That MMMPH You Hear Is the Sound of Maternal Disapproval

So, in answer to the most common question I get these days, "What is Ronda doing?"

Followed by the second most common question, "What do YOU think about that?"

Ronda is teaching at the West Coast Judo Training Center every weekend, where she does a great job, along with fellow coaches Richard (Blinky) Elizalde, Gary Butts, Victor Ortiz, jiu-jitsu black belt Sam Garcia, and the occasional old lady (that would be me) putting in a guest appearance. 

MMMPPHH (That is my maternal disapproval sound.) She is also competing in grappling and MMA. Last weekend she competed at the tournament hosted by Gokor Chivichiyan and Gene LeBell's club, Hayastan, in the men's middleweight division. She "accidentally" left her phone off so I did not know she was competing, because I could have gone to Hollywood and watched her. This is EXACTLY like the last time she was in a tournament in Los Angeles, competing in the men's division, several years ago. My husband had taken her to the tournament because I had to pick someone up from the airport. When I called him to see if she had anyone to fight he told me she was competing in the men's 180 lb and under division and she had said that 

"Mom always lets me do it."

 I said, with my usual calm demeanor, 

"WHAT?!! Let me talk to her! Give the phone to that child!"

The conversation went like this.

"What? What? Mom, I can't hear you. Must be static on the phone. Bzzzz. Bye."

MMMMMPPPHHH.

(In case you are wondering, yes, she did win that tournament and the one on Sunday, too.)

So, now she has three MMA fights scheduled. Do I approve of it? Hell no. It involves someone trying to punch my baby girl in the face. Hell, no, I don't approve of it! The only way in which this would be even remotely acceptable to me is if the other person just lay down and let her pound on them, and it STILL wouldn't really be okay. I would be sitting there grumbling,

"Look at that person getting all their nasty blood all over Ronda. That's disgusting! I'll bet that won't wash out."

MMMMMMMMPHHHHH!

My only consolation in all of this is that some day, she will have children of her own. I am taking lots of pictures now so that when I rat her out to her own kids when she is making that MMMMPHHHH sound, I will have photographic evidence.

You Can't Sunbathe Your Way to Success

At practice this weekend, there was some complaining about the extra rounds of randori (yes, I heard you.  I 'm old, not deaf. )

MANY years ago, Rusty Kanokogi had a trainer meet with the women's world team. This was back when the whole idea of a strength and conditioning coach or a personal trainer was just a radically new concept. It was also back before everyone who couldn't get a real job was calling himself a personal trainer.

The people that met with us were the real deal. Their other clients included a professional ballet group and a major league baseball team. I don't remember what particular exercises we were supposed to do. I probably didn't do them. If Rusty was around, she would be the first to tell you that obedience was never one of my virtues. (Is obedience a virtue? I don't think it is.)

What I do remember is the trainer telling us that one day they brought both the baseball players and the ballet dancers to their gym at the same time. They looked out into the weight room and all the baseball players were lifting weights and all the ballet dancers were stretching!  Even before I started coaching, I got the point of this story - people were working on what they were already good at. The ballet dancers really needed to be stronger and the baseball players really needed to be more flexible.

YOU GET BETTER WHEN YOU GET OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE.  Read that last sentence seven or eight times. Have it tattooed upside down on your chest so you can see it every time you look down.

You know why so many people want to do throws instead of randori? Because just like the baseball players and the ballet dancers, they look good doing it.

A lot of people don't want to fight. They talk a good game. They lift hard in the gym. But when it comes to standing on that line and showing what they're made of, they have a million excuses.

"I did that yesterday."

"One more round of randori isn't going to help me win."

"I could get injured and not be able to compete in the real match that counts."

 (I have NEVER understood how you can be too injured to train but not too injured to compete, no matter how many times I hear that stupid line.)

Most people, deep down, don't want to fight that often. They're afraid. They're afraid to lose, afraid to get hurt, afraid that people will look at them and think they look stupid.

You can't get better by just doing what's fun or whatever you feel most like doing on that particular day. Okay, maybe you weren't sunbathing. I'll bet those baseball players were lifting really heavy weights and were probably sore after practice. It wasn't what they needed. What they needed was to get pushed out of where they felt comfortable and to work on whatever it was they really didn't want to do.

Guess what? As a coach, your job is to push your athletes outside of that comfort zone.  If you're just going to help people be comfortable and agree with them, you may as well be that guy by the pool bringing the drinks with the little umbrellas in them. I mean, that guy is cool and all. But he's not a coach.

Business, Judo, Life

This was on my voice mail recently:

"Are you dead? Did you quit judo? Do you hate me? Why haven't I heard from you?"

I am not dead, I haven't quit judo and I don't hate my friend who left the message. I have been working an enormous amount lately. I am a consultant on staff at the university. Just for the heck of it I am taking a graduate course in data mining. I'm doing consulting work for my clients. On top of all of that, to prove that I am clinically insane, recently I put in bids on two contracts. If you've never bid on a federal contract, you have had a charmed life. The most recent document we submitted was about 200 pages and it has to be 200 pages of research design, analysis, qualifications - not just s#@t you made up. We won't  know if we got it for a while but, win or lose, I am enormously proud of the work we did and of my team that put it together. Of course, I would prefer to win, since it will mean a fair amount of money for us.

So... this all got me to thinking about the very different attitude I have taken about winning and losing in business and in judo. As part of one contract we needed a section on "past performance". This is a summary of the similar work you have done. Putting this together, I came up with a list of 22 contracts we had completed, and I know this wasn't the full list but it was most of them over the past 20 years. Most of our contracts are from 2- 5 years, so that is a good amount of work. I recalled as I went through the list a few we had bid on and did not get. The really odd thing is, every loss I had in judo took me years to get over. I would go lock myself in a room and cry for hours. Sometimes days. I would be upset about it every time I thought about it. 

Oddly, I never cried over any work we lost out on. In fact, once, when we had a grant that was not funded and I asked the first author for the reviews and he admitted he had been mad we didn't get it and thrown the reviews away, I was shocked. To me, those reviews are my chance to see what I did wrong and correct it for the next time. This is really odd because, unlike judo, when I don't get the contract or grant, I lose money and, if I can't get enough funded, people lose their jobs. 

Why are losses in sports so much more personal? 

I'm not sure, but two reasons I can think of are:

Opportunities in business are continuous.  I have an idea of how much work is reasonable for our company to do, the rate we want to grow, and we are often booked a year or two in advance. There isn't a week that goes by that some possibility doesn't come up where we can submit a proposal. When we are looking for more work, we'll usually let two or three pass by before we find the right one. Sometimes we'll even start on a bid only to drop it a week later when something more promising comes across my desk. Just imagine if the Olympics came every week.

There is more of a time lag between when you put out all of the effort and when you find out the decision. In competition, yes, you have trained for years, but the real time of competition, you fight your hardest and right then are told if you win or lose. Usually, I will put in a proposal and not find out if we won it or not for another two to three months, sometimes as much as seven months later. By then I've done a lot of other work, been paid for a lot of the work I did in the past. Imagine if judo was like that - if you competed, and then you went home. A few weeks later, you'd get a letter telling you not that you won that tournament, but that you won one two months earlier. The next month, your medal would come in the mail.

That disconnect takes some of the emotion out of it. Maybe that is why people were interested in watching me fight but no one is interested in coming to my office and watching me create diagrams of a designs for a data warehouse. Okay, well, maybe that's not the ONLY reason.

Coaching and Ego

The fact that I'm writing this at nearly 1 a.m. gives you some idea of my current schedule. However, I often run into people who tell me they noticed I am not writing in my blog very often, so, this one is for you ...

At practice yesterday, two points occurred to me about coaching and ego. Ronda and Eric were doing randori and Gary Butts made the comment,

"AnnMaria will go stand there to make sure they don't go through the window."

One of the black belts who was visiting for the first time laughed, but I went and stood by the window. Going through a plate glass window could seriously hurt somebody. Afterwards, I was telling the other black belt, who also coaches, that my views on coaching had changed over the years. When I was younger I thought, like many people, that a real judo coach could beat everyone in the room, that age didn't matter, size didn't matter, it was just skill.

As I got older I realized that was 

• Wrong
• Irrelevant

I am a little, old person. When I was a little young person I beat a lot of people bigger than me at tournaments. Read this next sentence slowly.

There is no such thing as winning at practice.

You see, that is why they call it practice. It is practice for other things, one of which is going to tournaments where they have winners and losers. Also, I worked out with Miguel Tudela at my old club, Tenri Dojo. Miguel was, at the time, the number one judo player in the 209 and over category. I could not beat Miguel, even in my prime. Size does matter and the only people who pretend it doesn't are the really big people.

Even if you can beat everyone in the room, so what? If you are that tough maybe you should be competing and someone else should be coaching. You may find it is a whole lot harder when you have to go four minutes round after round against someone YOUR SIZE and you DON'T know all the moves the other person is going to do because you never saw him or her before and they ARE going at you 110%.

I had my knee replaced last year. That isn't an irrelevant statement here. A critical job of the coach is maintaining the athlete's safety. I was working out with - a coach - my foot got caught between the mats, I got thrown from the knee up. From the knee down my leg stayed where it was. 

Now, I have a different view as a coach. I am watching the facilities, making sure the mats don't come apart that, no one goes flying through a window or smacks into a wall. If there had been someone there watching that day, maybe I would not have been injured. 

In our new facility, the mats are permanent and blocked against the wall so they can't come apart. Ronda laughed at me because even at the training camp in Tunisia I picked up some of the mats and moved them so there wasn't a gap. I used to do that regularly at the old location for the West Coast Training Center.

I am always walking around picking up belts so no one can trip on them, standing by the window,  making people turn around so they are facing the mat while waiting their turn for randori, rather than with their back to it, moving over people in matwork who are about to run into each other. Yes, it doesn't look as cool as throwing people or armbarring them and it isn't really as fun, either. You know what is way less fun, though? Having your knee replaced.

(Oh, just so you know, I am watching to see people do their techniques right, don't get bad habits, don't break the rules and other judo-related points. I'm not just a movable mat for the window and walls. My point though is that correcting type of behavior can feed a coach's ego, where the standing by the window, fixing the mats, well, not so much.)

The other part of being a coach and ego is kind of a no-lose situation that occurred to me yesterday. When you are a competitor and people you used to be able to catch in pins, throws, armbars or chokes you can no longer catch nearly as often, you get frustrated. Even if it is because they are getting better, the fact is, they are getting better than you. So, if you catch them - good! I am a good judo player. If not, bad! They are improving faster than me.

If it bothers you as a coach if your players start throwing you and armbarring you, then you missed the point somewhere. 

Now that you are a coach, it is like this. If I catch them - good! I am not totally old and decrepit yet. If I can't catch them - good! They are getting better. That's the idea. I'm a good coach. So, you get to feed your ego either way. Kind of makes up for the mats- windows - belts thing.

Like Switzerland, but without the Chocolate

I realize we came back from Tunisia a month ago, but business has been wonderfully crazy busy. I am taking a five minute break to write this post. My advice to anyone who has a chance to go to the training camp in Tunisia next year is that you should go. It would be especially good for just about any American player. I mostly watched the women's practices. The first thing I noticed is that there were several countries you don't see that often. Tunisia, of course, Kazakhystan which I probably spelled totally wrong and Spain all had a lot of players. There were a few from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Australia and I don't remember who all else. There were some really good players but there were also a lot of upcoming athletes so if you are coming to your first camp, this would be a good choice. There is also the fact that EVERYONE was incredibly nice.

In Tunisia most people speak Arabic and French and neither Ronda nor I speak either. It didn't matter. All the players at camp went out of their way to get matches with each other. When Ronda hurt her knee, the Spanish coach came up to me (at least I speak Spanish) and offered to have their doctor check it for her and tape it. Some how she made the Tunisian coach understand that she wanted to come to practices and do gripping, matwork and whatever she could with her knee taped up and the coach was fine with it, so she was able to attend every practice and get in tons of matwork.

Then there is the country itself. It is amazingly beautiful and not at all what I expected, given all of the negativity we hear in the news about Arabic countries and Africa and here you have both together. The food was great. The people were great. The history was amazing.

Even the cab drivers were nice. We went on a tour of the historical sites between practices and Ronda commented on how friendly everyone was. He said,

"In Tunisia, everyone is welcome. We get along with everybody. We are the Switzerland of Africa. Like Switzerland, but without the chocolate. No chocolate. It's too hot here. It would melt."

Shag Okada: A man worth remembering

In the book, How to stop worrying and start living, Dale Carnegie wrote,

“I realize now that people are not thinking about you and me or caring what is said about us. They are thinking about themselves—.... They would be a thousand times more concerned about a slight headache of their own than they would about the news of your death or mine.” 

That is usually true. I have been too busy to write anything on this blog. I was in Tunisia and when I got back I had some terrific consulting opportunities come up, so I didn't write anything at all.  When I got some time, I planned to write something about the training camp. And I had people to meet with at work and practice at the West Coast Judo Training Center and a dentist appointment ...

and then I received an email that Shag Okada died.

So I stopped worrying about all of the rest of that stuff to write about him. I knew Shag for nearly thirty years and in all of that time he was never once anything but helpful and kind to me. He didn't have any reason to be. In fact, thirty years ago, a lot of people would say he had reasons not to be. I was female in a sport that was supposed to be for males. I was non-Japanese in a sport that was supposed to be Japanese. There was a lot of racism and sexism. Shag should have been on that side. He was older, Japanese, male, and integral part of Nanka Judo Yudanshakai (the largest and probably oldest judo black belt organization in the country). I didn't even go to a meeting for years after I got my black belt. Things get back to me, though. One thing that got back to me nearly thirty years ago when there was a discussion of funding players to the U.S. Open and National championships. My name came up and several people were against giving me a dime. I wasn't from the "right" club, "But she's a girl!" some people objected (I was in my twenties, had a masters degree and working as an engineer at the time). It was just as well I wasn't at the meeting. Shag, who even back then was a force to be reckoned with, stood up and said,


"But she's winning."

It was simple, to him. And I did get the same funding as everyone else. He was for equal opportunity before it was popular.

Various judo publications would ask high-ranking black belts to predict the outcome of the next tournament. (This was before we had the Judo Forum for things like that! ) I beat every American I fought for two years straight and yet, in every publication, the only person who picked me as the one to win the Panamerican Trials, U.S. Nationals, U.S. Open, World Trials or Olympic Festival was Shag Okada. When I pointed that out to him, and thanked him after one of those tournaments he looked surprised and said,

"But I had to pick you. I've seen you train."

The reason he had seen me train is that he let me, Dawn Beers, Jimmy Martin and two dozen other judo players use his dojo, Orange County Kodokan, every single weekend for years on end. Just to help us get better. Twenty-five years later, we started the West Coast Judo Training Center based on the concept he supported back in the 1980s.

When I had a baby, I wanted to get life insurance, which was something I knew nothing about. I asked Shag, since that was his business. I trusted him and whatever he told me I would have bought. He said,

"You're young and healthy. You don't need that much life insurance. Buy this one. It's not very expensive and it's plenty for you."

That kind of shot my negative image of insurance salesmen for life.

Shag was very knowledgable about judo. He donated an enormous amount of his time to judo from the local through national level all of his life. He was even an international coach, leading the Panamerican Team. He supported me when I was president of California Judo, Inc. All of that is nice and appreciated.

More than anything, though, what I remember about Shag over thirty years is that he was generous, honest, kind and fair. If, as I really do think, the measure of your success in life is how many people will be truly sorry when you are gone, then Shag Okada was a successful person indeed.

Sixth Time is a Charm

Today was the sixth time Ronda entered the senior national championships. She has competed every year since she was 17, except for last year when she took some time off. For the sixth time, she won the national championships. She first competed in 63 kg when she was 16, back in 2003 and then moved up to 70 kg in 2007. She never lost to an American at either division.

Usually when someone wins a national title their family, friends and even acquaintances make a big deal out of it. I know for Ronda a lot of people took the attitude like,

"Oh, it's Saturday, I went to Starbuck's and Ronda won the national championships."

First of all, I wanted to take this opportunity to say how immensely proud of Ronda I am. Winning looks easy because she has trained so damn HARD, year after year after year. That's worth mentioning.This is the third point tournament she entered this year and among those she has had 11 matches and won them all by ippon. Someone made the snarky comment that doesn't mean she's been training, that she could have won them all easily anyway. I think that remark is incredibly rude and disrespectful to both Ronda and her competitors. Ronda has been very fortunate to have some really good people helping teach her and coach her over the years. She has also worked her ass off. She didn't go into Wal-Mart, walked down to aisle twelve and pick up super-ninja judo powers off the top shelf.


Speaking of judo, someone told me a long time ago that the only reason he read my blog was for the tips about judo and that it should be required to have a judo tip in every post. To make up for my slacking in the past, here are a couple of training tips. Next time I will try to remember to put in some tips on defense in matwork, since this blog is getting too long already.

REQUIRED JUDO TIP #1
Why does someone out of left field sometimes beat the number one player? It isn't often that a player is number two or five for years and then knocks off the number one competitor in the division. There are a few reasons, some having to do with the top player and others related to his or her competition.

If you've been competing against a person for a while, you know what your competitor does. You know if the person is right-handed or left-handed, prefers forward attacks, does counters, is better at matwork. That person isn't very likely to catch you with something unexpected. You don't get to be number one unless you STUDY your competition. You also expect them to know what you do. They're studying you, too. On the other hand, a person who is just coming up from the juniors you may never have seen before. The person comes in for a forward throw, you block and next thing you know you are slammed with a backward combination that you didn't see coming. Or they have some weird way of doing o soto gari from both sleeves or something else that you haven't expected. The point is, your regular competitors have spent years working on their techniques and anything new is going  to be well, new and somewhat unperfected. "Unknown" players though, can have been working on that double-sleeve o soto gari from when they were six until now, for ten years, but YOU don't know about it.

Not only are those unknown players, by definition, going to come at you with techniques which you can't predict but they also don't necessarily know they are supposed to lose. This can cut both ways. They can approach the match thinking,
"Oh, my God, oh my God, I'm going to get humiliated."

I've even heard people in that position say,
"Well, after I lose to ----- , then I have either Joe or Blow to fight for bronze."

On the other hand, the people you have beaten ten times before, psychologically it IS going to be hard for them to overlook the fact that you beat them the last ten times by ippon and they haven't gotten magically better since then and you haven't gotten magically worse.

So, if you are the underdog, take this tip to heart. Come on in the beginning of the match like a bat out of hell before the :"favorite" has figured out what you do, if you're right-handed, if you're a terror in matwork. Don't hesitate, don't be afraid to attack.

Now a few words to the "overdog" . Kind of sucks, I know. If you win, everyone expects it but if you lose everyone will make a big deal of it. Sort of a double-bind for you. Know what sucks even worse, though? Losing! So, listen up here. The two huge mistakes you don't want to make both involve getting cocky. TRAIN!!! I know that is brain-dead obvious but I have seen too many people who have won the nationals, U.S. Open, whatever, several times and don't really train for it, who take the attitude,

"Oh, so you think Joe Blow is going to beat me?"

Maybe not. Maybe Sam You-Never-Heard-Of is going to beat you because you are out of shape, had to kill to lose those eight pounds to make weight at the last minute, you ran out of energy at the third minute and got thrown because you were exhausted.

Never, never, never take anything for granted. They don't give you points on the board just because you won the last two years. The second reason the "overdog" loses also has to do with being unprepared, but psychologically. So, you get to the tournament, you trained, you were in shape and your first match is Sally Lou Who. You're used to feeling out your opponent, getting your grip. You walk up to Sally Lou, reach up to get a grip and she drapes herself over your arm and does a soto makikomi and you're done.Apparently she has not received the memo that you're supposed to grip fight for a while before attacking.

Or you knock Sally Lou down for a yuko right off the bat, and start to get up so you can throw her for ippon the next time, but Sally Lou whose dad was four-time Olympic wrestling champion has crummy throws but the best matwork of any fifteen-year-old in the universe and she turns you and pins you for ippon.

That 15-year-old kid you're going to fight? Take her every bit as seriously as last year's Olympic team member. Warm up for the match just the same. Get the grip you want. Get the set up you want. Be ready. Because you know what? You need to make it through that fifteen-year-old kid or you're not getting to the finals.

You'd be amazed how often people are thinking about who they're going to fight in the finals when they haven't even fought their first match yet.

I was visiting Mojica Judo Club one day and a very insightful young player asked me,
"What do you think about when you are competing in those big tournaments like the world championships?"

I told him,
"If you think about it like winning the Panamerican Games or the World championships you'd be so nervous you'd go crazy. I just think about winning the next match,about making one less mistake than the other person."

Good job little Pumpkin on making the least mistakes today!