Bulletin Sep & Oct 2002 - Bushido-Kai

4 BUSHIDO-KAI BULLETIN
into the center!” Oi! Another judges decision. And another victory for Massasoit.
I was not really disappointed. I was exhausted. Charlie Chaves, my instructor at
Tohoku, walked over to my dad and me after the competition. “Your son won both his
matches!” said he. Perhaps Charlie was just being sensitive about the decisions not
falling to Tohoku. But it seemed like a darn nice thing to say at the time.
The next month, I was out of the competition early because my opponent had
used an illegal (supposedly) choke across my windpipe. I complained in the locker
room and the guys just shrugged. Three lessons to be learned here: (1) do not depend
on referees to win a match, (2) the rules are the rules only when both parties and the
referees agree that they are, and (3) don’t bitch and moan after the fact, if you lose. Even
if you are right, you likely to look like a powder puff.
I was slowly loosing my taste for competition. Not because I did not win consistently,
but because I could not depend on consistency from match to match. As things
turned out, once I graduated college, I joined a more local club The Framingham Martial
Arts Club under the direction of Larry Garron. The only competition here was inhouse
and it was much less stressful. Occasionally, we had some interaction with our
sister club 20 miles away but the judo we did was not so much competition as it was
practice randori (freestyle).
I recall doing randori with many of the juniors during a weekend long gashuku
(training camp) held at our sister school. I would go at half-effort to give the juniors a
chance at applying their waza. “Good!” I’d encourage them, “Nice try. Turn more next
time,” or “Good! But get a little lower.” Unbeknownst to me, a little illness had crept
upon me. It was the martial artist's worst enemy and it was the inevitable reward for
years of maturity in the arts: the illness of comfort and complacency. When it came to
sparring Al, who was my size and rank, I was faced with undeniable conclusion that I
could barely hold my own. A couple of years of not worrying about referees, not having
my hands cramp up and not going home dragging my sweaty gi at my heals had made
me...well...soft. I was experienced but not in good enough shape to spar.
I knew that I could not continue competing ad infinitum just to feel “on my
game,” but I didn’t want to go on training knowing that I was constantly “off my
game.” Then and there I designed a new goal for myself. Never be more than a few
weeks out of competitive shape for your age. The lower the age, the shorter the weeks it
should take to be at peak.
Now, admittedly when you are past 50, with a few decades of bruises, twists,
sprains and other physical challenges, you may not be in the best shape to compete—
even if you are at peak. But keeping tabs on yourself is a healthful discipline. Knowing
that at 30 you could get up for a match in, say, 3 weeks, boosts your confidence and
keeps you a little more honed than if you figure you have made it to martial arts Easy
Street.
When I first learned karate, Sensei did not emphasize freestyle sparring. In fact,
we were not allowed to freestyle until green belt level. In my first karate match, I threw
Richard, my senior, with a de-ashi-barai (or was it a mis-timed sasae-tsuri-komi-ashi?) and
felt immediately confident about my karate skills. But a year later, when a visiting
brown belt came in from the mid-west and did some very light sparring with us, my
confidence dissolved. Unlike us, his dojo would spar nearly every class. And he would