Christian Barry and John Danaher were both graduate students in philosophy at Columbia University, and it was there that Danaher’s introduction to Jiu-Jitsu began.
Recalling his first impressions of Danaher, Barry said:
I knew that John worked part-time as a bouncer.
He was a very large imposing figure, very soft-spoken, very serious, but he also would sort of quietly and politely sometimes tell me about his experiences as a bouncer, which were kind of eye-opening and sort of terrifying for me at the time.
After training for a few months himself, Barry brought Jiu-Jitsu up with Danaher directly:
I talked to him about it a couple of times and he seemed fine but a little bit not that interested.
He was a man who had found his own way of using his body effectively in fighting and probably might have been a bit skeptical.
That changed when Danaher challenged Barry to show him some Jiu-Jitsu firsthand:
He just got me on the floor and pulled me into a headlock. I didn’t know that much Jiu-Jitsu.
I had probably been training for about three months and probably weighed about 154 lbs (70 kilos).
He weighed considerably more than that. He was a bit of a monster.
Barry managed to escape and take Danaher’s back, a moment he believes shifted something:
I think he was kind of intrigued.
From there, the two trained informally at the Columbia gym on mats taped together with electrical tape:
It mostly consisted at first of me just trying to keep him off me…
Everybody wanted to train with him because he was like a fascinating physical guy.
He was like a serious weightlifter and he weighed a lot, quality strong guy, and it would be a good test case for anybody to show whether or not their guard actually works if you can kind of keep someone like that at bay.
He became very serious and sort of obsessive in his training and thinking about it and quickly zoomed past me and many other people.
Barry said Danaher became completely absorbed in the art almost immediately, and even in those early days showed confidence in experimenting with his own ideas:
John did have that confidence early of just coming up with stuff and he would use it in training and it would work.
I remember just being like: “John, are we supposed to be doing this?”
And they were like: “No, if it works, it works.”
Barry also linked Danaher’s teaching style directly back to their shared academic background:
That systematic breaking down and articulation of general principles explaining sort of more complex phenomenon is definitely a fruits of a more philosophical mindset.
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