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Israeli jiu-jitsu black belt travels the globe for mentorship in Cullman
Updated Apr 04, 2021;
By BENJAMIN BULLARD, The Cullman Times
CULLMAN, Ala. (AP) Yonatan Harel left his home in Israel to set out on a global, year-long quest (and counting) all to seek out the best instruction the world has to offer as he immerses himself deeply in his martial arts passion. It’s a search that had already led Harel a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt with 17 years’ training to studios in California and Brazil. Now, it’s led him here.
Harel, 41, is currently in the middle of the three-month Cullman stretch of his extended jiu-jitsu sabbatical; a stint whose sole purpose is to train under Daniel O’Brien, the owner and chief instructor at Cullman’s Triad Martial Arts Academy. To say he’s seriously committed is an understatement: Harel had never set foot in a small Southern town before this year, but he rented a local apartment and did most of the same logistical legwork any oth
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He’s talking about O’Brien himself, who took over the Triad legacy established by original studio founder and widely-acclaimed 5th degree jiu-jitsu master Johnny Lee Smith. Smith studied in the early 1990s under Brazilian jiu-jitsu legend Rickson Gracie, and there’s a strand of Gracie’s revered approach to the discipline that threads directly from Smith’s early training days to O’Brien’s own technique. In the small but intensely dedicated global jiu-jitsu community, Smith achieved household-name recognition in the 1990s - and O’Brien is doing it again, more than two decades later.
It was just that kind of recognition that led Harel to seek out a residency with O’Brien in the first place, with a literal ocean of distance posing no obstacle in Harel’s determination to learn from the best.
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