Jiu-jitsu family member needs your help

Spending time on the mats at Toronto BJJ I’d often hear Professor Jorge Britto talk about how we are a family, how our rolling partners are not just our teammates but members of a great jiu-jitsu family. A nice sentiment, I always thought, but little else. Well, this week I got a better sense of the jiu-jitsu family Jorge often speaks of when I heard about the plight of Fernando “Terere” Augusto.

Terere was one of the Alliance Team’s brightest stars. A Pan American and Mundial champion from the slums of Rio de Janeiro who has beaten some of the best in the game, including two wins over Marcelo Garcia. Bright, brilliant, flamboyant, a “real showman,” Jorge called him, “one of the best competitors in all of jiu-jitsu.” And he understood the importance of giving back, once selling a car he won at a jiu-jitsu tournament to open his own school, the TT Academy, located beneath the Cantagalo Favela where he grew up and where other under-privileged kids could come and train. He was a teacher to some, such as World and Pan Am champion Andre Galvao, and a hero to many.

And, as Jorge told us this week, he is in desperate need of his jiu-jitsu family. Terere has been plagued with personal problems for several years. He once spent three moths in a U.S. detention facility after he caused a disturbance on a 2004 flight from Washington to Sao Paulo. Drugs and likely mental illness have destroyed his life and he has sometimes been living on the very streets he fought so hard to help others avoid. In and out of rehab, nothing seems to work. Each step forward toward normalcy, a return to training, a return to competition, is followed by a greater step backward.

Now, the 28-year-old fighter’s family is making a desperate plea for help from the jiu-jitsu community. As a result, Elan Santiago, instructor at Alliance Rio de Janeiro, contacted Gracie Mag: “A lot of people are calling me offering money, but what we urgently need is specialized help. From the public clinics he’s been going to he comes back worse. He needs a private clinic. Terere’s case is very grave. We’re racing against time to avoid something worse. I’m certain that in the Jiu-Jitsu family there’s some father of an athlete, some psychiatrist who can help us.”

That is why this week Jorge has made a plea to his jiu-jitsu family at Toronto BJJ and to the jiu-jitsu family at-large to make a small donation to help Terere get the medical attention he needs. A collection is being taken up at TBJJ’s front desk and anyone wishing to contact Elan Santiago for more information on how they may help can do so by telephone: (21) 7858-7244. He can also be reached via Gracie Mag at gracie@graciemag.com.

* Thanks to Scott Wallace over at ScottOnTheNet for some of the background info.