A Humble Beginning

The Birmingham Sombo Club club started in an over-size wooden shed on a rental property where I invited a few friends and co-workers over to train. Within about a year I moved to my custom-built suburban home equipped with with a walkout basement, Inside, past the garage was an ample 500sf of open training space - including padded walls and a dedicated bathroom. As a not-for-profit operation, there were no fees, and judo gi’s were provided at cost. A student would sign a liability waiver and be good to go.

I focused on my career, and ran classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Needless to say, this “business” model was very popular with perennially broke college age students.

The operating model was simple. If you came in with prior knowledge and experience, you were encouraged to share what you know. Otherwise, we would teach you. The focus was sport submission grappling with a hybrid of Sombo, Judo and Japanese Jujitsu. We started off as a judogi school, as Sombo Kurtkas were near impossible to source, but under the influence of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and 10th Planet Jujitsu we began to train regularly no-gi as well.

The structure of the class was simple: guided stretching and warmups, instruction from me or whoever was willing to share, then we would roll for submissions. There was a lot of focus on standing work and throws, and the model was more catch wrestling like with scrambles to submissions from anywhere being the norm. Throws, arm locks, leg locks, strangles, slicers, reaping and everything else you could imagine were the norm. We refrained from neck cranks and small digit manipulations, but “painful holds” were fine.

Our motto was the “Everyone Fights, Every Night - and we didn’t stop until we were exhausted or turned green (sometimes literally). We jokingly called it ‘Fight Club’ after the popular 1999 movie starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and violated the first fule of Fight Club by talking about it to anyone who would listen.

Once the club had became established I was promoted by Scott Anderson from “provisional” to a full black belt. Some years later I was promoted to 1st Degree Black Belt in Russian Sombo (Sambo). Scott and I were affiliated with the American Sombo Academy, a now defunct organization that kept few if any records.

My students and I would occasionally travel around the nearby southeast area to compete in various generic ‘grappling’ competitions. We even went to a few BJJ competitions in the mid 2000’s (Auburn Jujitsu). It’s always fun to go to a “grappling / submission wrestling” competition, try to figure out what the rules are, whether or not there were weight divisions and then to fight in the “open” division no matter what.

The Birmingham Sombo Club ceased operations in 2006 when I relocated to Wisconsin for work. I relocated back to Birmingham AL in 2008 but chose not to restart the club, and began a focus on a combination of defensive and competitive action pistol shootng.

I was able to access an archived copy of the club’s website from 12/20/2003 from the Wayback Machine and pull some photos. Feel free to follow the link but be warned it is a bit of a slow and painful process, the digital cameras of the era were basically potatoes, and the internet bandwidth of the time made downloading the ‘full resolution’ versions of the images an arduous process.