Jiu-Jitsu was never the whole story.
CHRIS HAUETER is a legendary figure in the world of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Not only is he a member of the "Dirty Dozen"—the first twelve non-Brazilian BJJ black belts—but he is also a singular personality, known for his wide-ranging intellect, his relentless curiosity, and his uniquely conceptual approach to the art.
When he asks fellow BJJ black belt and author Scott Burr to help him write a book about his life and thoughts on Jiu-Jitsu, it seems like a perfect fit: Scott, after all, has built a career helping others turn their stories into books, including the bestselling BJJ memoir Worth Defending.
As the project ramps up, however, Scott is quickly caught in the rip current of Chris's perpetually-expanding vision for a book covering everything from personal history to Jiu-Jitsu to politics to evolutionary theory to psychology to pop culture to art to the search for God and the rise of fascism in the twenty-first century.
Shouldering an undertaking whose scope is growing beyond his ability to reckon with it, and with pressures mounting in both his personal and professional life, Scott finds himself caught between the seemingly impossible task of wrangling Chris's sprawling output into a unified whole and the prospect of failing to do so, with Chris and the rest of the BJJ community looking on…
Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on the creative act itself, The Chris Haueter Book is an intimate portrait of one of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu's most iconic and unconventional thinkers: a deeply personal and intellectually expansive story about martial arts, artistic aspiration, and the search for connection and understanding in a cultural moment defined by discord and division.
