 (Sun Su at practice ... ONCE.) STICKS AND BONES “Hey, I’m going to be in another jiu-jitsu tournament this Sunday,” I told my brother on the phone. “Is that like the one you went to last year where you injured your arm?” “Yeah. I didn’t really injure it. I, uh … just couldn’t use it for a couple of weeks.”
I never got around to writing about my first jiu-jitsu tournament back in February. Mostly because I couldn’t use my arm for a couple of weeks. Again, I was goaded into it by a fellow training partner and then team captain, a diminutive but wily Filipino whom I call Ferret. Ferret was the Joe Pesci of jiu-jitsu in our club. The Little Pinoy That Could – could take down 220 pound fighters with his 120 pound frame, that is. For some reason, he took a liking to me and tried to coach me, giving me a game plan for my first tourney. On the morning of the tournament though, in a moment of clarity or Yogi Berra insanity, he threw it all out the window. “I’ve been thinking…. Forget about what I was trying to teach you, man. Just play YOUR game. Don’t worry about his game. Use YOUR game,” Ferret said with his encouraging intensity. “Got it. Thanks,” I’d say while wondering what the hell “my game” was. At the registration desk, the check-in girl asked, “Number of years of training?” “Six … months.” The look she gave me wasn’t exactly beaming confidence. It looked more like an anticipatory “Get Well Soon.” The tournament was “no gi” meaning “no jiu jitsu uniforms.” This is also known as “submission wrestling.” Submissions are holds that force your opponent to tap out due to pain, injury, or impending unconsciousness. Sometimes you tap out soon enough. Sometimes you don’t. Lounging on the blue grappling mat were a few wiry grapplers with camouflage shorts, tattoos, and shaved heads. I again wondered if I had erroneously stepped into a life phase that was clearly meant for someone else. I passed a couple of tree trunk-sized wrestlers as well. Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to go against the big ones since I was in the Under 180 pound weight division. Suckers.
WEIGH-IN I took off my shoes, shirt, and socks and stepped onto the scale. “184. Next.” “Sorry, what?” I asked. “184.” “I just weighed myself at home today. It said I was 176.” “Sorry, you’re 184.” “Wait, let me try again without my sweat pants.” “… 183 … and three-quarters. Next!” Oh my God. I’m with them.
I sat in a stall by myself until the two little boys in karate uniforms were escorted out of the restroom by their father, a man who looked about my age. This is crazy, I thought examining my reflection in the mirror. People your age (like Bouncer) are getting out of the tournaments, not just getting into them. I took my glasses off. What are you doing? Is this a phase? A blurry self-image stared back at me. I have to prove something to myself. I’m not sure what. One contact lens in. It’s now or never, I decide as I put my other lens in. And right now, I have a job to do. Somebody’s going down. Things are clear again as I run back to the gymnasium. My division is up next. SHOVE AT FIRST SIGHT “You missed the girls division. It was more exciting than the guys,” Amy says as I meet her in the stands, “Where were you?” “Damn it, I wanted to see that. I was in the restroom.” “You better get down there,” she says. I watch a couple of matches from the front line waiting for my turn. The Mighty Oakes, a wrestler on our team, looks like a man possessed, a bull seeing red. The veins in his tapered neck tell me he’s psyching up. I hope we don’t get matched up. I’ve never beaten him once in practice and he’s never looked this mad. Wrestlers are naturals when it comes to jiu-jitsu. They’re already experts at taking you down and ground control. Brazilian jiu-jitsu just gives them more ways to make you hurt on the ground. “You’re on deck,” the ref says to me. The adrenaline is making me vibrate. I try to stay calm and loose. I see my opponent getting ready. He’s a couple inches taller, pale with dark hair, a little heavier than me but he’s no hulk. He doesn’t have a monstrously thick neck nor does he have cauliflower ears. Whew, not a wrestler. Looks like a nice guy. Then he puts his mouthpiece and wrestling headgear on. The ones that protect your ears. Fuck me. It starts just like a practice match. Touch hands and go. We’re loose. We’re relaxed. We circle. My eyes on his chest and arms. I really don’t know how to take people down at this point. But I know that if you control the head, you control the body. I hook his neck and whip him to the side. It surprises us both. I try it again. He recovers and does the same to me. I shove him back. He shoves me. We clash, fighting for necks and wrists and armpits. I feel a brief moment of weightlessness. Then I’m plunged back first into the vast big blue mat. Just before the tidal wave hits. A tidal wave with funny looking headgear. UNDERWATERWORLD Ever have one of those claustrophobic dreams where you are trapped or drowning and you can’t yell for help, can’t move, and can’t breathe? Ever have one of those in front of an audience when you’re wide awake? That pretty much describes my first tournament match. Headgear Guy straddles me in the mount position, with me on the bottom. I try to roll him a couple times, by holding one of his arms, wedging his foot and bumping him to that side with my hips. It’s simple physics, my dear, and this defense has saved me dozens of times. It doesn’t work on him though. At my peak in college, I was able to max bench press 385 pounds once. Just one day, just one time. I can’t do that now but I give him a shove with just as much intensity. It’s not the jiu-jitsu way, I know, but I figure at least I’ll find out why. He almost flies off but manages to post an arm. I sit up and twist. For a second we are balanced together on the edge of a coin. But with his hips over mine, I have no real leverage and collapse again. Leverage is power, not the other way around. Legs entwine mine and hands clamp my biceps to the ground. I am stretched out like a rack beneath him. This is a new one. I didn’t realize then that it’s more of a stabilizer, a chance for him to rest and for me to tire from trying desperate escape attempts. It’s vampiric. I thrash and shake and buck to no avail. His cup grinds into my abdomen while sweat soaked shirt covers my mouth with 195 pounds of perspiring live beef behind it. I’ve tasted worse. I begin to miss oxygen. An inch matters. An inch of space allows me to still breathe. Allowing me to hear again. I hear Ferret from the sidelines, “Scott RELAX!” I do. He sits up and grabs an arm I left somewhere. He locks it and twists at the shoulder, but I’m still strong enough to resist. All of those teres major and minor back exercises over the years buy me a little time. He attacks the other arm the same way. Resistance is fading. Wave after wave comes down and I’m stuck between Charybdis and the Sweat Monster. “Catch his arm!” Ferret yells. I’m weak and tired now. Forever does that to you. He slides one arm under my neck. I can’t stop it. One arm over my throat. Too weak to block. The goal is to make the space in between his forearm blades, where my neck is, as small as possible. My cough reflex activates but I can’t cough. There’s not enough room in my throat to spasm. He goes in for the kill. His breath thunders against my ear drum. And I roll him over. It took me months to realize why the first dozen times I tried to roll him (the upa escape) didn’t work and why this time did. The reason it didn’t work was because he was too far back, too cautious. He has to be right on you, going for the kill, and sometimes you have to let him. Embrace the reflection. Trap the doppelganger. One center. One turn. My turn. I’m on top now. Deep breaths, clean air. With his legs still clamped around my waist, I stand up like a colossus from the ruins, lifting his weight with me until he lets go. I can only do this once. He’s tired too. His legs open up and his butt drops to the mat. I stand above him. He lies below, flailing his feet around as I try to catch his ankles. This is what Ferret meant by “My Game.” Breaking the guard. Getting on my feet again. Pushing the legs aside as I slide my weight back down to his chest like a ton of bricks. Now it’s my game. MY GAME, you sweaty squatting motherfu— Urk! I lean in too far and he catches my wrist and pulls me back in. Next thing I know my arm is between his knees, my hand is trapped against his chest, and the fulcrum is just behind my elbow where his pelvis is. Classic armbar. The funny thing with the armbar is that you break the arm with your groin (or inside of your thigh if you’re not wearing a cup). Your hips push out and you pull the poor arm back to your chest like a slot machine handle. Tendons and joint capsules go snap as easily as pulling a drumstick off of a Thanksgiving turkey. It only takes an inch or two. I struggle and topple over with my chest and face against the mat, my “free arm” now trapped under me. He keeps applying pressure to my captured arm. I’m done here. It’s time to tap ou-- I can’t tap. My only free arm is under my body and I can’t get it out. My other arm is immobilized in his grasp. Shearing pain. The ref shouts down at me, “Give a verbal tap if you can’t tap out!” He can barely see my face because half of my mouth is smushed against the mat. “Tap! … Tap!” I mutter. We’re near Headgear Guy’s sideline and his team is cheering at him. The ref doesn’t hear me. Headgear Guy doesn’t hear me and cranks some more. It feels like Velcro being slowly pulled apart. I say it again, louder, “TAP! TA—“ “Give a verbal tap if you can’t tap out!” the ref actually says OVER my verbal tap. I feel pain that I have never felt before or since then. “TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP!!!!” Release. We fall apart, limp and free. My forearm doesn’t really want to come back to me when I contract. Headgear Guy gets the win by submission, although some people actually think the time ran out because it was so close. He would have won either way. “Good ground control,” the ref says to my opponent. I walk off the mat away from my team cradling my arm. It hurts when it moves and it hurts when it doesn’t. Amy runs down to me, “Are you alright?” “Yeah. Not so sure about my arm though.” By the end of the tournament, I didn’t feel too bad. The guy I lost to actually won the whole division. He even beat The Mighty Oakes (whom I was rooting for mostly out of revenge). So I fought the toughest guy first – just a bad break, in more ways than one. Plus, no one else got a sexy fine thing greeting them after they lost nor after they won for that matter. Win or lose, I still got the girl.
EPILOGUE Ferret consoled me later, “You did better than I did in my first tournament. My first time, the guy got me in a guillotine in the first few seconds before we even went to the ground. So fucking embarrassing man.” Ferret couldn’t compete this time due to an injury. I encouraged him to go for his MBA, and he moved back home. Working at Kinko’s with his B.S. was just making him crazy. The tournament above was nine months ago and in retrospect, I made a ton of mistakes but that’s how you learn I guess. Hopefully the tournament this Sunday will have a couple less
mistakes.
EMAIL: scott_to_trot[at]msn[dot]com |
