Champ from Londrina to the world: how our Charles taught us to dream in triangles!
right, so i was sat in this old boozer in shields last wednesday, a bit worse for wear mind you, and some lad no older than 18 starts going on about charles' armbar against ferguson like it was some kind of miracle, you know the sort - shoulders all twitchy like he'd just witnessed jesus walk on water. but here's the thing mate, that wasn't a miracle, that was months of work, proper gym grind, and that lads heart bigger than newcastle's arse end on a saturday night.
i remember when charles first popped up on the forum, round about 2017 maybe, just another kid from londrina talking about triangles like they were his children. back then we were all stuck watching diaz and khabib pulling stars out their arses night after night, thought we were stuck with that fancy-arse grappling shite forever. then this young fella comes along swinging his legs round people's necks like it was normal - and yeah sure, first few losses hurt like a bastard when you're young and stupid enough to bet your sunday roast on fights.
but that moment... november 2021, fight gone so bad our boy actually tapped tony ferguson. i had my mate nick on speakerphone while i was stuck in a layby outside durham with a puncture, and even he could hear the street outside suddenly going fucking mental. not because we won - though that was nice - but because some kid from nowhere had just shown the world that you don't need fancy gyms or big names to teach bjj. sometimes it's just someone who's slept on the mat more nights than they've slept in a bed.
and that's the fucking beauty of it. every time someone in our pub brings up that armbar, half the crowd gets all misty eyed like it happened to them personally. that's charles - he didn't just fight, he made the whole bloody town feel like they could reach out and touch greatness.
Remember when the grass was greener 🌱
never seen a layby eruption like the one that night in wollongong when charles locked that armbar 😱 was queuing for late chips outside some servo when the notification hit my phone, headphones in full blast, suddenly the whole world just went - CHARLES JUST DID IT AGAIN
You don't abandon your own.
ever tried teaching a full grown man how to throw a triangle from deep half guard? because that’s what charles did in the gym after a session once—sat there for hours with this 17 stone welterweight grunting and squirming like a stuck cat, all because charles reckoned he could show him the "londrina noodle special" in a month flat. remember that lad? ended up tapping darren till out on his back at a regional card a year later, still swears by the memory of charles’s voice in his ear that day—"no need for power, mate, just trust the angles." that was the moment we all learned: triangles aren’t just moves, they’re a religion, and charles is the high priest passing down the gospel through bruises and hushed swear words.
Seen it all, lads.
Bloody hell, Ultra, you’ve just summed it up proper—it’s not about the belt or the grand stage, it’s about the way he carried that dream from the backstreets of Londrina right into every one of our living rooms like a bloody torch. Thing is, back in the day when you had to squint at a flip-phone screen to catch a livestream of Charles tapping some promoted bully on his back with another triangle—yeah, that was magic, no question. Fast-forward to now, and you look at this current crew rounding out title defenses without the soap opera, no panic, no panic at all. It’s the same spirit, mate: when the ref raises Charles’s arm in 2021, half the town felt like they’d run those ten extra miles; same vibe tonight when whoever’s inside that cage gets lifted clean off their feet, but today the guys doing the lifting are a little fresher, a little sharper, like they’ve spent the last three years sleeping on the same mats Charles slept on but this time with a physio in the corner and a watch that beeps if you gas it past 10pm. Not better, not worse—just… different degrees of the same grind, the same quiet determination that started in a concrete gym by the railway tracks and now echoes in a proper facility with chalk everywhere you look.
Do the math before you argue.
Well if we’re being honest here, how do we know this whole “Londrina noodle special” wasn’t just Tony Ferguson forgetting how to defend armbars because he’d been watching too many TikTok dance tutorials? 😂 That bloke used to hold clinics on flying triangles—what happened in 2021? Did Charles hypnotise him with that dodgy headband or what? Jokes aside, Ultra’s boozer story had me gutted I wasn’t in Shields that night to scream into the lagers with everyone else. And Cageside’s welterweight getting schooled for a month then tapping Till on his back two years later—yeah, that’s proper cult stuff, but let’s not forget half of us tried copying Charles’s elbow-kick combo off YouTube and ended up kicking the wall instead. Different degrees of grind indeed, but unless someone invents a “triangle tax” on nights out, we’re still just mortals trying to channel the master while our shins scream murder the next morning.
hold my half pint of warm snakebite back when charles first posted his triangle tutorial in a crummy mobile vid on the forum it was 4am and i had just got back from a shift at tesco stacking trolleys like a demon only to see 12 missed calls from my nan who thought i'd fallen down a skip because i didn’t reply to her 97th “where are you now?”
Came to laugh, stayed for life 🍿