MY FAVORITE FATALITY
(or Why Girls Are Bad Luck On Pirate Ships)
In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, when you fight someone better than you, it forces you to
work your defense. When you fight someone lesser than you, you practice your
offense. And when they’re new, you practice your rear naked choke.
Josh was kind of new. He had the long limb advantage, which caught me off guard at first, literally. He even got me on my back at one point.
I
could hear the girls in our class (three of them) cheering him on – telling him
how to do the key lock on my shoulder. That stung a little, I mean come on,
where’s the love? The new guy who looks like Josh Hartnett flirts with you for
one practice and now I’m the bad guy because I’m the quiet one? This is just
like high school – oh yeah, those girls were just IN high school a couple of
years ago. Nevermind then.
Fine. I’m the bad guy.
I
swiveled and got my legs back inside his, then shot a leg behind his neck. I
had nothing, but he still thought I was going for a triangle choke. He scrambled up,
I got on his back. Put my heels in his sides, my arm around his neck, and shed my
composure for bare tooth fury as he desperately pulled at the boa constricting his carotid arteries.
Then I let my weight drop towards the mat, pulling his consciousness into the ichor of my dark heart. He tapped out entirely too soon for my liking. Sorry, girls.
“Damn – *cough* – that is hardcore,” Josh breathed as the redness in his face went down. I complimented him and encouraged him to stick with it. The way I see it, it’s okay to cut off all blood flow to your opponent’s brain, as long as you don’t hurt his ego too much afterwards. Josh then went on about how he used to wrestle with his brothers.
“I can tell.”
When he was twelve.
I can tell.
He never came back. That’s when he lost.
“Scott,
you ever think about competing, man?” Ferret, the team captain, asked
me a
month ago. Ferret is under five feet tall and 115 pounds and
occasionally taps out guys twice his size in tournaments because no one
else is in his weight division.
“I was thinking about competing in a year or so,” I answer reluctantly.
“No, man, start now. That’s how you get good. I’ve been watching. You’ve really improved,” he flashes his dimpled Malaysian grin.
“Thanks.
I’ve gotten a few rear naked chokes and guillotines on new guys but that’s it,” the taste of bloodless victory is sweet.
“A lot of people in the white belt divisions aren’t that good, man,” Ferret says from a perspective vastly different from mine. A two-year white belt can completely own me. Ferret himself is supposed to be a blue belt but he missed the annual testing date, and is stuck in white/blue belt purgatory for another year.
“There’s
a tournament next month. You should go,” Ferret insists. I can’t help taking
it as a compliment.
The club lost it's best competitors this year - they all graduated or
moved. Even Ferret is going back to school next year. He wants to
cultivate another strong team.
“It’s no-gi,” he explains. That means you don’t wear your gi - your jiu jitsu jacket and pants, which sounds good to me because I’m not that comfortable with the gi yet. I’m always getting choked out with my own collar, and I have the neck burns to prove it.
“So we just wear any old shorts and a T-shirt?” I ask him.
“Actually, most guys don’t wear shirts in no-gi. That way you are slippery and hard to grab.”
This just keeps getting gayer and gayer.
“No-gi is faster,” Ferret explains, “I can use my speed to an advantage. They can't slow me down by grabbing my sleeves. But in the white belt division there’s usually a lot of wrestlers, they have the advantage at that level.”
“Yeah,
I’ve noticed,” I cradle my neck as I remember the number of neck cranks and
spinal twists I’ve endured rolling with wrestlers in practice.
There's
always a few wrestlers in Brazilian jiu jitsu class. You start to
recognize them
pretty quickly. The thick necks. Solid waists. Cauliflower ears.
They’re often
built like trees, straight up and down. When you roll with them, it’s a
lot
like fighting with a tree too: they only bend or move when they want to
bend or
move. If you find yourself airborne and then supine, breathless, with a
mountain of shoulder smothering your face, you are probably fighting a
wrestler. When you feel your own neck and/or lumbar
vertebrae painfully clicking three times or more, then you are fighting
a
wrestler. Wrestling is the most underrated martial art there is,
probably
because it’s taught in almost every high school in
Wrestlers are also frighteningly strong, and Oakes is the strongest of the strong in our club, which is why one of the greatest compliments of my life was when he said,
“Damn, you’re really strong. I really have to force things to submit you, and sometimes I still can’t. That's just freakish … are your joints made of adamantium or something?”
“Hahaha,”
I shake my head in humility and smile while cradling my arms and rubbing my aching bicipital
tendons.
Everyone has their own style of fighting. With Oakes, it's pure power.
One time, I actually left bite marks in my own shoulder due to him
compressing it across my face. Every muscle I ever exercised in the
past fifteen years comes into play when I go against him. This week, I
actually managed to get on top of him for a change - twice (side
control).
After I corkscrew myself out of an armbar and roll out of two shoulder locks (omoplatas), he says
"Pretty slick with those escapes now." Thirty seconds later he makes my arm an offer it can't refuse.
Afterwards, I watch an unsuspecting victim roll with Oakes for the first time. He gets flipped in the air, and hits the ground with an avalanche of muscle golem landing on top of him.
“Ow,
so that’s what that looks like," I muse.
My
ribs hurt just from memory.
One
of our teachers, Prophet, an easy-going brown belt, said this about tournaments:
“Tournaments aren’t like practice. Some people get crazy at them. Dirty elbows, knees. Man! They act like it’s life or death or something. It’s just jiu jitsu. Just stay cool, man. Stay. Cool. But go ahead and drop that knee on his face if you have to 'cause, shit, he'd do it to you.”
Anyways, the tournament is tomorrow. I'm a little concerned about my bicep tendons. I think I strained them a few months back and they still hurt when I pull. I don't think I can win but I hope I can make a strong showing.
Wish me luck (from where you are I mean, you don't have to email me), but don’t tell me “to break a leg.” Knee bars aren’t allowed in this one.
Neither is profanity. F*ck.
.