Skip to main content

About Me

My photo
my many faces
My name is Romeo Barnes. I'm an author and a BJJ black belt with cerebral palsy. This blog is about my life balancing existence in two worlds. My latest book, My World is now available Amazon.com. Glad you're here, enjoy the journey.

Goals and Fights

Well one goal for 2010 has been accomplished, that's making purple belt. I got promoted Monday night. All that's left is publish Emotions Volume 2: Better Days, which is another blog post all it's own and win Mundials. Sadly, there's no way I can make the trip(medical bills+no sponsors=No Worlds). I'm having surgery soon(September) and I want to compete before I go under the knife for what has be 1,000th time. So I signed up for the GrapplersQuest US Nationals. I placed last year at this event taking 3rd place, having said that, last year was blue belt level, and purple is considered the lowest rank of the upper-class. A bishop with a black belt being king(for my chess players). What that means is this will be a whole different beast. I really wish I could compete on the IBJJF stage especially since I'm trying make a run for ADCC and ADCC Pro in 2011.(Someday I will) However, due to circumstances beyond my control GQ will have to be my IBJJF Worlds. I may do IBJJF No-Gi Nationals in August just before my surgery depending on what the bank account looks like.(Hopefully Maguilla will fund us for No-Gi Nationals but we'll see) For now though the focus is on GrapplersQuest on June 12th.

Comments

  1. Congrats on purple!!! Pictures or it didn't happen :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'll youtube my promotions from now on. Just for you Georgette :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

top vs. bottom

This is post that has been in my head since Georgette blogged her time at the Pan back in April over at her blog georgette's world . I don't quite remember the name of the post(just search her April posts) but in it she stated that sweep+submissions is better than takedown+pass therefore she implied unintentionally or not that playing the bottom is better than playing the top. Her reasoning being there are more options on the bottom which is completely true but thats only because you can transition to a different guard should the one you're using currently not be working not because the top player doesn't have submissions. Therefore, I must disagree with her statement. Firstly, if you pull guard and I knee-cut/step over into your half and flatten I get an advantage meaning all I have to do is stay there until time is up and I win. All leglocks can come from the top and in fact do especially the ankle lock. The toe hold and Heel Hook are the most common leg attacks from

Gay in BJJ

Truthfully, this would probably go over better as a YouTube video, but I figured that I haven't actually written on this blog in a while, so this is a good excuse to do just that. As the title states, I'm going to talk about being gay in the sport of BJJ. The thing that stopped me from posting this in the past was I didn't want to beat a dead horse. After all, this topic has been done talked about many times over in the BJJ community, but never from perspective(to my knowledge) of someone who was openly gay and active in the BJJ community. I'm that guy. So I will list questions I get both inside and outside the BJJ community as the answers are for the most part exactly the same. 1) What do I do if I suspect my training partner is gay? Answer: Ask him/her. It really is that easy. However, the manner in which this question is asked is really important. You know your training partner, so handle the situation accordingly(privately is always best regardless of the method o