And I mean, look, I’ve read his books, I’ve read about him. Some people love him, some people don’t. He showed up for us, right? I’m not here to think about anybody else’s experiences. In that moment, this person made himself available. And there was a continuity to that, that lasted right up until his death.
YEGANEH REZAIAN: We went to see Tony speak in Boston, maybe five or six months after Jason was released. Sometimes we went to places and Jason got recognized. Most people had been really sweet and supportive to us. And we met with Tony behind the scenes, a few minutes before the show started. We talked about several different things, personal and professional. His speech was really fascinating and very exciting, really fun to listen to, even informative. When he opened it up to questions, the very first question was, “What happened to the couple whom you met in Iran, and they ended up in prison?”
I jumped out of my place. This was a question for Tony; it wasn’t meant to be answered by me, assuming no one knew that we were there, but I was very excited, and I just stood up and said, “We are here! We are here!” Waving my hand in the air, and Tony stood there quietly, just staring at me, and I thought, Oh my god, what did I do? And then Tony said, “I didn’t want to destroy their date night, but they are here, and they are doing well.”
People started clapping, which was really sweet. But now I think, I really would have loved to hear his answer, without my getting involved. I never gave the guy the chance to say what he should have said.
44
“This Is Just Another Tribe”
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
MORGAN FALLON: The fucking smoking, man, and the exhaustion, and the travel, really racked up a hefty line of credit over the years. There were times when we’d be out on a hike [on a shoot] and I’d be like, “Who has the defibrillator?” Because I had Tony on mic, and I could hear him wheezing; I could hear him coughing.
NARI KYE: When we made No Reservations in South Korea, we got to do a tae kwon do scene, which was hilarious. Tony, then, was probably the most not-athletic person I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was still smoking a pack of [Marlboro] Reds back then, and he would never exercise. He was rail thin. He wasn’t overweight, so he didn’t look unhealthy. But he was so out of shape, uncoordinated, out of breath. Not flexible. And he wasn’t really doing tae kwon do, but we were at least trying to make this funny montage of him kicking my ass, and then another little girl kicking his ass. So we were trying to get him to kick, and Tony, not even joking, couldn’t even get his foot past his knees. It was just comical how out of shape he was.
OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: I was writing a blog for Fightland, and I was trying to find ideas on what to write. I was like, Maybe I should have my close friends and family try jiu-jitsu, and write about that. And Tony tried it, and he really liked it. I didn’t push him; he just started doing it, and he really wanted to do it.
ROY CHOI: We filmed an episode of [CNN web series] Street Food when he had just started jiu-jitsu; he was still smoking and complaining. I asked him between takes, “What are you doing with jiu-jitsu? Where are you thinking of going with this?” and he said, “I have no idea, but all I know is that I can’t stop.”
OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: He was always making sure, when he was going on shoots, that there was a gym and that he had time for training. If he couldn’t train, he was not happy.
And in New York, he had his private [sessions]; he would set them up himself; and then he would take a class. And he competed. I think it was good for him. He was in great shape doing it.
ARIANE BUSIA-BOURDAIN: Well, for the time I was doing jiu-jitsu, I was pretty small back then, so I couldn’t really train with him, but I’d always do something called an arm bar, or like a rear naked choke, on him.
DARREN ARONOFSKY: When we were [shooting Parts Unknown] in Madagascar, he was deep into the jiu-jitsu, really focused on that. When we weren’t shooting, he went to his room. And he was only drinking on camera and stuff like that. He never went out at night.
DEAN FERTITA: We did a Nashville episode of [Parts Unknown]. Doing jiu-jitsu was one of the prerequisites of participation, and to this day I still do jiu-jitsu, in honor of him. It was something I never had done before, but Tony’s interest in it, and dedication to it, interested me enough to try it.
I think I was surprised about that aspect of his personality, because it is a highly competitive thing, but what isn’t surprising, thinking back, is the dedication that’s involved in something like that, how much he devoted himself to everything he did; even his time away from work was the same way.
SANDY ZWEIG: It became a real responsibility for whoever the producer was on the show, to find him somebody to work out with. I mean, it certainly did affect the show in terms of the shooting schedule, but ultimately, it put him in a much better mood, so it was sort of worth it. There was a lot of pressure on those guys, to kind of make that all work for him.
TOM VITALE: With jiu-jitsu, I had to make the decision, do we miss this really important scene to illustrate this thing he wants to do, because it happens only in the morning, you know, versus the jiu-jitsu? How do we make it all work? It was every day.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: The first time he meaningfully touched me beyond a handshake was when he put me in an arm bar on a rooftop. That’s when I knew he actually cared about me. It was in Shanghai, and we had just wrapped, so he was ecstatic, and he was going home to jiu-jitsu, and he was excited to see his daughter, and he just went up behind me like whoop. That was his sign of love and endearment. It was that weird moment where I realized, He cares enough about me to try to break my neck.
JOSH FERRELL: I was lean and mean when I started working with Tony, but working on the shows, I gained almost eighty pounds. In the midst of all that, Tony kept saying, “You gotta try jiu-jitsu.” Finally, we were in Budapest, and I had rolled my ankle, and Tony was like, “Hey, man, this is tough love. Let me get your first few sessions,” and then I did it, and I was hooked.
HELEN CHO: I was super interested in martial arts as a kid, but my parents couldn’t afford to send me to a martial arts school. So I just kind of suppressed it; it was a childhood thing. And then, as an adult, I hear Tony and Ottavia obsessively talking about jiu-jitsu. I was really curious, and they showed me a couple of moves, and then Tony said, “Why don’t you take an intro class? I’ll set it up.” I tried it, and I loved it immediately. It brought back something that I’d put away.
JOSH FERRELL: Being on shoots with Tony, he didn’t have anybody to roll with, and he’d say, “Bring your gi,” so, included in these crazy hectic shoot days, I’d go roll with Tony for an hour. Sometimes we’d go to gyms and there would be other people, but I remember in Senegal—there was no local jiu-jitsu club in Dakar in 2016—so in those cases it would be, “OK, let’s just beat the shit out of each other until we’re both exhausted.” That would always get him in a really good mood. He was a very intense dude, and he did find the sport that matched his personality, his ability to go from zero to one hundred like that.
NICK BRIGDEN: There was a period where all he would talk about was jiu-jitsu. I actually started getting into it, being prompted by Tony to try it out. I was training for maybe four months, and we were all in Nashville together, and we decided to all train together. We went to this little academy, getting instruction, and then it was time to roll with each other. And I had never rolled with Tony, but I had some wrestling in my background, as a kid, so I kind of knew my way around the mat, and I had a few different moves that I had learned from jiu-jitsu. So Tony and I started sparring, and immediately I got him into this arm bar, and he tapped out on me, and I couldn’t believe it, that I fucking tapped out Tony. And he got pissed about it, too.
In the next minute of that round, he went at me hard. He had his gangly legs wrapped around me, and he got me into this move called “the scorpion.” At the time, I didn’t know when to tap, before a limb is busted. And I didn’t—he had got me in this move, and I didn’t tap, and all of
a sudden we hear a tuk, tuk, pop. And my knee had hyperextended. And he stops, and I stop, and he looked at me and said, “Oh, fuck.”
I walked on it a little bit, and it felt funky, but it didn’t feel horrible. So we finish off the session, and then we all piled into the van, and my knee just blew up. I had torn something. Tony did not feel good about that; he felt horrible about it. We finished that shoot, and then Tony gave me this great orthopedic surgeon back in Manhattan who fixed me up. I never blamed Tony. I think Ottavia came down hard on him about it. But we went at each other really hard. I think a lot of pent-up frustration through the years came out in that two minutes of sparring together.
MORGAN FALLON: There was this incredible relief as he began to get healthy: he quit smoking, he was doing jiu-jitsu every day, he was on a good diet, and he really popped to life. He had these two years that were just fantastic. It was like, OK, he’s gonna be all right. This is good.
ERIC RIPERT: He had to have the trainer in the morning, anywhere he was, his victims. He said it would be good for me to do it. And I said, “Absolutely not, it’s not even one percent chance of [me] doing it. It doesn’t appeal to me.” And, I know for him, it was very good for his mental [health], and it changed him—he lost a lot of weight, built a lot of muscles. It was good for his cardio. He stopped smoking, he stopped a lot of things. He started to eat better, and so on, and be more cautious. So, for him, it was a great experience.
And I saw him actually—in Marseille, one morning, he said, “You know, you have never seen me doing it. Come, come watch, come see it.” And I went two mornings in a row, at six a.m., to see him. And he was with a guy who was very good, actually, and they would sweat on top of each other, and it was disgusting. And you could smell the body odor and so on, from far away. And I was like, What are they doing? It’s disgusting.
TOM VITALE: He gave me the hard sell on jiu-jitsu. He offered me a jiu-jitsu training membership for a year, but I refused to even pretend to be interested in it. If, for some insane reason, I was ever going to get into jiu-jitsu, I would have done it secretly, and certainly not have told Tony. I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction.
NIGELLA LAWSON: I worried about him when he started going so completely obsessive about jiu-jitsu. He got too thin. I said, “You always look gorgeous. You absolutely are wonderful, but you don’t want to go into scrawny old man, you just don’t.” And he said, “I have to be this thin, because otherwise I’ll get beaten.” The way he was about winning.
DAVID CHOE: Every jiu-jitsu person I’ve ever met was like, “Tony came by my place and worked out three times in one day.”
JOEL ROSE: He said, “The same way I used to wait on line to score heroin, I’ll be at the dojo, waiting for it to open.” He had the same feeling; he said he was trying to use that kind of addiction mentality for something else. I think that when you do have that kind of personality, it’s all encompassing, and it reaches into every nook and cranny of your being.
MORGAN FALLON: It was fucking insufferable. I would try to telegraph to him, over the course of these hundreds of conversations about jiu-jitsu, like, “Brother, I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about; I have no interest in what you’re talking about; I will never know anything about what you’re talking about; this is purely an endeavor of you telling me the same stories that you’ve told to everyone else.”
He was a lifelong addict, man. If it wasn’t heroin, it was work. If it wasn’t work, it was jiu-jitsu. If it wasn’t jiu-jitsu, it was relationships, or any number of other things. The way that Tony’s power went out to the world was largely through his various addictions, and I think he very clearly understood that he was never gonna be someone who was free from those addictions.
The jiu-jitsu was good, because largely it was a positive addiction, and so, as much as it was fucking insufferable to sit there and listen to him talk about something that I knew nothing about, over and over and over again, I wasn’t worried about him. I wasn’t worried that he was gonna collapse, or have a heart attack, or die of emphysema.
OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: It’s like he was getting maybe a high from doing it, you know.
People do become addicted to jiu-jitsu in a way. I mean, he had addiction problems. And I’m not saying being addicted to jiu-jitsu is a problem, but he tended to become addicted to things. I think that’s what happened with jiu-jitsu.
NARI KYE: When we were in Korea for Parts Unknown, he was training, and he would tell us about all kinds of gruesome injuries. Like, his penis turned black. I was like, how does that even happen? It was crazy.
OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: I mean, he did get injured. And everybody gets injured. There’s people way older than him doing it, so I wasn’t super worried.
We trained together. He would have this burst of energy, where he would give it his all, and if he couldn’t submit me, then he had to take a breather. He was super intense. And very competitive. And he was becoming really good.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: The whole jiu-jitsu thing—on the one hand, it seems like just a hobby, but it was a pretty fucking serious hobby there.
I think part of the reason I wanted to write about him, aside from the fact that he lived an interesting life and seemed like a fascinating guy, was that I’ve always had a little debate in my head about the capacity for reinvention. To what extent is the die cast at a fairly early point? To what degree is the person you are when you’re forty the person you’re going to be for the rest of your life?
Part of what was so intriguing to me about Tony is that he’d lived a certain life until he was older than I was when I was writing about him, and then he changed in pretty radical ways, and lived this whole other life. What was fascinating to me about jiu-jitsu was—there’s Tony until Kitchen Confidential, and then there’s Tony on the other side of Kitchen Confidential, who has a certain persona he’s cultivating, and then jiu-jitsu actually sort of upended a lot of that.
The idea that you’d be approaching sixty, and do that with the conviction that he did, and the obsession that he did, and as successfully as he did . . . it’s a corny word, but it was inspiring.
He has this Rabelaisian persona, where he goes out, and he eats anything, and he drinks anything, and it’s abundance in all things, no filter on the stuff that’s coming out of his mouth, or going into it. And there was always a little bit of an illusion there, because, as I discovered pretty quickly, he was really disciplined about all kinds of things, clearly, long before jiu-jitsu.
It was quite surprising to me to hang out with him and realize that he’s kind of playing a character on TV, who has a big bowl of pasta and knocks back shots till all hours, not mentioning the fact that he’s up at seven in the morning, sweating it out, and is becoming much more careful about what he consumes, and is thinking about consequences in a way that he hadn’t before, and in a way that Tony Bourdain the character isn’t supposed to.
I get in [to Renzo Gracie Academy, where Tony trained in New York], and I realize, like, this is just another tribe. It’s just another subculture. This is the kitchen all over again. What he wants is to be the newbie, who’s initiated roughly into a kind of marginal, secretive, obsessive priesthood. The camaraderie, and the way he related to everyone, a lot of that seemed to me to have pretty strong resonances of the kitchen.
When we went to spar at a random gym in Hanoi, he did acknowledge that it’s very similar to the kitchen . . . it’s a shared-language thing. So, suddenly, he has this mode that he can relate to total strangers anywhere around the world. He has to find them. They’re not everywhere. He’s gotta do some homework and figure out what rock they’re living under. But when he does that, he doesn’t have to speak the same language, they can have nothing in common. . . . To me, that, that just felt very linked to everything that had come before.
MICHAEL STEED: There was this peak period where he seemed happy. That addictive personality was just all focused on jiu-jitsu. He wasn’t asking about my family or anything, but he loo
ked great; he had all this energy. At one point, at the end of a scene, he almost hugged me, and I was kind of like, “What the hell?”
And then fucking what’s-her-name enters his life, and he starts smoking again, and it just sort of got back into that negative energy that fit this weird fantasy character that he felt he was, and needed a counterpart to.
MORGAN FALLON: He wanted to be a rock star again, and all of a sudden, it was right back to smoking, and not just smoking, but smoking on camera, which was totally unheard of. That moment in the Puglia [episode of Parts Unknown] when he lights up in scene: that was pretty intense, and kind of a really depressing signifier of him, in some ways, being like, Fuck it.
OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: I think he went back a little bit to old vices. You know, he went back to smoking every day, and maybe drinking more than he was when he was at home with us. Those things don’t really make you feel like going training in the morning.
He never really quit. He had moments when he was like, “I’m really getting back into it. I really want to get my purple belt.”
[At the beginning of] the summer he actually died is when he told me, “The goal for this summer is for me to get the purple belt.” So it was always in the back of his head: “I better go back to training, like, seriously.” But he had other things in his life that kind of kept him away from that.
45
“Maybe You’ll Find Another Chance at Love”
The End of the Marriage
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: I probably talked to Tony for twenty hours, over the course of the year [2016]. And that was the year in which his marriage fell apart, and his show was kind of coming into its own.
Bourdain Page 26