Eight-year-old Benjamin Tolentino making a name for himself in wrestling

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Hollister’s Benjamin Tolentino has won over 20 gold medals in wrestling tournaments this year and has a 63-9 record in sanctioned matches. He won Grand Champion of the Santa Clara Valley Wrestling Association and took first place at both the California State Freestyle Championships and Rocky Mountain National in Las Vegas.  

It’s quite a series of accomplishments, but what Tolentino really wants to talk about is the “Rumble in Reno,” the tournament in which one opponent was a poor enough sport to punch him in the head. He brings it up a lot during his interview with BenitoLink—but, to be fair, he is only eight years old, and things like that tend to stand out at that age.

“I don’t know why he did that,” Tolentino said. “He got mad because I was beating him. He went out of bounds and the referee was talking to him. Then he started punching and kicking me in the face. I started to get a little frustrated, but I beat him, and I won a gold medal, which made me happy.”

There is a photo of Tolentino jumping with joy next to his defeated opponent that harks back to the famous shot of Muhammad Ali taunting a supine Sonny Liston as he shouts, “Get up and fight, sucker!” The look on Tolentino’s face can only be described as “sweet victory.”

Tolentino first became interested in jiu-jitsu after watching a video of his grandfather, Keith Riddle,  competing in the martial art. He started training at four and a half, and his mother, Shae Tolentino, said it immediately became his passion. 

“Ever since he saw the video, he has been nonstop,” said Shae. “But he couldn’t start competing until he was six years old. The first tournament we put him in was a state championship. He lost two in a row and was immediately eliminated. We thought we had messed up.”

Far from being discouraged, Tolentino’s enthusiasm grew. As they drove home from the loss, his grandmother told him, “You don’t have to do this anymore.” He replied, “Are you kidding me? This was the best day of my life!”

Riddle began training with Tolentino at Hollister Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and described his grandson as a natural in both jiu-jitsu and wrestling. Coach Jose Leon, owner of the martial arts school, said Tolentino’s ability to work hard distinguishes him. 

“Ben has a lot of talent in listening and being coachable,” he said. “Once you get the listening skills down, everything else is easy, and they can start developing motor skills. There’s a saying: ‘Embrace the grind. You develop a pattern for them—if they embrace it, they will hopefully carry it on later in life.”

Riddle said that they constantly tell Tolentino that it’s not his talent but his ability to work harder than the other person because the other person is learning the same moves he’s learning. 

“So the difference is in how much you put into it,” he said. “Ben seems like he wants to be here and is happy to be here. He applies what he learns, and he just competes very well.”

Leon said that Tolentino was quiet and timid when he first started training, but as started getting used to competing, he became less emotional and more comfortable with the sport.

“He’s just relaxed,” Leon said. “He knows what to do. There are ups and downs because he competes so much, but his consistency makes the difference.”

Riddle said he saw Tolentino’s consistency and training on display at a recent tournament in Stockton, where he faced an opponent he had lost to twice before.

“He was all over the kid,” Riddle said. “He could have submitted multiple times, but finally, he got the kid on his back and choked him out. The kid never had a dominant position on Ben. I really saw how he had grown in that moment.”

The adult-sized trophies he has been winning easily overshadow the 46-pound Tolentino, but he proudly talks about each one: a bear statuette he got from the state championships (“I had some pretty good matches at that one. The last kid scored a couple of points on me, but I won 18-8”), a massive Triple Crown trophy  (“I had to win three tournaments to get this one.”) and a belt that will take him at least a decade to grow into from Rumble in Reno (”That’s the one where the kid kicked me in the face.”). 

Like any star athlete, Tolentino already has a younger competitor nipping at his heels: six-year-old Jesse “Baby Yoda” Santiago, who started training when he was four. Santiago has participated in 17 tournaments so far this year and recently won the Kid’s Pan Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation Championship in Florida, the biggest tournament in the world for his age group. 

“He wants to go to every tournament he hears about,” said his father, Rich Santiago. “If he thinks he’s not signed up, he gets angry. It has been three months since he started competing, and since then, it has been nonstop.”

Leon gave Santiago his nickname because at first, he would come into the studio and sit cross-legged, pretending to meditate. Since then, he said, Santiago has become perhaps the strongest six-year-old in the world at the gray belt level.

“I think he has a bright future,” Leon said. You don’t have to coach him very much and he understands grappling on his own. He’s just a natural at it.”

Santiago said he defeated his four competitors at the Pan Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championship with a “body triangle,” a maneuver in which he throws his leg over his opponent and squeezes them like a boa constrictor. 

“I was proud of myself and excited,” he said. “I liked pinning the kids and getting the points. In my next tournament, I am going to get rid of all the kids one by one.”

Santiago and Tolentino spar frequently, and they share the same dream: to compete at the Olympics someday.

“I loved watching the track running,” Tolentino said. “And then I watched the freestyle wrestling and I learned a lot of stuff. I want to keep wrestling and go to Fresno State one day.”

Until then, he will keep up an exhaustive schedule of practices, including twice-weekly trips to UFC fighter Daniel Cormier’s gym in Fresno and signing up for as many tournaments as he can, all with the encouragement of his family.

“The sky’s the limit,” said Shae. “I’m the Uber, just taking him to accomplish his dreams. His dad and I tell him, ‘If you give 110% on the mats, we’ll give 200% to get you where you want to go.”

Follow Tolentino’s tournaments on the Hollister Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu’s Instagram page.

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