A Rough Introduction to Judo

In some ways, it might be fair to say that I was coddled through my first decade of life. For one thing, my mom was an elementary school teacher at the same school I was attending. This condition lasted from second through fifth grade, the end of elementary school where I grew up.

This meant a few things for me. For starters, instead of riding the bus to school on most days, I would hop in the car with my mom, who would take me directly to the school. I could then kill time in the library or maybe in her room until school started, and after school meant that I could play with Jabari, the principal’s son. We had a great time our fifth grade year roaming the halls of the school, making pretend spaceships out of cardboard boxes, and reading The Chronicles of Narnia together.

As the summer wound down, it was time to start middle school. This meant a lot of new things, but the one I want to focus on right now is riding the bus to school every day.

Now, riding the bus wasn’t some foreign experience for me! I didn’t always catch a ride with my mom, and besides, we weren’t at the same school for my first couple of years. Even still, this was something new: waiting for the bus with the other kids.

We would wait at the bus stop, which was on a corner of the street where my family lived. Our street corner was fairly typical for a suburban neighborhood, complete with a storm drain, like where Pennywise the clown might show up one day. We would stand on top of the concrete cover of the drain, which was just part of the sidewalk.

One day while waiting for the bus to arrive, I remember sort of wrestling around with some of the other kids. It would be another three years before I would wrestle in high school, and judo was still a decade away.

Well… judo was kind of a decade away.

All of the kids got into this little struggle, from what I recall. It’s not like it was just me and one other kid, but I have to focus on the two of us now.

It must have been cold outside. Let’s call this December. Maybe there was ice on the pavement, but South Carolina didn’t have very many mornings below freezing when I was growing up, and there are even fewer days like that now, so I can’t be sure. What I know for sure is that I had my hands in my pockets, and we were sort of kicking at each other’s feet.

I didn’t quite grasp what the game was, but I soon found out.

After maybe a dozen kicks back and forth, the other kid caught my foot right as my weight was shifting down on it. As my weight shifted toward where that foot had been just a split second ago, all of my weight shifted to that side. I was crashing fast.

Here’s me showing a proper judo foot sweep, something I incorporated into my jiu jitsu game years later.

The fall I took was nothing like Ben’s careful, graceful, trained fall here. Instead, I face-planted onto the concrete—or maybe it was the steel lip of the storm drain—and busted my lip open pretty nicely. Maybe it’s a good thing my hands were in my pockets, or else I might have posted and broken my arm.

I ended up having this terrible bloody Hitler-stache that turned into a scab in the coming week. This probably did not make my transition to middle school any easier.

This was a very rough introduction to judo for me. My actual intro to judo took place in 1997, and you can read all about that here: