Reptilian Overlord Dick Cheney Receives His Blue Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at a Winchester Academy

There is a belt. It is blue, it is four centimeters wide, it is a standard cotton weave of the kind sold in bulk to academies across the mid-Atlantic, and on the evening of 14 August it was tied around the waist of the forty-sixth Vice President of the United States by a man who has since stopped returning our calls.

The rank bar is black. There are no degrees on it. A blue belt with no degrees is exactly what it appears to be: a first promotion, the first significant adult rank in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, ordinarily awarded one to two years into consistent training. Nothing about it is unusual. We establish that at the outset because it is the only sentence in this story nobody has disputed.

This newspaper has spent sixteen months on the promotion. We have interviewed eleven people, six of whom agreed to be named. We filed five records requests; one was fulfilled, nine months later, by a volunteer archivist in a storage unit in Hagerstown, Maryland. We hold a thirty-one-page attendance export, a thermostat log, a uniform invoice, a certificate of promotion, and a fourteen-page ruling that determines nothing.

We should say plainly, and once, what we are not going to spend this story on. The subject’s species is not in dispute at this newspaper and has not been since 2014, when we published eleven thousand words and forty-one pages of appendices and were contradicted by no one. Readers who write to us about it now receive form letter RD-FORM-9. It is settled. It is, at this point, faintly boring, and our Standards Desk has asked that it stop being the first thing anyone mentions. What is not settled is whether a man who spent twenty months without a detectable pulse may be entered in a Masters 7 division against men with hearts. That is a live question in Virginia grappling. Nobody will answer it.

“He shows up. He drills. He asks the right questions. I am not going to punish a man for showing up.”— Curtis Ballenger, evening gi instructor

I. The Ceremony, Reconstructed

The promotion took place on Thursday, 14 August, at the conclusion of the 6:30 p.m. gi class at Shark Pit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, 210 Fort Collier Road, Unit 6, in Winchester, Virginia. We have reconstructed it from four independent accounts: three from students in the line-up, one from a parent waiting in the lobby with a child in the youth program.

The accounts agree on this much. At approximately 7:39 p.m. the class was called to line up by rank along the north edge of the mat. Twenty-three students were present. Three promotions were announced. The first was a fourth stripe on a white belt, awarded to a woman who works at the hospital. The second was a youth promotion, gray-and-black to gray, awarded to a nine-year-old. The third was the blue belt.

The belt came off a shelf above the front desk, still in its plastic, the manufacturer’s cardboard insert in it. We have timed the sequence from shelf to tie at forty-one seconds, using the audio track of a phone video that was subsequently deleted and which we have not seen, do not possess, and are not claiming to possess.

The white belt was removed by the subject himself, folded once, and handed off. The blue belt was then tied by a second party, and it is here that the accounts diverge.

Two witnesses say the belt was tied by Curtis Ballenger, who runs the Tuesday and Thursday evening gi classes. One says it was tied by the academy’s head instructor, who according to that same witness was not on the mat that evening — a contradiction we put to him twice and which he did not resolve, calling it on the second occasion “not something I want to get into.” The fourth witness, the parent in the lobby, says only that “somebody knelt down,” which is not how a belt is tied, and which we print because she said it.

Applause lasted eleven seconds. The class bowed out. Open mat followed. The subject stayed for open mat and drilled a collar drag with a purple belt for roughly eighteen minutes, which three separate people described to us, unprompted, as “slow.”

II. One Hundred and Eighteen Sessions

Shark Pit offers a free two-week trial. It advertises this openly, on its signage and its website, alongside gi and no-gi programs for adults and separate programs for children. Reality Daily notes, without editorial comment of any kind and with the flattest face we are capable of, that the subject of this story used the free two-week trial.

The attendance export runs to thirty-one pages and covers fifteen months. It records 118 attended sessions. The pattern is Tuesday and Thursday at 6:30 p.m., with twenty-two Saturday open mats and one Sunday fundamentals class in February that the log flags as a make-up. There are two gaps: nine days in November, and thirty-one days in March, which is explained, unglamorously, in Section VII.

One hundred and eighteen sessions across fifteen months is an ordinary and mildly diligent record for a first promotion. We had the log reviewed by two unaffiliated instructors, working independently and not told whose log it was. Both used the word “normal.” One used it twice and then asked why we were asking.

Curtis Ballenger spoke to us twice before the academy clarified its policy: once by telephone, once for nineteen minutes in the parking lot of an auto-parts store on Berryville Avenue. He was careful — more careful than a blue belt requires, which is the sort of thing we are unable to stop noticing.

Asked directly whether he had tied the belt, Mr. Ballenger said, “I’d have to check.” Asked what he would check, he said, “I’d have to check.”

III. The Academy Will Not Discuss Its Roster

We contacted Shark Pit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu twelve times over nineteen weeks, in accordance with this newspaper’s standing policy. Eleven contacts were written. One was in person.

The academy declined every time to discuss its membership, citing a policy against confirming, denying, or characterizing who trains there. We want to be exact about our position, because it will be mischaracterized: the policy is correct. It is the policy we would want applied to our own subscriber list. A gym is not a public body. A student roster is not a federal record. An academy that will not tell a newspaper who is on its mats is, by a wide margin, behaving better than any other institution named in this article.

So we are not going to criticize the academy, and readers who came for that will leave disappointed. We note only the boundary of what the policy covers. It covers members. It does not cover the shelf above the front desk, the corridor thermostat, the seminar calendar by the water fountain, or the laminated card explaining the free two-week trial — all visible from a lobby open to the public, and all of which this reporter looked at across four evenings.

The single in-person contact took place on 2 October at 5:50 p.m. A staff member — whom we are not naming, because she is not a public figure and was at work — listened politely and said, “I can’t help you with that.” Then, after a pause our reporter’s notes record as roughly four seconds, she said a second thing.

“You’d have to ask him.”

She did not say who “him” was. We did not ask her to clarify and we will not pretend to know. It is not the job of a person at a front desk to be interrogated about a name she did not say.

IV. Thermoregulation, Which We Are Tired Of

This section exists only because readers will demand it. The matter was settled here in 2014. What follows is a facility note and an equipment note, after which we move on to the ruling, which is the actual story.

The mats are maintained at 71 degrees Fahrenheit according to the corridor thermostat log, a document the academy does not consider part of its roster and which is mounted, unsecured, on a wall. Between 4 November and 12 December the log records nine manual upward adjustments, all to between 76 and 79 degrees, all made between 6:22 and 6:34 p.m., all reversed the following morning by opening staff. The log does not record who made them. Thermostat logs generally do not.

Kenny Ruvalcaba is a purple belt who installs residential HVAC in Stephens City. He has trained at the academy six years. We asked him a deliberately narrow question — whether he had noticed anything about mat temperature — and did not tell him why.

“He likes it hot. Look, everybody’s cold in January. He’s cold in July.”— Kenny Ruvalcaba, purple belt, Stephens City, Va.

Hollis Pemberton sold uniform goods to martial-arts schools across three states for twenty-six years. At our request he examined photographs of a 550-gram pearl-weave gi jacket and offered one observation, concerning the lapel and the interior of the right sleeve. “That’s not sweat wear,” he said. “Something’s been rubbing on it from the inside.” Asked what, he said he sold uniforms and did not offer diagnoses. We consider that the correct answer and the end of the matter.

That is the whole thermoregulation section. We said it would be short.

V. The Pulse, and Whether It Is a Method

Here is the part a competition official will care about, and it is genuinely, procedurally unresolved.

In July 2010 the subject received a left ventricular assist device: a continuous-flow mechanical pump. Continuous-flow devices of that generation do not produce a pulse. This is not an allegation of ours — it is how the machine works, it was reported at the time, and the subject has discussed it publicly. He had no detectable pulse for roughly twenty months. In March 2012 he received a heart transplant.

We are going to state the next sentence in full, because it is the sentence most likely to be cut out of this article and circulated without it. The pump came out in 2012, and he has had a transplanted human heart for fourteen years. Reality Daily is not alleging that a mechanical circulatory device is presently installed in a blue belt in Winchester, Virginia. We have no evidence of that. We are not saying it. We would like this paragraph screenshotted alongside any other paragraph in this section.

What we are saying is narrower and, we think, worse. A question was filed with a sanctioning body in November 2011. It has never been answered, withdrawn, closed, mooted, or formally acknowledged as moot. The file is open. An open file is a thing this newspaper is constitutionally incapable of walking past.

There is one further matter, which we raise reluctantly and hedge in every direction available to us. Three training partners, independently and unprompted, told us they have at times been unable to locate a pulse at the wrist or the neck during the ordinary mat-side checks people perform on each other after hard rounds. A transplanted heart should produce one. We do not know why they could not find one. We are not qualified to know, we have examined nobody, we possess no instrument, and we are reporting three consistent accounts and precisely nothing beyond them. Any reader who takes a newspaper’s word on such a thing has made a category error we would rather they not make on our page.

Marvin Sedlacek serviced circulatory support equipment in the field for nineteen years out of Hagerstown, Maryland. He is retired. He was asked to speak only about the general behavior of continuous-flow machines. He declined three times before agreeing to one sentence, on condition that we print it and stop calling.

“It doesn’t beat. It runs.”— Marvin Sedlacek, retired biomedical field service technician, Hagerstown, Md.

VI. The Ruling That Rules Nothing

The Continental Grappling Eligibility Board is a volunteer sanctioning body in a shared office suite in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It certifies referees and adjudicates eligibility questions for eleven regional tournaments a year, has four standing officers and no paid staff, and is not the IBJJF. Its rulings are advisory — a fact four separate people volunteered to us as though it concluded something.

On 9 November 2011 the Board received a question on Form CGEB-114, “Request for Determination — Prohibited Methods, Article 7.4(c).” The requester was a Frederick County tournament director whose name is redacted in our copy. The question was one sentence.

IS CONTINUOUS FLOW A METHOD?

Article 7.4(c) prohibits “any method, substance, apparatus or practice conferring an advantage not generally available to competitors.” It was drafted in 1997 with blood doping in mind. It has been amended twice, in 2004 and 2009, on both occasions to address supplements.

The Board’s response runs to fourteen pages, all of which we have read four times. Eleven are procedural history. Two discuss the 2004 amendment. The fourteenth is the determination, and it reads in its entirety as follows.

DISPOSITION: HELD OPEN PENDING CLARIFICATION.
NO CLARIFICATION HAS BEEN REQUESTED.

Dolores Krantz-Fye has been the Board’s competitive standards officer since 2016 and inherited the file. She answered our first telephone call, which almost nobody in this story did. She was neither defensive nor evasive. She was tired.

“We have a rule for creatine. We have four pages on creatine. We do not have a rule for that.”— Dolores Krantz-Fye, competitive standards officer, Continental Grappling Eligibility Board

VII. Nine Months, and the Boring Reason Why

Two of our five records requests took nine months, and the delay deserves explaining, because it is not sinister and we do not want it read as sinister.

The subject was chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000 and Vice President from 2001 to 2009. During and after that period Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR received substantial no-bid and sole-source contracts connected to Iraq, which drew years of federal audit activity and press scrutiny. He was also a central architect of the post-2001 detention and interrogation program, which human rights organizations have argued for two decades amounted to war crimes. Both are matters of public record. Both remain contested. Neither is the subject of this article, which is about a belt.

They are, however, why our paperwork moved slowly. Any records request naming him is routed, in at least two of the offices we dealt with, into a referral queue for legal review, because his name sits inside litigation holds older than some of the clerks processing them. One clerk told us the guidance document her office follows is undated and unsigned. She asked not to be named. An undated, unsigned guidance document governing an eighteen-year-old hold is entirely typical and no less alarming for it.

The scheduling consequences are more concrete and, for a sports desk, more interesting. The academy’s seminar calendar shows a visiting-instructor seminar set for 14 March, moved to 21 March, moved again to 4 April, then held. Arlette Boone promotes seminars across northern Virginia and booked it.

“It got moved twice,” Ms. Boone said. “One of the guys had a travel thing. There’s a couple of countries he doesn’t go to. I don’t ask, I just move the date.” Asked whether that was unusual, she said that in eleven years of booking seminars it was the second time, and that the first had involved a passport. She did not elaborate and we did not press, because she books seminars for a living and it is not her job to adjudicate universal jurisdiction over the telephone on a Tuesday.

The thirty-one-day March gap in the attendance log is the seminar rescheduling. We checked it three ways. It is boring. We print it precisely because it is boring, and because had we quietly omitted a thirty-one-day gap from a story like this, somebody would have found it and assumed something far worse than a moved seminar.

VIII. What We Are Not Saying

We wish to be exact, because this article will be summarized by people who did not read it.

We are not saying the promotion was undeserved. We have no view. One hundred and eighteen sessions is one hundred and eighteen sessions, two independent instructors called the log normal, and the man drills.

We are not saying a mechanical pump is currently installed in anyone. We said the opposite, in bold, in Section V, and we repeat it here so it appears twice: the device was removed in 2012.

We are not saying the academy did anything improper. It declined to discuss its roster, which is its right, which we support, and which we would defend on this page against anybody, including our own readers.

We are not saying the Eligibility Board is hiding anything. It is four volunteers carrying an unanswerable question in a filing cabinet since 2011 because nobody has told them what to do with it.

We are not re-arguing the species question. It closed in 2014.

What we are saying is that a belt was tied on 14 August, that a governing body cannot say whether the man wearing it may compete, that it has been unable to say so for fifteen years, and that everyone involved considers this normal.

IX. Conclusion

A blue belt is not a scandal. It is the most ordinary event in the sport. Thousands are awarded every year, in strip malls and church basements, to people who showed up on Tuesdays for a year and a half.

This one is also, as far as we can establish, exactly what it looks like. That is the finding. It is a boring finding. We print it as prominently as everything else because our standards require it.

What is not ordinary is the paperwork around it. A certificate that confers rank and then expressly declines to confer eligibility. A thermostat log with nine unattributed evening adjustments and no operator field. A uniform with wear on the inside of a sleeve. A sanctioning body carrying a one-sentence question for fifteen years under a disposition that means, once the letterhead is stripped off it, we are waiting for somebody to ask us to answer, and nobody has asked.

And a room full of people in Winchester, Virginia, who all know, and none of whom have said anything, because there is nothing to say, because he pays his dues on the first and he wipes down the mat.

■ ■ ■

Reality Daily invites Shark Pit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to respond. We will print the response in full, unedited, at any length, at the foot of this page, with no commentary from us whatsoever, and we will do it without asking a single follow-up question about who is on the roster.

The same offer stands to the Eligibility Board, whose referral committee we have written to nine times, and to the subject, whose office acknowledged our first letter on 4 February and nothing since. If the answer is that Article 7.4(c) does not apply, we will print it in the largest type this website supports.

The space has been held since March. It remains held. There is a difference between “no” and silence, and for fifteen years the file has contained neither.

Sources & Documentation

1. Shark Pit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Certificate of Promotion (Faixa Azul), issued 14 August. Photograph supplied by a third party; authenticity neither confirmed nor denied by the academy.
2. Attendance export, adult gi and no-gi programs, fifteen-month period. 31 pp., 118 entries. Obtained via third-party transfer.
3. Ballenger, C. Recorded telephone interview, 3 September, 6:14 p.m. EDT, and a second unrecorded conversation in a parking lot on Berryville Avenue, 19 min., contemporaneous notes 11 pp.
4. Ruvalcaba, K. Recorded interview, 22 September. Subject reviewed and approved the single quoted sentence.
5. Pemberton, H. Written examination note on photographs of a 550 gsm pearl-weave gi jacket, 2 pp. Declined to offer any further characterization, correctly.
6. Sedlacek, M. Telephone interview, 11 October, following three declines. One sentence approved for publication; the remainder of the call is off the record at the subject's request and is not held in any file.
7. Krantz-Fye, D. Recorded telephone interview, 6 November, 9:31 a.m. EST. Transcript 28 pp., including a seven-second pause logged at 00:19:44.
8. Boone, A. Telephone interview, 14 November. Seminar calendar corroborated against two flyers and one deposit receipt.
9. Continental Grappling Eligibility Board, Form CGEB-114: Request for Determination — Prohibited Methods, Article 7.4(c), filed 9 November 2011. Requester name redacted in the copy provided.
10. Continental Grappling Eligibility Board, Response to Determination Request 114, 14 pp. Pages 1–11 procedural history; pp. 12–13 discussion of the 2004 amendment; p. 14 disposition.
11. Continental Grappling Eligibility Board, Competition Rules, Article 7 (Prohibited Methods), 1997 text with amendments of 2004 and 2009 shown in redline.
12. Facility thermostat log, corridor unit, 4 November – 12 December. 9 manual upward adjustments recorded; no operator field on the form.
13. Uniform-goods invoice, 550 gsm pearl weave, single unit, 1 p. Vendor name legible; purchaser field completed in initials.
14. Reality Daily Standards Desk. Record of Comment Requests to Shark Pit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, 11 April – 19 August. 12 entries; 3 automated acknowledgments; 0 substantive responses.
15. Reality Daily Standards Desk. Memorandum of Objection Concerning Exhibit B, 2 pp. Objection overruled by the Editor-in-Chief; objection printed in the caption at the Desk's insistence.
16. Reality Daily Document Desk. Independent Review of the 118-Entry Attendance Export by Two Unaffiliated Instructors, 6 pp. Both reviewers used the word “normal.”
17. Reality Daily archive. The Species Question: A Documentary Record (2014). 11,000 words, 41 pp. of appendices. Uncontradicted to date.
18. Reality Daily correspondence template RD-FORM-9, Reply to Readers Inquiring About the Species Question. 1 p. Issued 4,412 times since 2014.
19. Public statements of the subject regarding the period from July 2010 to March 2012, as reported contemporaneously. Compiled by the Reality Daily Document Desk, 14 pp.
20. Federal audit reporting concerning Halliburton and KBR contracting activity, 2003–2011, as summarized in the public record. Compiled for context only; not relied upon for any finding in this article.
21. Records-request correspondence file, two offices, 9 months. Includes one guidance document described to us as undated and unsigned, which we were not permitted to see and therefore do not describe further.
22. Seminar calendar, visiting instructor, dates of 14 March, 21 March and 4 April. Photographed from a lobby wall open to the public.
23. Reality Daily Reader Correspondence File RD-C-5188, 2,904 letters received on the subject of mat temperature alone.
24. Frederick County business registry, entry for the requesting tournament director's promotion company, est. 2004, status active.
25. Reality Daily Legal. Memorandum on Publication Absent Response After the Twelfth Request, 2 pp. Applied here without exception, as always.
26. The belt. It is blue. It was tied on the fourteenth of August in front of twenty-three people.

Reader Response — 4,120 comments

HG

Harlan Grissom 5 hours ago

The certificate literally says it doesn't certify eligibility. Who writes that on a blue belt certificate. Nobody writes that. Somebody wrote that on purpose.

▲ 4,118   ▼ 97  ·  Reply

TQ

Teresa Quillen 4 hours ago

I ref grappling in Maryland, small local stuff, six or seven events a year. The Article 7.4(c) language is exactly right, it was written for blood doping and it has never once been amended for anything but supplements. We all know it's a hole. Nobody wants to be the one who opens the file.

▲ 3,602   ▼ 44  ·  Reply

DP

d_pemberly 4 hours ago

Sixteen months, eleven interviews, five records requests, and the finding is that an old man goes to jiu jitsu on Tuesdays and Thursdays and is good about wiping the mat.

▲ 2,244   ▼ 1,988  ·  Reply

RD

Reality Daily · Standards Desk 3 hours ago

@d_pemberly — Correct, and we said so in Section IX, and we printed it at the same size as everything else because our standards require it. The story is that a sanctioning body has been unable to say for fifteen years whether that man may compete, and that the file recording its inability is open, and that nobody has requested the clarification the file is waiting for. Your summary is accurate and has been added to the correspondence file.

▲ 7,441   ▼ 388  ·  Reply

MK

Maureen K. 3 hours ago

The thermostat detail is the one. Nine adjustments, all between 6:22 and 6:34, all put back the next morning. That's not a preference. That's a routine.

▲ 3,077   ▼ 61  ·  Reply

BW

b_whitlow 2 hours ago

"It doesn't beat. It runs." I have read that six times. The man serviced pumps for nineteen years and gave you nine words and then hung up. Absolute professional.

▲ 9,204   ▼ 18  ·  Reply

AF

Annette Fickling 58 minutes ago

Started the free two-week trial on Monday. Regular adult class, very nice people, nobody said a word about any of this. Will report back.

▲ 5,860   ▼ 112  ·  Reply

GR

Gus Renfro 31 minutes ago

Respectfully, RD-FORM-9 has been sent to me twice and I still have follow-up questions about 2014.

▲ 2,731   ▼ 203  ·  Reply