Apparently, it doesn't bother you to lose

About a year after I won the world championships, I was out drinking margaritas with Bruce Toups, who, at the time, was the Director of Development for judo in the U.S. If you have never met Bruce, you've missed out on one of the more brilliant analytical minds when it comes to dissecting what it takes to win a judo match. 

He said,

I've watched a lot of judo players over the years, a lot of people I thought had talent. I was trying to figure out why you were the one that won the gold medal. So, I watched every one of your matches that I could find on tape. Here is what I noticed. I saw matches where you lost - I didn't see very many of them - but YOU NEVER LOST THE SAME WAY TWICE.

I remember this (although being nearly 30 years ago, I cannot swear this was verbatim what he said) because it struck me at the time such an odd thing to consider worthy of comment. Of course I never lost the same way twice! I HATE LOSING !!!  Any time I would lose, I'd go back to the dojo and work and work and work on whatever it was so that never happened to me again.

If someone choked me, I would find whoever in the area did that same choke and work out with that person every single round that I could until I could stop it 100% of the time. I'd teach that choke to everyone in my club so that they could try it on me. If I was working with someone who was less experienced or smaller, I'd let him get me in that choke, so I could fight my way out of it. 

At the time, I had just finished competing and had not yet started coaching, so I still had that tunnel vision where I assumed everyone was just like me.

Over the years, I have found that no, not everyone hates losing so much that it eats at them. No, not everyone goes back and works on whatever they lost by. In fact, lots of people go home, say they were unlucky, the referee made a mistake, the other guy got to train in Europe and they didn't or whatever the reason - and then they lose the exact same way next year.

I was working on our book, Winning on the Ground, and Jim had included a move I have seen his son do 100 times, Ronda do 100 times, Aaron Kunihiro do 100 times and so on. My initial reaction was, "Oh God, do we really want to include that? I have seen it SO many times!" But I thought about it for a second and realized that yes, we really do want to include it, for two reasons. First, it is a signature Pedro move and as my friend, Steve Scott says, if he picks up a book by someone famous for a certain thing - whether it is a golf swing in a golf book or an arm bar in a matwork book - he expects to see that thing in there. It's one of the reasons he buys their book. The second reason, though, is that after all of those hundreds of people who have lost to this arm bar, it still works. In part that is because there are always new people coming up. It may be an old move but it's new and amazing to them. 

The other part, though, is that lots and lots of people lose the same way twice. I guess it just doesn't bother them that much. 

This still puzzles me. 

The Blessing of Losing

I HATE LOSING.

You really have no idea how much I hate losing. I have NEVER, and I do mean this most literally, never, met anyone who hated losing more than I did as a competitor. I would cry all the way home on the plane, lock myself in the bathroom and cry, break things, you name it.

Before the finals at the world championships, a coach, trying to make me less nervous, I think, said,

"Look at it this way. Even if you lose, you'll have tied with the best any American has ever done."

I turned to him and said,

"No, if I lose, I'll have fucking lost!"

He laughed and agreed,

"Well, yeah, I guess that's another way to look at it."

If someone had come up to me at 19 or 26 and said that losing could be a blessing, I probably would not have punched them in the face. On the other hand, depending on their timing and who it was, maybe I would have.

And yet .... in hindsight, which is far more often 20/20, I realized that losing was a blessing.

When I fought in the finals of the U.S. Open at 17 against Diane Pierce, one of the best women competitors ever, she armbarred me in nothing flat and I was PISSED. It's a really good thing I didn't get lucky that day and win on some fluke. Diane was a lot better than me and it showed me how much more judo there was I needed to know. When I asked her for advice then, and later, she was extremely generous with her time. She taught me that armbar. It won me a ton of matches. She also gave me great advice on competing, like

"Never change divisions because there is someone tough in it. Get better and make people run out of the division to get away from YOU."

By the third time I won the U.S. Open, I came back to work, told my co-workers I'd won a gold medal over the weekend and everyone was like, "Yeah, yeah, you did that before."

When you win all of the time it's sort of a no-win situation. If you win again no one is impressed and if you lose everyone is shocked.


Most people put more pressure on themselves the longer a winning streak goes on, and this is especially true if they are young. Mathematically, the guy who has a 17-0 record and loses should be far less upset than the guy who had a 7- 10 record. I mean, the first guy won 17 out of 18 fights. It's not that way at all, though. For many, many people, the stress to stay on top builds with every win. I remember feeling as if it would just be the end of the world if I lost. I'd go a year or two at a time without losing a match, and then I'd get third in Paris or London or something and I would be PISSED. But, guess what, the sun still rose in the morning and I wasn't dead.


Yeah, some people I thought were my friends would disappear. There were always the people who thought this loss showed I was over the hill. As my coach, Jimmy (Man Mountain) Martin, used to say, "You're only as good as your last match."

Overall, though, losing was not the end of life on planet earth as we know it, and after crying for a few days or a week, I'd be back at practice, training harder than ever, with all of that pressure from feeling as if I could NOT lose gone because, I had lost and so there, it was over with.

The most important thing I learned from losing is that the things we fear are never as bad in reality as in our imagination and that no matter how bad they are, we can still overcome them.

After competing for years, when things were not going right, I still had the confidence and strength to keep on training and believing in myself that I could pull through this slump, because I had done it before.

The blessing of losing is realizing that you have the strength to come back from a loss and win again.


But I still HATE losing.