![]() The one problem was Jolanda Scotto, the girl he'd started dating 8 months earlier. Still young enough to take a chance, Torres decided to just pick up and move to San Diego with only $500 to his name. The thought of training with him was too much to pass up. Galvao, one of the most successful BJJ competitors in history, had always been an idol of Torres. He was planning to go train with legendary BJJ champion Marcelo Garcia in New York City, hoping to finally take his game to the next level, when former teammate Keenan Cornelius called him from California to tell him how great the training was at Andre Galvao's Atos gym. Torres quickly removed himself from the squad returning home to the New York area in 2013. Furthermore, he found himself without a team when his camp at Team Lloyd Irvin was hit by scandal as a couple of members, as well as Irvin, were accused of sexual assaults. But he wasn't quite able to break through on the biggest stage. He got his black belt in 2009 and had some notable early successes including a Pan Am championship. Torres' world title took a bit longer than he expected. If their passion isn't that great, a world title probably isn't in their future. But if someone comes to him and says their goal is to be a world champion, that is a different conversation and Torres up front tells them they have to be all about jiu-jitsu all the time. He doesn't pressure his own students to become jiu-jitsu fanatics the way he was and said getting on the mats two or three times a week is plenty for the average student. I was only able to train on the mats two or three days a week but I was thinking about jiu-jitsu 24/7," said Torres. I'd get hold of old instructional tapes, go to Barnes & Nobles to read all the jiu-jitsu books or I'd look at Black Belt Magazine every time they had an article on it. But I'd still try to find as much information as I could. "This was before there was much jiu-jitsu on Youtube. He'd sit in his high school classrooms with his jacket on the back of his chair and spend classes reaching from side to side, seizing the jacket sleeves and practicing his kimura locks on them. It was like learning some kind of next level superhero stuff." "That was the most incredible thing to me, that I could make somebody give up like that. "I asked if he was really trying to fight it and he said he was," said Torres. Recalling the first time he learned to do a triangle choke, Torres said he used it that class in sparring and couldn't believe it when his opponent tapped. Torres had watched a couple of UFC's and jiu-jitsu, he thought, was indeed cool. "I didn't really want to do karate again but the school also taught a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class once a week," he said. He quit karate upon entering high school since it just didn't seem as cool as his other pursuits of skateboarding and basketball but when he failed to make his high school hoops team, his father urged him to go back to martial arts. Having started out in karate in Rockland County, where he grew up after moving with his family from the Bronx, Torres earned a black belt in that art by age 14. Torres credits an obsession with the "gentle art" as the reason for his rapid improvement. The belts came right on schedule - he was promoted to blue belt within six months (by none other than his first teacher's teacher, Royce Gracie) and made black belt within 4 years, an incredible rate of ascension marking him as something of a prodigy. Back when he was fifteen and just starting out in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, he methodically sat down and listed his career goals along with a rough time line for when he should achieve them: ![]() ![]() He's allotted himself one hour for lunch and discussion before getting his set amount of rest between training sessions. A two-time ADCC world champion, and arguably the most successful all-around American jiu-jitsu competitor ever, the 32-year-old Torres has his diet, just as he does his training schedule and seemingly everything else in his life, down to a careful science.
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