Wednesday Night Training - A reflection

For many of us at University Judo, it has been a long day and a half. 

I myself got the news while I was at work teaching a lesson, and immediately felt my ability to face the crowd melt away and fortunately managed to get another teacher to cover the end of my lesson before I had a breakdown in front of thirty confused teenagers.

Tonight was the first judo training since it happened. There was jiu jitsu last night also but Wednesday night was normally a night that would include Rick, talking smack and chiding us over every microscopic detail of a technique that our little brains could not fathom (either that or denigrating us just for shits and giggles). So for very obvious reasons, Wednesday training had a very different tone to it. But if there's one thing Rick would have wanted, it was for the judo to continue, and that it did. It was good to see a crossroads of members represented, ranging from the old, the young and the teenage.

In contrast to usual, we began our session today with a mokuso, functioning as our minute of silence. We warmed up as Rick would have wanted us to, even throwing in the push-ups, sit-ups and scoops sets that we had slacked off on for so long. Rob Levy, our club's second-in-command for as long as I had been there, composed himself long enough to teach us a classic University Judo waza, namely, the hopping kouchi-kosotogari combo. We followed this with some quick rounds of ne-waza randoori before splitting the mats to do some competition drilling, which consisted of situational uchikomi, followed by tachi-waza randoori. We closed off with some nage-komi and some active warm downs (with one of those being hikikomi-gaeshi, another Littlewood favourite).

Before we bowed off, we finished with some sombre words. During this, Dave Mair, who knew Rick the longest of the members present on the day decided to give us a bit of insight into the significance of the man we were celebrating that night. He told us about the fact that Rick, in his 1972 Olympics appearance, took the eventual gold medallist the distance, because his crafty tachiwaza and renowned newaza put Shinobu Sekine off his game. He told us about how Rick, despite being a foreigner, was the man Okano-sensei asked to demonstrate techniques to his students, a task that no mere mortal would be trusted to do in the God of Newaza's class. He told us about how Rick, as a 4th dan, hit five sankaku-jime (triangle chokes for the less Japanese literate among us) in a row, just to prove a point.

They opened the floor to say some more words about our sensei, but I still felt a bit overwhelmed to communicate out loud in front of the crew so I guess I'll take my time, and maybe wait until the funeral. I will say this however: after feeling like a club newbie for so long, especially training amongst a number of our stalwarts, and not having the recognition or silverware that they earned, it hadn't fully dawned on me until recently that I had moved on from that position, especially having been an instructor for the last two and a half years. And now that Rick's gone, I guess I'm gonna have to step up my game and make him proud as he accesses his security camera and spies on us from whatever afterlife he's managed to takeover and convert into Neo-Tanuki.

For those that would like to share in his memory, the funeral will be at Purewa Cemetery in the All Saints Chapel (the bigger one, as a man of his status warrants) at 12pm. 

I will leave you with a video from tonight's randoori (at about 1:20 I try to emulate one of dai-sensei's signature moves, the yoko-tomoenage-juji-gatame combo). 

-Ben Uy