The road to becoming a world-class grappler isn’t always paved with complete honesty as Nicky Ryan‘s mother recently revealed in a candid discussion about her son’s unconventional path to jiu-jitsu stardom.
When teenage Nicky wanted to abandon traditional education to pursue grappling full-time his mother wasn’t having it. The pressure campaign was relentless with supporters constantly advocating for the young athlete’s dreams.
“Everybody was hounding me,” she recalled on The Simple Man podcast. “You got to let Nicky drop out of school. You got to let him just waste his time. I was like, there’s no way.”
The breakthrough came when Nicky presented what seemed like a reasonable compromise. He assured his mother that renowned coach John Danaher would personally tutor him to earn his GED making the educational sacrifice seem manageable.
“I got the big lie or promise that John Danaher was going to study with him to pass his GED,” she explained. “So that was the deal. He was supposed to study with John get his GED.”
To ensure accountability she attached serious consequences to the agreement.
“I told him if he didn’t do that that I wasn’t going to help him buy his first car.”
The deception unraveled in the most awkward way possible. During a chance encounter with Danaher himself she inquired about the tutoring sessions only to discover the entire arrangement was fictional.
“I saw John and I was like, hey John how’s it going with the GED training? And he looked at me like, what? What the f–k are you talking about?” she recounted. “I’m like, I’m going to k-ll these kids.”
True to her word she followed through on her ultimatum regarding the car purchase. However by that time Nicky‘s gamble had paid off spectacularly. His rapid rise in the grappling world had already generated significant income.
“I didn’t help him with his first car but I didn’t need to actually. By then they had their own money. They had more money than me,”
she admitted with a mixture of frustration and pride.
Danaher‘s response to the situation was characteristically pragmatic. As she recalled him saying:
“All right we’ll just go teach a seminar. You’ll buy your car. It’s fine. I got you.”
This revelation sheds light on the determination that drove Nicky‘s unconventional journey. Growing up in New Jersey he initially showed little interest in the martial art that would define his career. It was only after witnessing his brother Gordon Ryan‘s emerging success that Nicky‘s passion truly ignited.
The Ryan brothers shared a common aversion to traditional career paths preferring to chase their athletic dreams despite the financial uncertainty that characterized the sport at the time. Back then making a sustainable living through grappling alone was nearly impossible with many athletes eventually transitioning to mixed martial arts for better earning potential.
Nicky‘s early success vindicated his risky decision. Training alongside elite athletes at Renzo Gracie‘s Academy he developed at an extraordinary pace. By age thirteen he was competing against and defeating experienced adult practitioners demonstrating the prodigious talent that would justify his mother’s eventual acceptance of his unorthodox path.
The scholarship provided by Danaher allowed Nicky to train daily with world-class teammates creating an immersive environment that accelerated his development. While the tutoring promise proved to be a fabrication the mentorship and training opportunities were very real.
Looking back his mother’s initial resistance seems understandable given the uncertain prospects in professional grappling at the time. Her son’s deception while questionable ultimately led to a career that has exceeded even the most optimistic projections from those early days when everyone was “hounding” her to let him pursue his dreams.
