…or, Pat wears a suit.
We held our annual judo tournament (or shiai, pronounced “shee-eye”) on Saturday. We had about 60 competitors show up, in divisions from kids’ all the way to seniors (senior being anyone older than 16). There were only nine referees, which meant that if you came to ref, you were working all day.
This is because judo has three officials on the mat for each match: the referee and two corner judges. We had two fighting areas running, each one needing a minimum of three people to officiate. We wound up with a team of five people on Mat I and four on Mat II (my mat). What this essentially meant, for me, was that I was on the mats for three out of every four bouts.
It was a successful day: the club made some money, we had a minimum of injured competitors (the worst injury, by far, was a broken arm), and afterwards we all went out for all-you-can-eat sushi.
I told you I wore a suit.
This past weekend went like this:
Friday: Work, then pack, then go see Moon.
Saturday: Get up at some unholy hour, before the sun even deigns to rise, go pick up my friend and fellow judoka X, and then hit the road for Gimli. The town’s named for Odin’s shining hall, and it’s a three-hour drive from my house. X snoozed in the car, and I alternated between listening to 90s on 9 and Lithium on the satellite radio.
We arrived in Gimli shortly before the instructor did, so that was good. We got checked in at the hotel, got changed into our heavy cotton pants and canvas jackets, and went down to the seminar room, where they’d already laid out the judo mats. Quick stretch, and a bow-in, and then we covered nage-no-kata for two hours.
Judo kata, for those not familiar with the idea, are essentially choreographed, pre-arranged demonstrations of a set of techniques. Nage-no-kata means “forms of throwing”, and it is a brief survey of some of the techniques you would use to take a person from a standing position and put them ever so gently into a more horizontal position. There are five sets of three throws each, all demonstrated using both the right- and the left-handed techniques. First you demonstrate hand techniques, then a set of hip throws, foot techniques, and finally back and side sacrifice throws. For my brown belt, and then for my first-degree black belt, I needed to know the first three sets. For my next belt, nidan, I will need to know the entire nage-no-kata. So this was a good learning experience for me.
We broke for lunch at about noon. Lunch was delicious: a make-your-own sandwich bar, with assorted raw vegetables and the like. The room where we ate, Meeting Room C, looks out over the beach on Lake Winnipeg. If I recall correctly, Lake Winnipeg is only outclassed by the Great Lakes and Great Slave Lake for the title of largest lake on the continent. This weekend it was pretty choppy — high winds from the north drove waves onto shore. One of the instructors, who comes to Gimli fairly frequently, remarked that there’s usually about another hundred feet of beach in the summer.
After lunch we returned to the mats for katame-no-kata, the forms of grappling. Judo involves a fairly significant ground game, and this kata works through fifteen of the things you can do on the ground: five types of hold-down, five strangles, and five joint locks. X and I had never down katame-no-kata before, but we both took to it quite readily. One of the instructors asked us how often we’d done this kata before. When I said “Never,” his eyes got a little big, and he nodded. I took it as a compliment.
Katame-no-kata, which is required for your third-degree black belt, or sandan, involves a lot — a lot — of kneeling. I was glad that, forewarned, I had purchased knee pads. X, who didn’t have knee pads, ended up going out and buying some liniment. (Horse liniment, but that’s a story for another day.)
After a couple hours of groundwork, we broke for the day. I went for a swim in the pool, then to supper — a roast-beef buffet, with all the trimmings. Then X and I hit the hospitality suite for a while, waiting for 10 PM, when the kids would get kicked out of the pool. From 10 till 11, we swam, or hung out in the hot tub, or (briefly) baked in the sauna.
Sunday was more kata — we reconvened at 10 AM, after a hearty breakfast, to go over nage-no-kata and katame-no-kata again. Everyone was moving a little slower, stiff from the previous day’s workout. Right around noon we finished up, and helped load the mats into a truck.
Then we got a little lost, trying to find the highway from Gimli back down to Winnipeg — I ended up going down #9, when I wanted highway #8 — and that cost us about twenty minutes. Once we were back on track, X fell asleep. We had some lunch in Headingley, then pointed the car west and were back home in a couple hours.
And that, ladies and gents, was that.
Next time: The Writers’ Group meeting
Things change in a twinkling sometimes. My judo sensei, who has had cancer for a year and a half — maybe longer, I can’t remember what year it began — died this morning at 2 AM.
I saw him on Wednesday, and he looked fine, if a little thin. Now he’s gone, and I still can’t quite believe it.
Last night three of us carried 5,000 pounds between us, down a flight of stairs, and loaded it onto a truck.
This afternoon five of us carried the same 5,000 pounds back up the stairs.
Judo tournaments are a lot of fun.
…or “What I had to do for a silver medal”.
I’m the one being thrown.
Enjoy!
The throws are, in order:
Uki-otoshi (“floating drop”)
Seoi-nage (“shoulder throw”)
Kata-guruma (“shoulder wheel”)*
Uki-goshi (“floating hip throw”)
Harai-goshi (“sweeping hip throw”)
Tsurikomi-goshi (“lifting-pulling hip throw”)
Okuri-ashi-harai (“sideways foot sweep”)
Sasae-tsurikomi-ashi (“blocking lifting-pulling foot throw”)
Uchi-mata (“inner thigh throw”)
Each one is performed right-handed and left-handed.
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* Which impresses everyone, but really isn’t that bad of a landing, if you know what you’re doing.
So I got a silver in the kata competition. Video will come later, once I’ve youtubered it.
Tomorrow, sometime, I’ll be doing something very much like this:
at a tournament. (Except I only have to do the first nine throws.) Wish me luck!
This weekend I: saw, and had a brief chat with, William Gibson; did nage-no-kata with the head of the Canadian Grading Board for judo, and also had a brief intro to the first set of ju-no-kata; drew Darth Vader in Crayola crayon; and heard the cutest version of the ABC song I think I’ll ever hear.
Friday
I took the day off, since I wanted to be able to get to the reading at 2:30 PM. I left town about 11:30 AM, a little later than I meant to, but isn’t that always the way? Barreled down the highway, got into the city at about 1:15 PM or so, then made my way through the tail end of the noon rush to Portage Place. The reading was at the McNally Robinson bookstore on the main floor, in the little eatery there. I got into the store, and the food smelled so good. I regretted eating at McDonald’s in Portage, but I’d been hungry.
There weren’t any tables free. There were, however, quite a few tables with one person at them, and most of them looked like they were there for the reading. I was just trying to figure out who I was going to approach when two women got up from a table directly in front of the reading area and said they were leaving, and I could have their table if I wanted. Uh, yes. Thanks.
So I sat down, and the waiter came around, brought me a water and a menu. I ordered a root beer and waited. It was 2:00 PM, half an hour yet to go. A girl showed up, looking like she needed a seat, so I offered her a spot at my table. We chatted about writing for a while, then the reading began.
Gibson read from his latest book, Spook Country, which I finished reading last week, and thoroughly enjoyed. It’s set in the present day; as he’s said in recent interviews, the present is pretty much science fiction these days. After he and the poet John Havelda did their readings, there was about a half an hour Q&A with the audience. Some good questions were asked, on the nature of language (both authors like to play with language; Gibson, after all, coined the term cyberspace back in nineteen-eighty-what-have-you, and Havelda is (IIRC) a Hungarian poet, raised in England, now living in Portugal with his Portugese wife), on the future of books, and the like. Afterwards I was one of the first in line, and I got my beat-up old copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive* signed by Gibson.
to be continued…
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* I couldn’t find my copy of Neuromancer.
