MARINA DEL REY, CA — Surfside Jiu-Jitsu Academy, an 18-year-old school with four black belt Worlds medalists in its lineage, has quietly rearranged its front-room medal wall this week to center a framed 8x10 photograph of 52-year-old purple belt Marcus Delanoy receiving a silver medal in the three-competitor Master 4 Purple Light division at the IBJJF Orange Coast Spring Open.
Delanoy, a 14-year practitioner and former syndicated sitcom lead best known for his 2006-2011 run as bumbling uncle ‘Chip Laramie’ on ABC’s ‘Don’t Ask The Accountant,’ lost his opening match by an advantage, received an automatic silver via the bracket’s single-elimination three-man format, and was photographed on the podium between a gold medalist named Dennis and an open mat.
The photo now occupies the center panel of Surfside’s lineage wall, a 22-foot mahogany installation that previously displayed the gym’s four black belt World Championship medals in chronological order. Those four medals have been relocated to the rear hallway leading to the staff bathroom, a corridor that owner and head professor Rafael ‘Rafa’ Zepeda acknowledged in a statement Tuesday ‘is, dimensionally, shorter than the lineage wall, but still technically wall space.’
The four demoted medalists — brown-belt-Worlds-runner-up-turned-black-belt-bronze Luana Almeida, No-Gi Worlds silver medalist Caio Bernardes, Masters 1 Worlds gold medalist Teodoro ‘Teo’ Miranda, and two-time Pan Ams gold medalist Kimi Watanabe — were notified of the rearrangement via a group text sent at 11:47 p.m. Sunday. Each of the four has since sent a private Instagram DM to Zepeda’s personal account. All four DMs have been marked ‘Seen.’ None have been replied to.
Asked during a Monday morning interview on the academy’s front steps why Delanoy’s silver medal in a three-person bracket had been elevated above four actual World Championships, Zepeda paused, adjusted his gi collar, and explained that the silver ‘represents a kind of mainstream legitimacy that Luana, Caio, Teo, and Kimi, for all their podium performances over the last eleven years, never quite delivered for this academy.’
Zepeda added that Delanoy’s competition result had already generated ‘a significant, measurable return on visibility,’ citing an internal intake report showing a 340 percent week-over-week spike in intro-class inquiries, 94 percent of which were submitted by individuals who had never trained any martial art and who listed, in the open-text field of the online form, the phrase ‘loved that one show’ or minor variations thereof.
‘We are not in the medal business,’ Zepeda said. ‘We are in the story business. And Marcus’s story — Emmy-nominated supporting actor from a beloved family-hour sitcom returns to the mats after a decade to bring home hardware — that’s a story. Kimi winning Pan Ams twice in the same division is, with respect to Kimi, a result.’
Delanoy, reached by phone Tuesday afternoon at his home in Pacific Palisades, said he was ‘humbled and a little embarrassed’ by the wall rearrangement and that he had ‘offered multiple times’ to have the photograph moved to a less prominent location, such as ‘the kids’ area, the parents’ viewing bench, or frankly the break room fridge.’ Zepeda, when presented with these offers, reportedly declined all three, stating that ‘the kids need to see what’s possible.’
As a gesture of goodwill following his silver medal, Delanoy offered the academy unlimited free seminars on ‘performance under pressure, audition preparation, and the art of showing up.’ Zepeda accepted the offer within four minutes. The first seminar, scheduled for May 3, is already sold out at $85 per attendee, with Delanoy receiving 60 percent of the door and Surfside receiving 40 percent and the naming rights to the seminar series, which has been titled ‘The Chip Laramie Method.’
In the three weeks following his silver medal finish, Delanoy has entered and subsequently withdrawn from three additional IBJJF opens, citing in order a pulled left lat, a scheduling conflict with a pilot table read, and ‘respect for the division, which deserves my full presence, and right now my presence is fractured.’ Each withdrawal was announced on Delanoy’s personal Instagram and each post was reposted to the Surfside Jiu-Jitsu account within nine minutes, captioned ‘Champion mindset. 👑’
A review of the academy’s Instagram archive reveals that none of the four displaced black belt medalists have been tagged in a Surfside post since the rearrangement. Kimi Watanabe’s Pan Ams double-gold post from March 2024, which was pinned to the top of the academy’s feed for fourteen months, was unpinned on Sunday evening at approximately 11:52 p.m., or five minutes after the group text went out.
Zepeda has also commissioned a new mural for the front reception area, to be painted by a Culver City artist whose previous work includes the lobby of a boutique cycling studio. The mural, according to leaked sketches, depicts Delanoy in a triumphant posture on a podium, with four smaller, slightly shadowed figures standing behind him holding what appear to be medals but may also be sandwiches. Zepeda has declined to confirm whether the figures are meant to represent the academy’s four black belt World medalists or ‘just, like, vibes.’
Luana Almeida, reached via a phone number provided by a mutual training partner, confirmed she has not yet decided whether to continue training at Surfside. Asked if the bathroom-hallway placement of her 2022 Worlds bronze medal bothered her, Almeida laughed for approximately eleven seconds and then said, ‘It’s fine. The hallway gets a lot of foot traffic. Different demographic, obviously. But traffic.’
At press time, Zepeda was in negotiations with Delanoy’s agent regarding a potential ‘Chip Laramie Signature Gi’ collaboration, to be sold exclusively through the academy’s pro shop at a 38 percent markup over standard gi pricing, with Delanoy’s likeness embroidered on the lapel and the phrase ‘Don’t Ask Me, Ask The Accountant’ stitched on the inner liner. The academy’s four black belt World medalists have, as of this writing, not been consulted on the project, but Zepeda has assured them via a follow-up group text that they ‘will absolutely get first dibs on the sample run, once we have Marcus’s approval on the collar stitching.’