Hi fellow praticioner, It would be difficult after all these years to say my BJJ game is pure, it had influences from a lot of grappling aspects of other martial arts. However, I will skip over the martial arts that were not focused on ground work even thought they might have influenced some details. Just to name a few: Dumog, Sambo, Jeet Kune Do, Wing Tsun, Muay Thai, Silat, ... My first real grappling experience was through Ernest Debrun in 1991 (except for some Judo as a kid) He was teaching 'classical' Jiu-Jitsu near my home town Leuven, Belgium. We would see a lot of standing self-defense moves, but every training we would end with some rolling on the ground. This fighting looked like Judo but included leglocks and things like guard. Because I liked this part of the training so much I actually switched to Judo in 1995 and had the luck to train for 3 years with Eric Veulemans. He was an amazing coach and I kind of regret that I didn't continue training at his school. Ofcourse, decisions come with consequences and opportunities and probably if it was not for this, I would have never met Joffrey Hion in 1996. He was a great friend, who had spent quite some time training with Dan Inosanto in USA. As me, he preferred the ground game and therefor was one of the first european students to be very knowledgable in Shooto an MMA style that was build around grappling and included all possible joint locks. Around the same time I was joining my brother every week on friday to his 'classical' Jiu-Jitsu classes in Boutersem. That's where I met Wim Deputter who for years to come would be my sparring partner. In 1998, after multiple seminars in Europe, I decided to travel to the Inosanto Academy myself. And it was there that I had the luck of participating in the Machado Jiu-Jitsu classes. At that time it was not very common to follow both the Shooto classes and the BJJ classes. There was this kind of rivalry that one group said the other group didn't understand position and that the other group didn't understand submission. (it took about 20 years and John Danaher to show people they should have just unified everything) But since I was actually one a the few abroad people that had passed the 'Shooto Advanced Student' test of Yorinaga Nakamura and was training with both Erik Paulson and Ron Balicki, people were ok with it. Unfortunatelly, there was almost no BJJ in Europe and so I went to practise freestyle wrestling at the Fulton in Antwerpen. It was there I met Michel and Maurice Goffart, who also had just been training BJJ in the USA and were looking to get a Brazilian Coach over to Belgium. I received my blue belt bjj in 2002 from Kazeka Muniz after spending hours on the mat with him and the brothers. Politics were rough at that time, but these 3 people have thought me a lot on the basics of BJJ. And I believe we were very fortunate that Kazeka had both a BJJ and Wrestling background, which allowed us to score easily on tournaments against people not so familiar with wrestling. In 2003, I received a 'Representive Instructor' certification of Erik Paulson for which I am greatful as it kept my mind open towards other Martial Arts. From 2004 we invited Felipe Costa over to Europe, as by then we had the strong believe that the lightest fighters were more technical than the bigger ones. And who better to learn from, than the world champion in the lightest weight category. Well, this changed our jiu-jitsu a lot... we were already athletic, but now we got to mix it with techniques for non-athletic people. So, we just became better at competing and jiu-jitsu. Felipe is and amazing person and I would not have wished any other teacher to receive my BJJ blackbelt from in 2011. I wanted to share this story, as I sometimes believe we are a bit stuck on BJJ lineage. It's clear that certain people in the hierarchy influenced my game a lot, but it would be incorrect to say that none of my other training didn't contribute to the grappler / martial artist I am today. Ken