With a 52-athlete fight card featuring both legendary well-knowns and carefully curated next-gens, a tripled purse and a venue with a 1,000-spectator capacity, Jeff Curran knows his next invitational will pack plenty of thrills.
JCI 4: Night of Champions will bring 26 submission-only Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu matches to the mat at The MAC on Ridgefield Court in Crystal Lake Saturday, Sept. 19. Doors will open at 4 p.m., the pre-show starts at 5 p.m., and the livestreamed matches, including six title bouts, begin at 6 p.m., said Curran, a former Ultimate Fighting Championship veteran, fifth-degree BJJ black belt and professor of the Curran Jiu-Jitsu Academy in Crystal Lake.
👉 Tickets and other details, including the full fight card, are available at jcinvitational.com.
Curran — whose career now includes running nationwide camps and retreats as well as starring in and producing a YouTube series called “The Martial Life” — said he is excited about all of the pairings he has built from the hundreds of athletes who have applied from the U.S. and abroad since he started his invitational in 2025. But he’s especially excited about adding his first international competitor, as well as the return of a young, new UFC BJJ competitor.
“We’re building more than an event,” Curran said. “We’re building a championship platform where the best competitors in the world want to compete.”
JCI 4 will feature Shooto Watanabe of Japan against local fighter Joey Diehl for the bantamweight title. Watanabe trains in the greater Tokyo area and is an athlete with DEEP Japan, an organization akin to a feeder for UFC.
Among the youngest to step onto the JCI mat this September will be Raphael “Rafa” Ferreira of Draper, Utah, who, at age 5, was not especially enamored with his new Jiu-Jitsu lessons. By age 18, though, he’d become a UFC Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competitor who won by submission in his debut professional match-up April 2. He then competed in JCI 3 in May, claiming the featherweight title, which he will defend this September, about a month after his 19th birthday.
