John Danaher has been the coach and mentor for Gordon Ryan for several years now, but now it seems as though the student might have surpassed the master. Although BJJ competitors all have coaches working with them, Ryan and Danaher have an especially close relationship. Ryan has even been known to follow career advice that Danaher has given him over the years as well and as he’s managed to become the biggest star in the sport, it seems to be working out very well so far.
The two men recently participated in an interview with Derek Moneyberg and Danaher gave some insight into the life-cycle of the student and teacher relationship:
“At some point, you want to overtake your mentors. You want to get to a point where you’re better than the previous people.”
In fact, John Danaher revealed that he thinks that Gordon Ryan has already reached that point:
“I’m currently 55 years old, Gordon is in his mid-20s. Gordon already knows at least as much about Jiu-Jitsu as I do, plus he has his own elements in his game where he knows more than I do. So I would have no problem saying at this point, he knows more than I do about Jiu-Jitsu. He knows everything I know and he has stuff that he’s invented himself, that I don’t know.”
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise really either, as Danaher has always been open about just the fact that Ryan is a generational talent. He’s been able to demonstrate that incredible skill time and time again too, as he’s beaten pretty much all of the best grapplers on the planet and has dominated many of them without being under threat. Things are almost coming full-circle now too, as Ryan has even begun promoting his own students up the belt ranks as well. Ryan explained how his relationship with Danaher has progressed over the years, and the changes to his training that has taken place since he’s reached this level:
“The first few years of training with John, it was just John showing me moves. Okay and now I have to learn each individual move, each system, and I have to try to chain them together and, you know, beat the best guys. Whereas now it’s: John gives a general idea to me, I come back two days later or three days later, a week later, and now I have a whole different system developed and along the way I’m bouncing ideas off him. He’s giving me his opinions, we kinda bounce ideas off one another. So he gives a general idea and then three weeks later we have this whole new system developed around this general idea that he gave me a few weeks ago.”
The interview with John Danaher and Gordon Ryan where Danaher discusses the idea of being a mentor was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Derek Moneyberg:
