I never thought I'd have to say this but...

Raising four daughters, who now range from age ten to twenty-five, with an extra niece thrown in for good measure, our household is not typical, it occurred to me, based on the things you would think you would never have an occasion to say.

No, you cannot get a monkey and a penguin.

No, you cannot get a penguin even if you paint your room black and white and make it stand real still.

No you cannot get a monkey no matter how many tournaments you or your sister win by ippon.

If you advertise your sister's underwear on ebay I WILL sell you for scientific experiments.

Don't you dare go to work before you pick up all of the pieces of that computer and put it back together.

Do not do naked cartwheels in the living room when we have company.

You skipped Algebra and told your Buddhist teacher that it was a religious holiday, St. Frances Day? Who the hell is St. Frances, the patron saint of liars?

No, you cannot skip mass if you promise to feel really guilty about it.

Yes, you can have a Thanksgiving crab instead of a Thanksgiving turkey.

Yes, that's blood on that uniform but it's somebody else's blood, so it's okay.

Don't worry about the blood, it will wash out.

For future reference, if an animal is bleeding on the sheets A) take the animal to the vet and B) change the sheets, preferably in that order.

I don't care if your toe is broken, you have nine more toes. Besides, no judo technique really requires all ten toes anyway.

What do you mean you need to be picked up because you have "female problems"? Unless your female problem is that you just gave birth in the school library, you can walk the six blocks home.

Life Goes to the Slowest Winner

My friend, Lanny Clark, has a saying whenever things don't go exactly as one would want them at the moment,

"Life goes to the slowest winner."

His point is that it matters far less who is the high school football hero at 17 or who won the junior nationals at 11 or who got the highest score on the AP Chemistry test than who is president of Microsoft at 40, who wins the Olympics at 21 or who receives the Nobel Prize for Medicine at 62.

• When, like my daughter, Jenn, you are 22 and have a college degree and a job but not quite a career yet...


• Or, when, like my daughter, Ronda, you have a bad day and don't place in a competition...


• Or, when, like my daughter, Maria, you have a job as a sportswriter but you are living in Fort Wayne, Indiana ...

it is understandable to be discouraged.


Wisdom, of sorts, is one of the benefits of getting older, that partially makes up for bad knees, not being able to run a mile and going from good-looking to "good-looking for your age". Only partially, though.

One of those pieces of wisdom I picked up over the years is that setbacks are only permanent if you allow them to be. Another is that you can see the whole picture a lot clearer from a distance.

In my current position, I make less than I did a year ago. I was retired briefly, and I found that I liked not working all of the time. So, I traded off 80-hour weeks and regularly being thousands of miles away from my family for being home on the evenings and weekends, and not having to travel any further than downtown Los Angeles. Part of the deal, though, is that I am getting paid less. You probably aren't going to find someone who is going to pay you just as much for less work and better working conditions. If you do, give them my phone number.

My ego is a little bruised because, in America, one is supposed to be always getting more, bigger, better and having less is one of those horrible things like getting devoured by flesh-eating meal worms that should be avoided at all costs. I thought this way for about five minutes until it occurred to me:
A.) I make FIFTEEN TIMES what I made when I started working.
B.) The financial worries that I had are past. Would I be able to put all of the kids through college? Two have already graduated? Would I be able to pay for Ronda to go to the tournaments and camps she needed to reach her potential and goals she didn't even know she should have? Ronda did get to the events she needed and now she has a job and can pay for her own travel. Would I be able to pay the mortgage, sell the house and pay it off? The mortgage payments always got paid and the houses have been sold and paid off. I have figured out (painfully) how to have enough money taken out that when the taxes come due it is no longer the size of the Gross National Product of a small island country and we can pay them.
C.) My family is wonderful.
D.)I live in Santa Monica, which has beautiful weather, nice parks, good schools, an ocean and where the biggest civic issue is finding a good parking spot.

I think the best strategy, and - like all of life - I am making this up as I go along, is to be worriedly optimistic. It is probably good that I worried about finding a way to pay for the children to go to college and paying the mortgage, because it insured that I worked hard and found a way to do it. On the other hand, it is best not to make yourself too crazy worrying, because the odds are, if you work really hard and do the right thing, it will work out.

You'll make yourself less crazy if you take a long-term view. Life changes from day to day. My little Julia asked me how Ronda was doing at the tournaments this week and why did she have such a bad day on Thursday and not place. I searched for words to explain to a ten-year-old how even elite athletes have those days when every move is a step behind and a second late. They have fewer of them, but everyone has one or two. The best I could come up with is,

"You know, mija, some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue."

You can't judge your life one day at a time. Ronda's experience this past week is a case in point. She had a bad day on Thursday. There could be a hundred reasons. The other players were fighting to make it into the Olympics and she was just there to get some extra practice time on the mat. She wasn't training hard enough or taking it seriously enough and got a wake up call. Thursdays are always a bad day to compete if you were born in February. Who knows? The fact is, Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day had nothing on Ronda's.

So ... two days later, she comes back, beats the Brazilian who won the Panamerican Championship on Thursday, increasing her record against her to 4-0. She fights the Columbian who won last year's Panamerican Championships, gets thrown for a waza ari, gets pinned, escapes, gets thrown for a yuko - and comes back and throws the woman for ippon to win the match. She goes 3-0 for the day and wins the outstanding competitor award. On Sunday, she fights in the Zone Cup, beats the Canadian she lost to on Thursday, the Haitian and Cuban players forfeit rather than come out and fight her and Ronda wins the tournament.

On Thursday, there was talk about how the U.S. doesn't have a chance to win an Olympic medal in judo after all. Today, all of those people are silent. The point is, you don't judge a competitor on one match,one day any more than you should judge your career on what was in your paycheck this week or your life on whether you are getting along with your current significant other. There is a word for thinking like that, what is it, I'm searching for it - oh, yeah. Stupid.

Sometimes Low Self-Esteem is the Result of a Realistic Appraisal

Being able to look reality square in the eye is an important - and rare - trait

Today's blog advice is on success in marriage and judo, in that order and not necessarily together.

My husband is not perfect. If he was, he could have married someone with the looks of a super-model, the wisdom of Margaret Mead and the kindness of Mother Teresa. Instead, he is married to me, a person with the looks of Margaret Mead, the kindness of a super-model with the only common traits between me and Mother Teresa that we are both Catholic and have an "a" in our names.

Today, I had an epiphany regarding beta-weights and partial derivatives.
Of all of the people I know, Dennis is the only one who would not say,

"What the hell are you talking about?"

(If you are really interested, which you probably are not, you can read about it in my other blog, which includes a lot of posts on statistics.)
I suppose I could have married someone who would tell me every day how brilliant I am. I know people who wanted an adoring fan for a spouse instead of a partner. They needed someone to tell them how wonderful and perfect they were. Too late, they realized that a person who worships the ground you walk on, who never pushes you to be more than you are or calls you out for mistakes you made probably has some really serious issues of their own. Did these people never pay attention to the cardinal rule,

"Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself" ?

(No, not even if they are very good-looking and tell you that you are the smartest, toughest, most talented person in the universe. I don't know who that person is, but it is not you. Trust me on this one.)

Accept that you are sometimes only average and even sometimes less than average. Welcome to the human race. Don't hook up with someone who strokes your ego every day just so you can feel better about yourself in the short run. Remember, as a friend of mine said,

"It is better to have loved and lost than to have married a psycho."

There was a discussion on the Judo Forum this week about who has a chance to medal in the Olympics.

I am not going to comment on any individual because as I said on the forum, for all I know, they are all wrestling cougars every night and dragging 300 pound sleds up mountains every day preparing for the Olympics.

I do know that when people are NOT training to be best in the world it is no favor to them to pretend that they are. A few years ago, I told Ronda that I knew what training to beat the world looked like and what she was doing wasn't it. I told her I wasn't going to give her any money and even suggested if she wanted to train half-ass and see the world that she book her tickets on Travelocity. Ronda did not take this well. In fact, for a while I was an evil old woman while everyone else was her new best friend. When you love people a lot, you tell them the truth, if you think it will help them, even if they hate you for it temporarily.

All of those people who have been told by their coaches, teammates and "friends" that they are training smarter, not harder, that they don't need to train anywhere outside their own club or city, who believe their own press, who believe that you can win internationally without being sore, hungry and uncomfortable ON A REGULAR BASIS - have been sold a bill of goods. Being successful at anything means going outside your comfort zone, sometimes failing and being able to face up to that fact.

Crystal Butts is my favorite judo player this week. When I asked her how she did at the tournament on Sunday, she answered,

"I got my butt slammed. I'm not going to make any excuses."

When she overheard me say to Julia that she needed to ratchet her training up a notch, starting now, Crystal interjected,

"Me, too. I'll be picking it up with you this weekend."

Serge, shown above teaching seoi nage,commented recently that I tell the same stories over and over. Ronda laughed and reminded him that she had been hearing those stories all of her life. I do that on purpose and not due to early onset of Alzheimer's. In Latino culture there are "dichos", sayings that grandparents tell their grandchildren over and over in an effort to shape their character. Even though my grandmother passed away nine years ago, every time something difficult happens in my life, I hear her voice saying with complete assurance,

"God knows what he is doing, mija."

My grandmother did not put much stock in the latest self-esteem curriculum. She never even heard of such a thing. She told me,

"Sometimes you are supposed to feel bad. That voice inside of yourself is telling you that you did the wrong thing. Next time you should maybe not do that thing. Next time, you should try harder to be better."

I don't remember what it was that Nanny was chastising us about, but I do remember my Uncle Fred scolding her,

"Ma, you're making the kids feel bad,"

and I remember Nanny's unrepentant response,

"Good!"

Sometimes, you need to feel bad to get better.

People I forgot to credit:
The New York Times article I mentioned yesterday was part of a post in the Judo Podcast on dirty tricks and sportsmanship.

Locus of Control: The Secret of Success

The Cliff Notes' version:

"Constructs" are very important in psychology. A construct is a theoretical "thing" which cannot be directly measured such as motivation or introversion. One of the constructs that I found most fascinating when I was a student, and to this day, was Locus of Control. A person with a completely external locus of control believes that everything is due to circumstances outside his control. If I lose a match, fail a course or get fired from a job, it is because of factors over which I had no control. The refereeing is bad, the professor was disorganized, the boss hated me, I was just born dumb and uncoordinated. A person with complete internal locus of control believes that everything is within her control. In the same circumstances, this person would attribute the cause of failure to her not having trained hard enough, having forgotten to ask the professor when the assignment was due or not having learned the boss's expectations and thus had misunderstandings.

It is better in the long-run to have a more internal locus of control rather than an external locus of control. In the short-run, maybe not so much.

For example, today my little daughter, Julia, won one match and lost two. Valerie, a friend of mine, who remembered me when I competed, commented to her son,

"That little girl is not going to get any sympathy from her mother."

She didn't. I took her aside and told her that she had lost because she did her o uchi gari reaching rather than stepping in to the other person. I also told her that she loses because many of the girls she fights go to practice more often than her and that she was going to have to go to practice more often if she wanted to win.

Today, I heard some parents excusing that their child lost because the other players were heavier or older, or that the refereeing was poor. It's hard to admit that your child lost because she doesn't go to practice enough, because who is it that takes your child to practice (or not)? In my case, it is even worse to admit that she lost because her technique was incorrect, because I am the one who is teaching her. We have been working on her pulling herself in instead of pushing with o uchi gari, but obviously not enough. It is always easier to let yourself off the hook. You feel worse if you believe that any failure was your fault.

Today, Julia said to me,

"I don't hate tournaments. It's just that I hate losing."

I told her,

"You're supposed to hate losing. That's what makes people train harder."

It's easier at the moment to blame your inept co-workers, biased referees or professors who are 'bad teachers'. Easier on your ego, maybe, but ineffective, since there is nothing you can do about any of that. I'd like to be a better judo coach, I really would, but at the same time, I am sitting here looking at a picture of all of my daughters taken at Maria's wedding. I realize that I was able to pay for their college educations and training for the last Olympics because I chose a profession that paid more than coaching judo.

I know more about statistics and educational technology than the vast majority of people, but not nearly as much as I would like. I could complain about how math is hard, I have four kids, it wouldn't make any difference in my career anyway - or I could pick up the book on the floor next to my desk and read more about statistical modeling. On Tuesday I am going to a conference on Educational Technology and on Wednesday I am leaving work earlier so that I can take Julia to judo practice at Sawtelle.

More than any other, Gandhi's saying,

"Be the change you want to see in the world,"

epitomizes an internal locus of control.

My husband worries that I will push Julia too much, interfering with her current evening routine of eating Red Hot Cheetohs while watching Hannah Montana re-runs. I disagree. A person learns to have an internal locus of control through experiences that tell them that their efforts matter.

Random thoughts:
This post on sportsmanship, from a New York Times article, made me think what I would have done. If someone had beat me fair and square, and then, say, collapsed on the mat from some unrelated injury, would I have helped her up so she could have won? I thought about this after reading the article, and I think I would, not because I don't think winning is important but because she would have won. I would have known it, she would have known it and whatever the referee said wouldn't have changed that fact. It goes back to an internal locus of control.

Self-esteem comes from achieving a difficult task. This is true in sports, it is true in academics and professionally. The more you achieve difficult tasks, the more you will have the belief that you can do so in the future.

Photo of Serge teaching ko uchi makikomi at the Great American Workout.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

but I am going to write a bunch of words anyway.

Here are some things that were great about the Great American Workout in Rhode Island last weekend, in no particular order.

The number of girls and women in attendance, from all ages, to six-year-olds from New York City to women in their fifties from Connecticut. Women are usually a very small minority in judo, and often in a subordinate position while the men are teaching and being certified as coaches. This weekend, we had female clinicians, coaches and athletes, of all ages. As it should be.



Parnell Legros teaching. Oh my God.... I watched Parnell with my mouth open. He would be teaching and twenty or thirty little kids would be sitting still, riveted. The man is an amazingly gifted teacher.


Seeing great kids like Everett, Malinda, Ahmani and Ricondo helping the younger ones.


Watching Ronda teach judo and randori. I may be biased, but the truth is, she really is good, and she deserves to be good because she trains like she knows she should.

My baby proves yet again that she is a class act. Not a lot of people fit teaching five-year-olds around their training for the Olympics. Ronda did her weight workout in the morning, then taught judo all day Saturday, half the day Sunday and did randori on Sunday afternoon.

Seeing my granddaughter, Eva, for the first time.

Getting a chance to see Jim Pedro, Sr. teach again. My niece made the comment the other day that if Jim were to quit judo tomorrow he would have accomplished more than almost any other coach will in a lifetime in the world and Olympic medalists, number of years taught, number of players coached - and yet he came and taught for two days. He really is one of the most knowledgeable coaches I have ever met, and yet he is willing to teach everyone from small children to coaches for next to no money, and he is good at it. I told him that this weekend made up for every time he had pissed me off (and there were A LOT of them). He did a phenomenal job.



The number of coaches who were willing to help out our young players, from 13-year-old Katelyn Bouyssou to more-than-13-year-old Bill Montgomery and all of the coaches who came for certification. To see the number in our judo community who care enough to spend their time gaining more knowledge to teach their players was truly gratifying.


There was a lot more great stuff but it is late and I have to work tomorrow. If you did not come, you missed it, and I TOLD YOU that you would be sorry, but did you listen to me ... no! I covered escaping from sankaku, juji gatame (the purpose of life) and pinning people so they can't get up.

I think I have exceeded my limit of images to upload for this post, so I will have to put pictures of Serge and some of the other instructors tomorrow. Serge thinks this was the first time that I saw him teach, but it wasn't. I saw him at the USJA camp in Florida, too. He was great, then, too. I never miss an opportunity to steal ideas from other coaches, and so I watch other people teach every chance I get.

We are planning on making the Great American Workout an annual event. So, if you didn't make it, try not to screw up next year.

Judo, Success and the Meaning of Life: Because I love it

As one gets older, it is probably normal to ponder the meaning of life, and evaluate one’s own choices. Is it true, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, that all is vanity, we live, we die and that’s pretty much it?
Yes I graduated from college – thirty years ago, and my mother was very proud of me, but did it really change the world all that much? I won the national championships a few times, but someone else has won them for the past twenty-four years.

All in all, life has been good, but there are signs it is more than half over.

Life really changes. I remember a time when the rhythm of my life was governed by the U.S. Senior Nationals, I started training January first with a plan to peak in April. I also remember the first year that the senior nationals were over before I even remembered they were in April. I was in graduate school studying for a Ph.D. and the time just slipped by. Earning a Ph.D. was a great experience in many ways. My doctoral advisor, Dr. Richard Eyman, a true mentor, passed away a few years ago.

Margot Sathay was a great judo player. When I lived in Japan, she offered a matwork class at the women’s division of the Kodokan. Three of us came religiously, me, Michiko Sasahara and Hiromi Fukuda. All three of us won world medals. Probably the biggest thing she did for me, though, was tell me when I was planning on dropping out of college in my senior year and staying in Japan that she would not teach me and that she would talk to Osawa and tell him not to let me work out at Waseda any more either. I went back home, graduated from college, got three more degrees and never saw Margot again. She taught me an incredible amount of matwork and she kept me in school. She really did change my life, but, to her, I was just one of a thousand people she taught over the years. She died a few years ago.

Diane Pierce (Tudela) was my hero when I was young. She won more judo matches than any American in history up to that time, won U.S. Grand Champion (the winner of all weight divisions) when she was only 125 pounds. She taught me a tomoe nage juji gatame combination that I won countless matches with and she taught me about facing life fearlessly. Diane survived a bout with cancer many years ago and is now a great-grandmother.

It was an honor to be coach for the Nanka girls team and gratifying when they won the national championships. My fellow coach that year, Steve Bell, passed away about a year ago.

There have also been mistakes and awful times. My husband died, and although he left behind wonderful children and permanent memories, he is still dead. To the people who say that it will all be okay after a while I can only reply that “a while” must be longer than thirteen years. I have made stupid decisions in everything from during matches, to kids I could have coached better if I knew more at the time, to decisions in my professional life which, in retrospect, should have been pretty obviously wrong to anyone smarter than a hamster.

Yesterday, I was writing a program using some relative rare features of a programming language, something that I had been wanting to learn better, and a task just happened to come across my desk that required those. As I was working, the thought crossed my mind,

“I love what I am doing. This is exactly what I want to be doing at this minute and they are paying me for it. This is amazing.”

Thanks to Margot for not letting me drop out of school.

Today, I was doing matwork at the training center and in the middle of it, I thought to myself,

“I love this. I love my life.”

Over seventy years ago, in the book, “How to be happy, though human” , W. Beran Wolfe
wrote:

"If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day."

There is an old Spanish proverb ,

"There is no happiness; there are only moments of happiness."

In many ways, directly and indirectly, judo is responsible for what has made me happy. Maybe that is the real meaning after all.

Another of Life's Unanswered Questions: Just Who Do You Think You Are?

Just who do you think you are?
Why can't you be like everybody else?
Must you question everything?
Can't you ever just go along?

I've been asked some variation of those questions my whole life and the answers are No, I can't just go along, yes, I must question everything, because I am not everybody else, I am me. And, incidentally, no, I am not sorry now.

If you are like everyone else, you will be average. That's not terrible. McDonald's is average. You'll never confuse an egg McMuffin with oysters rockefeller, but you likely won't find rat poop in it, either. Average is safe. People of my generation remember the saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." This was a short cut way of saying that if you did the expected thing you might not make a million dollars but it was, well, safe.

I have quoted this a hundred times in different contexts. Sitting in class one warm afternoon during graduate school at the University of Minnesota, I'll never forget the professor lecturing us,

"Always remember, ladies and gentlemen, while Burroughs had all of its engineers hard at work developing a better adding machine, Steve Wozniak was in his garage inventing the Apple computer."

What does all of this have to do with judo?

Over the years, many, many people have criticized first me and more recently my daughter for having a bad attitude or being unsportsmanlike.

What terrible things did we do? Did we use steroids, hire henchmen to hit our competitors with boards, hide brass knuckles in our judo gis?

None of the above. We didn't act like everyone else.

What puzzles me are the questions that no one else asks. Here is one:

There has been a lot of talk about how Ronda is on a different level than the other competitors in the U.S. People have even suggested that she should not compete in the senior nationals, or if she must, that she be nice about it and not embarrass her competitors by making it evident how much better she is. No one asks why Ronda is doing so much better when almost everyone in her division (and several who moved out of the division when she moved up) are older than her and have been in judo longer than her. No one asks why a player who, until five years ago had competed in exactly one senior tournament, where she placed seventh, is now head and shoulders above the competition. No one asks what Ronda did that the other players didn't do.

You might think that I am patting myself on the back here and expecting people to say, "She had a coach who knew so much judo." That's not it.

I have a pretty high self-esteem but there is no way I would say I know more judo than Yone Yonezuka, because I don't. Israel Hernandez coaches another of Ronda's competitors. I don't know him well, but I would guess he knows more about judo than I do. Doug Tono, who has coached a couple of Ronda's competitors, knew more judo than me when we were kids doing randori at Uptown Dojo - and he still does. Ron Angus knows more judo than I do now - I have seen him teach - although I am not sure he did back when we were both at Tenri Dojo. Ronda has fought a couple of his players in Canada. None of this is false modesty. It is all true. Israel, Ron and Yone particularly chose to focus on judo most of their lives while I spent a lot of time learning statistics, programming and how to make things work across operating systems. It's no surprise they learned the stuff they studied and I learned the stuff I studied.

Buried somewhere under all of the things that need to be cleaned up and put away in our house are a gold and silver medal from the world championships, two Panamerican Games gold medals, a junior world championships gold medal. Only two people have ever asked me,
"Two people in your house have won world gold medals. How did you do that?"

One of those people who called and asked had an Olympic bronze medal and a world bronze medal himself. When I laughed, he demanded,
"No, seriously, how did you do that. I want to know."

I wish I had some brilliant master plan I could share where we all get bit by a radioactive spider and turn into SpiderRondaWoman. The truth is a lot more mundane.

Ronda made the hard decisions. She went to where the best training was for her and not where the most friends were, best weather or best education.

Ronda faced reality. She could not handle both college and training all out at the same time so she chose judo and got a job at Home Depot. Some people can train and compete simultaneously but Ronda knew it would not work for her.

Ronda did not make compromises. I have been to so many practices where it has been tacitly agreed that we will not train too hard, not really push each other. She trained her heart out even when it meant people didn't like her, called her mean or unfeminine or a lot worse things. She trained until she cried. She trained until other people cried.

People who go along with the crowd tend to be average and well-liked.

Other people don't go along, they cry, they fight, they are criticized, all for the chance to be something extraordinary.

We are all defined by our choices. Think about yours.