It had been a good 7 years since I’d last entered Martial Arts competition of any form. The last tournament I participated in was a Shidokan hybrid rules that heavily favored more traditional Kyokushin style fighters rather than the few of us weened on Mixed Martial Arts at the time. In a last minute development, I got to be on the first fight of the day; the organizers had decided to scrap the underage divisions due to lack of participants and went ahead with the lightweight over 18 matches. I hadn’t even warmed up and was listening to my ancient little Walkman when one of my team mates nudged me and told me they’d just called my name over the PA. Surprised as I was, I wasn’t going to show up late to the match and get disqualified for tardiness, so I hauled ass despite the organization’s lack of communication and made it to the mats.
I’ve always hated going up first when it comes to events such as these. It’s not fear of crowds or anything like that – I’ve been a live performing musician for about a decade and shed any such phobias long ago – but I find difficult to get into the right mindset; it is hard for me to get the engine warmed up when I’m kicking off MA events. Usually someone else will start it off and more often than not one of my team mates would be going up before me, I would then draw from the general energy of the people in the venue as well as that of my mates and get warmed up pretty good. However, when one is up first a person has a great deal of added pressures: your team looks upon you to give the best first impression, the crowd expects the first fight to set the tone for the entire day or night, and to top it all off you’ve got your own expectations to contend with (usually the harshest part of it all). It’s always a difficult thing to manage, the minutes – or seconds - leading up to a fight, but to do so when being the opener for the night is an added stress factor that can often make a fighter come psychologically undone.
So there I was, in the first Shidokan tournament in Costa Rica sans the clinch and the grappling (ergo a kyokushin tourney with a different name). I start the fight cold, just going in straight for the guy the way I’d practiced so many times, problem is this isn’t the type of match I usually practiced for. At the time I was a lanky, somewhat tall lightweight whose striking had never been of the devastating variety but more of the speedy stick and move sort, since Muay Thai was my bread and butter as far as stand up went I relied greatly on using elbow and knees when working somebody inside. This proved to be my undoing as I seemed to basically freeze up; every time I was going to throw an elbow or go for the clinch my mind would remind me that these were no-no’s in this context, which obviously impaired my performance. Add to that the fact that the person I was fighting was an experienced Kyokushin with shins like logs who picked me apart with low kicks to my lead leg; he must have hit me right above the knee a good thirty times, the total count of low kicks to that leg in the vicinity of the number fifty. At the end of the first round I knew I needed to change my approach but my mind was still reeling from the pain in my lead leg, so I looked to the guy at my corner, an old team mate who never really trained with diligence but always was around and was there to help with me while my trainer helped my other team mates (given the sudden turn of events). He could offer me nothing but “hit him more”. Sage advice, indeed! I took that pearl of wisdom with me as the second round started. My lead leg had taken such a beating that I couldn’t trust it to support me for kicks with my back leg, much less to lead-in with it, so I decided to use what little boxing I could use within such a limiting set of rules. My straight punches to the chest, delivered in descending trajectory, found their mark and availed me with some hope for a whole of 10 seconds as the referee told me to stop hitting to the face. In my head I wondered simultaneously if he was on drugs of if his understanding of basic human anatomy was fundamentally different than that of the rest of the world, for how could he be calling me for hitting the guy on the face with my fist when they were clearly landing on my opponent’s chest? I was dumbfounded, uselessly trying to plea through my mouthpiece, knowing full well that it would do no good.
My only remaining weapon taken from me by substandard refereeing, I realized that I couldn’t go on much longer. I took a few more hits to the leg and eventually it buckled under my weight. I tried standing and found it has swollen to such a degree that I was having difficulty just bending it so I could stand in a fighting stance. I threw in the towel, fearing that if I took any more low kicks to the lead leg I might be spending the rest of my life in and out of surgery for my knee and shattered femur. I spent the rest of the day tending to my now unbending left leg while I watched as the guy who beat me won the whole thing.
So now I was standing in a small, dark rock & roll club being told at the last minute that I would be fighting first rather than last in an Amateur Full Contact event with hybrid kickboxing/muay thai rules. I couldn’t help but draw a parallel to the last time I’d competed. My mind started racing for a few moments, but I managed to reign it in.
Gloves come on, off comes the shirt and on comes the head-gear. I warm up for a good ten minutes or so and force my mind into keeping cool and focused. I see my opponent warming up a few yards away and try to size him up. He’s shorter but strong-looking; he’s built and might be a handful physically speaking. I shoot glances at him now and then while I throw slow combinations to loosen up. He avoids my gaze every time our eyes lock. I don’t make much of it at the time but in hindsight it may have been that he was somewhat intimidated by me. I continue to look at the man now and then so as to get the idea of him being the target in front of me when the action starts. We’re summoned to the mats, I take my corner and continue to loosen up, trying to keep my cool and focus on the man across from me. They announce my name and my affiliation, which is greeted with loud cheers from the audience, something I did not expect, it surprises me for a fraction of a second as my mind quickly dismisses it in favor of staying on the subject of the imminent dance. The man across me moves a lot for a man about to fight, but that’s just my mind drawing early conclusions about his attitude; he might be nervous, he might be using a little too much energy to warm up, he might be a superhuman specimen that will kick my ass.
The ref is a San Shou expert, or so it’s said over the PA. Looking back I seriously doubt the man ever refereed a full contact match in his life. I tell myself I’m going punish this guy for every hit he gives me; every little tag will have dire consequences. The fight starts, we touch gloves - something that always unnerves me due to the proneness of some fighters to take cheap shots at you when doing this age-old salute – and we begin to circle each other, my brain stops actively thinking and goes into the reptilian state of mind: nothing but instinct and cold, minimal, split second decision making at a seemingly unconscious level, the rest of the world a blur just beyond the edge of my peripheral vision.
What happens afterwards is a very subjective recollection of what transpired, as my brain wasn’t recording on the level of the conscious mind but rather storing everything at a deeper level whereupon it might be drawn from in the future should it be required. I remember thinking my opponent’s kicks weren’t hard at all. I recall getting knocked down from a hit to the head then taking my time getting up for the ten -count, the hit burst both my lower and upper lips on the left side. I remember thinking something along of “what the fuck!? I can’t be done already!” and getting up while assessing if I was too dizzy to continue. Truth be told I was a little rocked but I decided that if I was going to lose I might as well get knocked out cold because I wasn’t about to quit.
Back into the fray, I remember using a few low kicks, wondering just how much damage I was doing to him, then jabbing a little. I recall retreating while countering and him going down. I remember getting stopped for some reason then starting back again and knocking him down with a jab-straight combo. I remember a spin backfist followed by a straight that knocked him down as well. A blocked attempt at a roundhouse. Knocking him down some more. Getting caught on the jaw, right on the right beneath the ear and falling hard, wondering if the pain in my upper molars meant they had been cracked or knocked out of the gums, taking my time to get up, using up the ten-count intelligently, then going back at it, taking it to the guy. I remember trying to look fresh despite the fact that I didn’t feel all that fresh, thinking that I better up my already grueling conditioning workouts some more. In the end I was victorious as my opponent could continue no longer.
I remember feeling a mixture of relief and elation at the fact that I won. I remember feeling that I needed to improve much, much more.
Now that I have seen the video footage of my fight a couple of times I can see the mistakes I knew I made confirmed and some I didn’t intue revealed. I need to improve my footwork a great deal, especially when cutting angles to avoid and retreat. I must remember to keep my head low when retreating as well. I must exploit openings with much more severity. I must improve my pacing and head movement.
I also noticed that the first time I got knocked down it wasn’t because of the punch itself, but of the roundhouse that swiftly follow it. The reason it hit me square on the head was because I reeled rather than rolled from the punch to the kisser and exposed myself horrible. I do feel proud about getting up from that for I have seen many a fighter stay down from such a hit as a roundhouse kick. I have done this to people myself! The second time it was a bit of a lucky shot for the guy. I originally thought it must have been a looping cross of some sort, but it was more akin to a push-punch step that squeezed through my guard, which I have to work on with diligence as well. I also realize that I did better in certain aspects than I gave myself credit for, so it isn’t all too self-critical in the end, I do have positive aspects as a fighter.
After having removed myself from competitive martial arts due to the realities of life, while not leaving the martial arts all together, I deem I have staged a moderately pleasing comeback, one that indicates, in my eyes, that I must still improve greatly and that can only come as the product of superhuman effort and discipline. I now know that I am capable of more than I thought and that I haven’t entirely lost my abilities. I have to fight again in a couple of weeks and must mend a thumb that might be slightly fissured and improve as much as I can on the above mentioned areas of my fighting before that. A test in life is always rewarded by even further testing, for joy is to be derived from the performing of these trials rather than the payoff, for reveling in the payoff brings complacency and self-conceit.
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