesn’t make sense to do that without New Wave Jiu-Jitsu. Jones was confident they would compete and it seems as though this meeting with Danaher might be a step on the way to getting that done. Danaher was already very complimentary about the first event, so it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to convince him to field a team.
Craig Jones shared the cryptic message after his meeting with John Danaher in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
