Forty Minutes and a Cashier's Check at Las Vegas Combat Academy

Alex Cuevas arrives at Las Vegas Combat Academy dressed for the occasion.

"And today we're doing no-gi, therefore, I'm all no-gi'd up."

Alex, you may remember, has some history with no-gi. He went in anyway.

The gym belongs to Donavin Britt. He's been part of it since 2002 and has run it since 2008. It's about 10,000 square feet of Krav Maga, jiu-jitsu, MMA, Muay Thai, and boxing, plus a shoot house for home-invasion training, which is not a sentence I get to type about most gyms (or honestly anything ever).

The day Alex visited, Donavin had just signed his name to 10 more years in the building. How he got that building in the first place starts with a white box he couldn't stop wondering about.

The White Box Up the Street

Donavin's school used to be up the street. For about three years, he drove past the building that's now his gym.

"I'd always see this big white box sitting here, and it had a bunch of Chinese writing on the outside of it. And I'm like, what the hell is going on in there? But I never see any cars there."

The answer walked into class one day.

One of his clients was a real estate broker, and he knew the building. Two guys had been trying to sell it for a long time.

The broker made a call. Somebody was over there right now. Donavin went by.

The first one was a five and five. This time, he says, the building's owners had thought about going a different direction. Then they came around: "you guys have been with us 10 years. We'll stay with you guys."

People ask him about a second location. He doesn't see it.

"It's hard to imagine doing that, to be honest with you, just because I know what it takes to run this place."

Everybody Got It in 2008

Before the crash, Donavin had other businesses. He had smoothie bars, a concept brought in from Canada with locations around the country, and he was in real estate.

The smoothie bars failed. The real estate crashed. So it goes.

What he had left was the gym. He'd trained there since 2002 and apprenticed under its owner, his old instructor. He tells the next part two ways in the same sit-down.

The first version is a handover.

"Then my old instructor, I apprenticed under him for six years, and then I took over the gym, bought the gym from him, and then my vision was a little bit different."

The vision was multiple styles, taught at a level he calls higher than average.

Our guide to buying a gym covers the paperwork side of a handover like this.

The second version is about money, or the lack of it.

"So with the last $400 or $500 in my pocket, I started what would become Las Vegas Combat Academy. And it was kind of my way of saying [two words, and neither of them was 'thanks'] to the universe going, I'm not dead."

You can probably fill in those two words. The episode runs unbleeped, if you want to check your work.

He never wanted to teach. Years earlier, when his instructor told him he'd be a good coach, Donavin's answer was "for what?" He apprenticed anyway.

"Didn't pay me a dime, and I didn't want a dime. I just learned how to teach."

He didn't want a kids program either, at least at first, and he'll tell you exactly what he thinks of that now.

"I didn't even have a kids program. I mean, I didn't want a kids program, which is stupid, right? But I was like, I don't want to teach kids. I'm going to teach adults how to survive."

That was 2008.

"And by the way, I didn't want to become an instructor. That wasn't my... that wasn't my goal. But it was the one skill set that I had at the moment."

Forty Minutes

At some point, Donavin split from his then business partner.

The episode doesn't say what year. What he needed next was money for a build-out, and what he had was one millionaire client.

They'd known each other four years. Donavin had never asked him for anything. He called him up.

"I said, hey, man, I need a favor. And he's like, okay, this ought to be good."

It was good. Donavin told him he needed money, and the client laughed and asked why he was calling him, of all people.

"I'm like, you're my only millionaire client. So he starts laughing. He goes, well, how much do you need? And I said, like 80,000 to just build out and the whole bit."

The client asked where he was. At the gym, Donavin said. The client said he'd be there in about 40 minutes.

Donavin figured they were going to sit down and talk it over.

"Comes in, hands me an envelope with a cashier's check for 80,000. He goes, I got to go on vacation."

Then the man went on vacation. They worked out the details when he got back. Donavin says he paid him back in about 15 months, and that the whole thing ran on his word.

Later, Donavin asked him why he'd done it.

The client had a specific day in mind. Donavin was in the dentist's chair getting a wisdom tooth pulled. The instructor who was supposed to cover his class called to say he'd been in a car wreck.

Nobody else could teach.

"So I tell the dentist, pack my gum with some gauze. I got to go teach."

He got out of the chair and went to teach.

The millionaire was in that class.

An Admin in a Special Operations Unit

Donavin found Krav Maga in the Army, cross-training in the mornings with Israeli soldiers at his post.

"I was an admin. I was an admin in a special operations unit."

None of the physical stuff carried over to what he teaches now. The mentality did.

He also spent 10 years in loss prevention, starting in plain clothes in Oakland grocery stores. He says he got into at least one fight a day.

COVID shut him down later, along with everyone else, and he says it didn't rattle him much.

"Shut up. Suck it up. Find a way. And if there's no way, we'll make a way."

The Krav Maga School That Fights

Donavin never planned to coach fighters either.

Then one of his instructors decided he wanted to fight MMA and told Donavin he didn't want anybody else in his corner.

So Donavin went and learned how. He studied under Kirian Fitzgibbons at Combat Sports Academy in the Bay Area. Dewey Cooper helped him figure out how to run a program and a fight camp.

He's cornered fighters in Bellator and the UFC since. In February 2025, he was in Riyadh for UFC Fight Night, Adesanya vs Imavov. The next part, he's careful to say, is as far as he knows.

"So I, myself and Kirian, as far as I know, Coach K and myself, were the only Krav Maga-based instructors to ever corner in the UFC. It was me and him."

Krav Maga's ground game at blue belt, he says, is white-belt jiu-jitsu. So his students go learn it.

"You cannot get a blue belt from me in Krav Maga unless you wear at least a three-stripe white belt in jiu-jitsu. You can't even test."

Fighters get one condition.

"I will not train a fighter who does not have a job. Not because he can't pay me. I don't take any money from my fighters anyway."

He also teaches the opposite of fighting, and treats it as the same subject.

If a drunk guy at the bar is running his mouth, Donavin's advice to his students is to buy him a beer. He's done it himself, two Heinekens, one of them for the loud guy.

"By the end of the night, his arms around me singing Sweet Caroline and I don't have to punch his ass and everybody's good."

Is that self-defense? He asks it himself and answers it in the same breath: yes, it's just a different tactic.

Everybody Bows Together

There was a stretch when the gym split into camps by discipline.

"I don't want the gym to become, and I let this happen before, and it was my fault. Jiu-jitsu guys are doing this. The Muay Thai guys are doing that... We all warm up together. Everybody get your shit. We warm up together. Then you disperse to your thing."

At the end of the night, he calls them all back.

"We bow together. Jiu-jitsu guys go back and finish their last half-hour roll every night. That's how it is."

People tend to stay, too. Donavin says nobody on his staff has been with him less than 10 years.

Someone Who Looks Like Them

Martial arts matter to Donavin culturally. In America, he points out, a lot of the kickboxing champions back in the day were Black. And the Black Panther Party started in the Bay Area, where as a high schooler he watched Wally Jay's Small Circle Jujitsu in Alameda.

"One of the big tenets of the Black Panther Party was being able to defend yourself. So a lot of black people enrolled in martial arts schools... So there's definitely that history there. And that's important to me culturally."

Not long ago, a couple came to Las Vegas for their 40th wedding anniversary. The husband had seen Donavin's Krav Maga on the internet and wanted to come say hello.

"But they come in here, and they've got tears in their eyes, and they're hugging me, because they've never seen anybody who looks like me doing the things that I'm doing."

Donavin is clear about what that means and what it doesn't.

"And so it is not because I'm black I'm better than anyone. It has nothing to do with it."

He says he has a responsibility "to do it right." What he wants is for somebody younger to see it.

"I can grow up and coach in the UFC. I can build champions, too, or I can become one myself, because they saw someone who looks like them do it."

Still Here

A lot of his members work in Las Vegas tourism. When that industry has a bad stretch, the gym feels it.

"This gym saved our life, man. It saved my family's life and provides food, and it is sometimes frustrating."

Owning a gym, he says, is a lot of long nights.