http://olympics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/one-way-of-protesting-a-referees-decision/
Ángel Valodia Matos, 31, charged at the referee, Chakir Chelbat of Sweden, after Chelbat disqualified him for taking too long in an injury timeout. Matos angrily pushed another judge, ran at Chelbat and kicked him, and spit on the mat as he was grabbed and ushered out of the arena by security.
Filmed a few years ago, when he’d just become the heavyweight champion in the UFC. This is the weirdest theing I’ve seen all week.
Tim has a reputation for being a shithead but he comes off as a fairly nice guy in this clip. I think I’m going to have to try a grasshopper. Sounds pretty tasty!
Also, observe how awkward it is when he tries to explain a “submission hold” to his date. Fighting isn’t good first-date conversation material, and I’ve noticed most girls (at least where I live) don’t seem to find it sexy at all. At least not as a subject of conversation.
Here is your Moist Towelette - a strong napkin-size towelette, moistened with a lemon-scented cleansing lotion.
Cleans and refreshes when soap and water are not available.
Directions: Tear open packet and use. Dries in seconds, leaving skin soft and smooth.
I remember this food being such a godsend. My father would come home with it in that bucket, and I knew the sweet, crunchy coleslaw, and the perfectly rendered mashed potatoes and gravy were not far off. And the crunchy, greasy chicken? Delicious!
The people at the restaurant were exceedingly friendly and prompt. I’m used to eating fast food at Subway, where I’m pretty sure employees suffer the same instruments normally reserved for cattle (whip, electric prodding device) in the break room, so as not to alarm the customers. Subway’s food might be healthier, but the service is slow and so morose that I’ve actually started to avoid eating there.
I went around a corner to the dining area of this popular fried chicken eatery, and sat at one of the booths. I got about three bites into my coleslaw (just as awesome as I remember it) when I noticed that hard-to-describe odor that you get when people don’t wash themselves properly for more than a day or two, and they sit in one place for a while, leaving behind what I assume to be some kind of puddle, slurry, amalgamate, solution, or sedimentary deposit. That metallic, almost-urine butt-sweat smell. Did you ever go head first on your belly down a slide as a kid? At the playground? I moved to a different table, and the smell wasn’t as bad.
The chicken was just as greasy and crunchy as I remember it being, but I have no taste for it anymore. It’s too salty and it’s alarmingly tender, sloughing off the bones with almost no effort at all. An elderly person could gum this chicken from its bones, were it not for the frialated exoskeleton, easily the most firm part of the entire entree.
There was also a tube of “buttery spread,” probably meant for the biscuit, but the biscuit, unadorned, contained probably an entire stick of butter already. I wondered at the kind of person who would want to add more lard to this already sodden confection. At some point, you might as well just put it into a cup and spoon it out, like a milkshake.
On his way out to a smoke break, an employee asked me “how is everything?” I’m telling you, the service at this place was great. I told him good, and sporked mashed potatoes into my waiting maw. These had appeared on my plastic serving tray, plopped neatly in their divider, still spherical, the way ice cream scoops are in cartoons, with a surfeit of gravy cascading down the sides of it. These, also, were as delicious as I remember them.
After I finished, I tried to read a book for a while, but the girl who’d sold me my dinner was busy pushing chairs around on the tiled floor as she cleaned, producing an uneven clatter at intervals just long enough where I’d relax and settle in before she started with the next chair. I got up and made for the door. She beamed at me.
“You can stay and read if you want, it’s no problem!” she said. I told her it’s okay, and she thanked me and told me to have a good night.
Okay, I’m going to tell you a story about softball. Don’t roll your eyes, this is an awesome story about softball.
It’s the last game of the season in Division II playoffs. Sara Tucholsky takes the bat for the last time in her college career. She’s a senior, a perennial bench-warmer who in her four years has never hit a home run. In fact, she’s only hit the ball 3 times in her last thirty-four times at bat. Against all odds, she slams it over the fence with two runners on the bases, earning a three-run homerun!
As Tucholsky rounds the first base, though, it all goes to hell. Her right ACL gives out and she collapses in agony, unable even to drag herself to the next base. The umpires rule that if she can’t round the bases, they’ll have to put a replacement on first and record her only homerun as a two-run single instead. And her teammates can’t help her.
This is where it gets awesome: The other team’s star slugger, Mallory Holtman, offers to help Tucholsky around the bases. It turns out there’s no rule against getting help from the opposite team, so Holtman and one of her teammates literally carry Tucholsky around the infield, dipping her so she can touch each base and then the home plate with her tippy toes. And this isn’t just a token of pity toward an opponent bound to lose: Tucholsky’s team ends up winning by two runs.
Reading this story, I got a lump in my throat. While I like to think of myself as a good sportsman, I don’t think I am anywhere near this generous to my opponents. I like to win. This story made me feel like a punk.
What about you? Is this the mentality you bring to competition? Are you even this selfless toward your own teammates during circuit training? Does this story at all reflect or resemble the frame of mind you are in when you compete?
As this story shows, the quality of your character is way more important than your competitive record. This isn’t some corny Disney parable where I’m asking you to lose the real battle and win the spiritual one. Even a selfish competitor must realize: history celebrates the honorable fighter, not the cutthroat.
There’s a lot of bad sportsmanship in competitive jiu jitsu and in MMA. The Tito Ortiz “You ain’t trying if you ain’t cheating” philosophy would demand the competitor celebrate Tucholsky’s fall, or maybe even try to drop bricks on her. If Tito were the coach of the opposing team, he would have been jumping for joy in the dugout, cheering his opponent’s misfortune. That’s why Tito is a clown. No matter how well he fights, he’s a poor ambassador for our sport. He won’t be remembered as a great fighter, even if he is a successful one.
Also, he is dating an orange woman who looks almost exactly like a rubber ducky.
(Read the ESPN Story here. Via his awesomeness himself, Ze Frank)
This segment aired on the supposedly enlightened NPR last week, including my local NPR station. I would summarize the infuriating displays of ignorance into a couple of bullet points, but there’s not a sentence in this article that’s free of arrogance, glib assumption, or just plain misinformation. The author even tries to imply that boxing is less violent because “the idea in boxing, which has always styled itself as “the sweet science,” is not to get hit.”
Feel free to hit up the “questions and comments” link in the top-right of that page.
I heard about this segment because my boss brought it up at lunch, and found myself checking off the same old checklist: MMA is less dangerous than boxing and pro football, there’s never been a death in a sanctioned event, etc. The difference between MMA as practiced today and its image in the eyes the public at large is pretty shocking.
On one hand, lots of us complain about what a yahoo the average MMA fan is. But what if more evolved people understood how complex the sport is, and how honorable most of its fighters are? MMA needs better evangelism.
(Bonus: See Dana White verbally jiu-jitsu Bill O’Reilley in a similar segment last year)
In a recent study, some scientists strapped jazz pianists into an MRI and found that the brain suppresses its self-criticism during improvisation and kicks the part that does creativity into overdrive.
The study suggests that the region of the brain that does rational thought (the prefrontal cortex) is an angry little fascist that regulates - or more to the point, inhibits - the rest of the brain. I imagine the prefrontal cortex as a stony-faced little nun who is always sad and angry with you no matter how hard you try (I went to a Catholic school for three years). That’s why alcohol makes you feel more relaxed and less self-conscious before it turns you into a drooling idiot; the first part of your brain that gets shut down is that mean little nun.
Last week I watched Choke, the 1995 documentary about the Vale Tudo Fighting Championship from the same year. In the opening scenes of the movie, Rickson Gracie says this about jiu jitsu:
The most interesting aspect of jiu jitsu is the sensibility of the opponent, the sense of touch, the weight, the momentum, the transition from one movement to another. That’s the amazing thing about it.
You must allow yourself to go as like an automatic pilot. You don’t know exactly where you’re going until the movement happens. Because you cannot anticipate what’s going to happen. You must allow yourself to be in a zero point, in a neutral point and be relaxed and connected with the variations. You pretty much flow with the go. This is a point beyond the knowledge. It’s years and years of playing around, giving this kind of sensibility.
This short passage cuts to the essence of what’s unique about jiu jitsu among other martial arts, including other grappling arts.
I’m not a spiritual person. What most people see as the spiritual or mystical side of martial arts is, for me, a matter of getting in touch with the part of yourself that lies beyond the oppressive little nun, which is to say, to tap 99% of your true potential. The ability to do this is what results in the “point beyond the knowledge” - the ability to flow, to zen out, to find the center, to go on autopilot.
Improvisation and the hard path to zen
Think about it: When you learn a new technique, you’ll follow its alien movement one step at a time. If you keep drilling it after class, you’ll eventually perform the move without having to think too much about the details at all. Then, one day, you might even be able to perform the technique live, against a resisting partner! Still later, you’ll find yourself performing technique after technique before you even knew you were going to do them. An experienced athlete performs the most complicated techniques as a matter of habit, or as Rickson would say, on automatic pilot. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
By itself, this isn’t all that interesting: you already do it in your everyday life. Say, when you come home with a bag full of groceries and you have to unlock your front door. You might hold the screen door open with your foot while you find the key with one hand, switch the groceries over, and unlock the other door with the other hand. The balance and precision required to do this everyday task are no more demanding than those required, say, for an arm bar from the guard.
The only substantial difference between unlocking your front door and doing an arm bar is that the arm bar is new and unfamiliar. Making it familiar is just a matter of practice.
Dismissing the Inner Fascist
But for most of us, that mean little nun is a huge obstacle to getting that work done. It’s not so much that we’re lazy (although that’s obviously a factor as well) as that we’re afraid of looking awkward, of messing up. The good news is you’re expected to mess up when you start out. The only way to get over the hump is to keep trying new stuff until you get it right. No one should ever be embarrassed to try something new and fall on their face. I have fallen on my face, literally, time and time again in training. It’s all part of the journey.
You should never be embarrassed to try a new technique and fail, or to repeatedly drill even the simplest techniques over and over again. These are the hallmarks of a future black belt in training. When I watch new guys train, I’m not interested in how naturally talented they are. We’ve all seen a million talented guys get frustrated the first time they can’t do something right away and eventually quit. What’s way more inspiring is the guy who sucked at something to start with, but kept at it, and can now do it effortlessly. He’s learned to unlock the front door.
I believe this extends to life outside the gym. Most of us are so terrified of looking awkward that we never try new and difficult things. But there’s the minority that’s willing to get out there and fall down trying. It’s not even a matter of talent. Those who are willing to fall down are the ones that end up getting really good. That’s the difference between the artist and the poseur.
Once you’ve got enough jiu jitsu down deep in that reptile part of you, you will find yourself at that zero point, that flow, that eye in the center of the hurricane. And that is the unique reward of practicing jiu jitsu.
I’ve been training a little over 2 years in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. That doesn’t make me an expert by any means, but I definitely wish I could go back in time and tell myself a couple of things. I’ve collected five of the things everyone I know wishes they’d taken to heart earlier in their training. Most of these, I came to realize around the time I got my blue belt (especially item#3).
Yeah, yeah
It’s entirely possible that this entire list consists of things you’ll never really understand until you get there yourself. But I’ll go ahead and let you know the things you wish you’d known when you were still a scrub. Because maybe then you wouldn’t have been such a scrub.
I’ll put it another way: These are the basics to a deeper understanding yourself as an athlete. These are the benefits we reap after all the hard work we put into our training. Most of this stuff, you’ll notice, has a lot to do with getting over your ego. As I’ve mentioned before, your ego is probably the biggest obstacle to your progression.
There’s nothing more stupid than when someone says “I refuse to tap to so-and-so because I don’t like him.” Or when someone takes pleasure in rolling against newbies. You’ll notice that, when high-level guys roll, they’ll roll super light and they’ll tap right away when the other guy gets a solid submission position. I used to think this was because they were just playing around, but now I realize they were usually both bringing 100% of their skill. They just weren’t spazzing out like I did when I trained.
When brown and black belts compete against each other in tournaments, notice how cool and collected they often are. Why not start emulating this right away? It’s fun to roll hard with guys at your own level, but keep in mind the real reason for live practice: to perfect your technique.
It’s frustrating for everyone concerned when new guys clasp their hands together in the arm bar and refuse to let go. Or hang onto their partner’s head even after he’s established side control. This practice is referred to as “spazzing out” or “being a retard.”
Look at it this way: In a chess game, if the other guy is attacking your king every turn, it’s not the final move into checkmate that really wins the game. It’s all the groundwork he did to get you into that desperate position. Think about it.
I prefer the word “essentials” to “basics.” In BJJ, the techniques usually taught to beginners aren’t necessarily any more simple than those taught in advanced classes. And they definitely aren’t any less effective. A lot of the reason a technique ends up on a basic curriculum is because it’s just useful a lot of the time, or is an easy way to learn a concept that will be recycled by later techniques, making them easier to learn.
I finally understood this for myself not long ago when I re-took a basic class on some open guard sweeps and the next day, knocked one of my school’s best guys clean over with a basic hook sweep. Before this, I’d been having all kinds of frustration with the newer, fancier sweeps I’d learned in advanced classes, with no success. I finally got somewhere with a technique we teach to guys fresh off the street. That stuff is never a waste of time.
You’ve heard the phrase “position before submission” a million times. I’ll take it a step further and recommend you pay special attention when you’re studying guard passses and sweeps from the guard (any guard: closed, butterfly, open, etc). 99% of all stalemates happen in the guard, with one guy trying to pass the guard, and the other guy trying to submit or sweep. Or worse, with one of them stalling.
Think about it next time you roll: You’ll probably notice that, when you’re pinned to the ground, it’s because you let the guy pass your guard or because you got swept while in their guard. Also this: You’ll probably hear about how the best guys in your gym “walk through” peoples’ guards.
Sports teams don’t run a full scrimmage every time they practice. So how come we roll in practice the same way we do in competition? The answer is because it’s fun, but it’s not the best way to get better at BJJ.
If you’re always brawling in your free time, you’ll keep gravitating toward what’s comfortable, and what’s more, you’ll probably be trying to muscle your technique, because you just want it to work, please god let it work (see item #1)!
Ideally, you should be doing flow drills and start-to-finish drills in your free time. Seeing as how I’ve never had the discipline to do these drills other than as a warmup, I can’t in good conscience recommend them to someone else. But there is a compromise: Positional drills.
In a positional drill, you roll live, but you constrain yourself to a certain position. For example:
In all cases, switch top/bottom halfway through the drill. This is a good compromise between going all-out and just practicing rote technique. And it’s something newbies can benefit from right away. It’s a good way to get around the “I hate being in someone’s guard” or “I can’t stand being in side control” syndrome. Spend some time with your pal working on these positions, and get over your frustration with them.
There’s a lot of material to learn in BJJ. This stuff is bound to get mixed up in your head. For one week, take detailed notes after every class. You’ll soon find what a relief it is to go back and remind yourself of a technique you’d forgotten you wanted to work on. We are frail beings, and our memories are no less frail. If you’re looking at youtube, take detailed notes on any technique you find interesting and try it out with your instructor or a colored belt watching.
The level of detail you use is up to you: For some people, a basic description of a technique is enough for them to refresh their memory and practice like the class just ended. Some lucky people are good enough at drawing (I’m not) to make sketches of the techniques. Level of detail also depends on the subject. I might take up most of a page on a new technique I found hard to understand, and only jot down a line on something that came easily to me.
Try it for a week. You’ll find how much interesting stuff you forget every day. You might even stop looking up those techniques on YouTube and at the bookstore that you always forget five minutes later.
[Digg]
The Injury:
Today was my first day in live training since Tuesday, when I got thrown hard on my left shoulder. I’ve only been able to attend a few classes since that happened. I’ve been lucky to suffer almost no injury in my 2+ years training BJJ; The only other time I can remember taking time off for an injury was about a year ago, when my left knee hurt when I flexed it past a certain acute angle. And, of course, the cauliflower ear that kept me from rolling far about two weeks. But now I don’t even wear my knee brace or headgear anymore (except, rarely, when my ears or knee get sore again), and this has been my first involuntary downtime. It left me home thinking about my game, and I’ve come up with some new stuff to work on.
I don’t remember being this excited about working on my game before - I think I’m really coming into the phase of the Blue Belt where your game branches out and everything feels new again - sadly, I think this is the last time it’s going to feel like this. As far as I can tell, once you reach Purple Belt it becomes pretty rare to learn entirely new moves.
Anyway, my shoulder feels fine most of the time, but if I put pressure on it from the side (like if I lay on my left side, or roll over the left shoulder) it hurts a lot.
Rolling with this injury forced me to think a couple of steps into the fight, when normally I’m only one step ahead at most. It made me realize how much I force moves even when I’m rolling “easy,” for two reasons: First, I still haven’t stopped using strength when technique fails me. This is a combination of my ego making me stubborn, and just enjoying a good brawl (I find it’s almost impossible to separate these two from one another. Maybe they’re basically the same thing?). Secondly, whether I’m working on a new move, or trying to improve at an old one, I tend to do whatever I can to maneuver into a position where I can work on the move. With the shoulder injury, I had to try to keep the game off that part of my body, which had me thinking more clearly about exactly what position I was in, and which position I was going to be in over the next couple of seconds, depending on what I was trying to do.
As a result, I was rolling more fluidly than I normally do. Most of all, though, it had me rolling with less ego than ever, because I’d given myself permission beforehand to tap quickly if I felt like my injured shoulder was in danger. As a result, I felt like I’d gotten more out of this live training than I’ve gotten in a long time. It goes to show you how much we get in our own way.
This idea of rolling “fluidly” is something you hear a lot about but that I’ve only recently recognized in myself. I remember talking to a friend at the gym about how he actually felt more fluid on returning from a two-week hiatus. He thought it was because he was just going after the right moves at the right time, because he didn’t have any technique move cluttering his head. This is probably what they’re talking about in traditional martial arts when they talk about having a “mind like water.” This makes a lot of sense to me.
Things I’ve been working on:
The D’arce (also called the Brabo Choke) and the Anaconda, two arm triangles that are usually applied from the top of the turtle. As with a lot of other turtle techniques, these apply to a lot of different scrambling positions that occur in the moments after a guard pass: In the video I linked, the D’arce/Brabo is being applied from a knee-over pass. The Anaconda is traditionally a top-of-the-turtle move, but I think it can also be applied from a similar scramble. I haven’t had much luck with arm triangles in the past, mostly because I never sat down to study them. It’s good to finally have a toehold to work from. The main thing that had frustrated me is that the “arm triangle” is actually two distinct positions: you can feed the choking arm under the arm and out by the neck, or under the neck and out the outside of the other arm. You have to use a different technique for these positions. So I’m going to learn both of them at the same time, and this is going to be my go-to game from the top of the turtle.
I’ve been having a lot of luck with the cut-across pass. It can be applied from standing, which I’ve never really tried before, and benefits from aggression: If you really spike the knee on the ground, you can get in there with a lot of speed. Once you’ve got your knee on the ground, you’re only halfway there. When rolling no-gi I’ve been using the T-Rex pass from there (My name for a technique my instructor taught us in the MMA class - I can describe it if anyone is actually interested). When rolling gi, everyone in the gym is using a new pass our instructor taught a few weeks ago where you pin the shoulder down and pull up on the sleeve. It’s a very easy to use and dependable pass.
Omoplatas: I’d forgotten how these can be thrown as a single-leg defense (check out this video), and I think I’m going to start trying this move, if for no reason other than it’s flashy, and for the most part my game is pretty ugly and functional . Because, as we know, your jiu jitsu inevitably reflects you, as a person.
Bronson