Trophies and Trinkets

(stuff I've won in jiu jitsu over the decades)

Over the years from about 1991 through 2015, I competed in an awful lot of grappling competitions.

I learned a great deal out there on the competition mats. I also got a lot of medals and trophies—trinkets, really—that have little intrinsic value beyond helping me remember some of these events.

I competed in hundreds of matches, from high school wrestling to judo and jiu jitsu. I won some tournaments that really mattered to me at the time, but I also don’t remember where most of the medals came from.

Here’s a pile of medals from judo competitions over the years:

You can probably see that I haven’t really prioritized taking care of these mementos over the years. More often than not, I was amused at the apparent loftiness placed on what was often a local or regional event. I don’t mean to take anything away from serious competitors who have worked hard for their accomplishments at all—quite to the contrary, it’s the physical trinket itself that makes me roll my eyes.

Here, they’re useful because they help me remember to tell a little story about my time competing in jiu jitsu and judo.

My first judo tournament was an in-house event for judo class participants. Although it wasn’t a big event and it was very local, there were at least a couple of tough dudes I got to compete against and try to throw or pin. This early success really encouraged me to compete in bigger events, and the next year, I won something called the Virginia State Championships of judo, even though I only had a couple of years of judo experience by this point.

Naturally, that encouraged me to try to win some even bigger events, and I did end up winning some of those over the years, ultimately finding an upper limit at the national level of judo competition. Probably the coolest looking judo award I ever won was from the Liberty Bell Judo Tournament in Philadelphia:

Okay, so this is all about the triviality of trinkets, but this trophy is actually really cool!

You can read more about my early judo days if you want here:

Judo competition was a lot of fun, but it was also very tough on my body. I certainly landed on my head more times than you’re supposed to, and during one event, I felt a little warning sign as my hand felt numb after a throw. That was more than enough feedback for me to change my style immediately, and I tended to compete in more jiu jitsu events from that moment onward.

Still, judo was so much fun. Trying to throw someone who doesn’t want to be thrown is a unique challenge.

All the time I was doing judo, I was also sneaking around and training jiu jitsu as much as I could. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has a lot of similarities with judo, but there’s much more of a focus on what happens on the ground, so you have more of a focus on the submissions (chokes or joint locks) than the throw or takedown, although those are still present too.

Here’s a messy pile of BJJ tournament medals, including several from the tournament I started with some friends, US Grappling:

Some of these medals are from bigger events with bigger budgets, and each of them has a little story to go with it (if you’re super interested or if you’re one of my students wondering about these, feel free to ask in person):

Most of these are from a time when I was really growing as a competitor, traveling around the country as much as I could in order to compete. They remind me of the literal distance to the moon I drove in order to accomplish all this, in order to find yet another event to compete in for a particular weekend.

By 2004—very hard for me to accept that this was 20 years ago—I had attained some success within a few of the medium-sized organizations around, and I got some fancy looking accolades:

This one felt like a bit less of a trinket! Still, it was certainly designed to keep me motivated to compete in these events. I understood that awards were a necessary part of marketing, and this sort of marketing was the type I could live with, since it made me look good!

Video was much more rare back then—your phone couldn’t really do video recording—so few of my matches from this era ultimately made it online, but here’s one that did (from an event on that fancy plaque):

Here’s another similar award from that same year:

Still, there was one event I really wanted to win: the IBJJF Pan Ams. This was the first really big event I competed in, and I lost in the finals as a blue belt. The division I was in had 60 competitors, which seemed like an awful lot for 2003, and it was, although today’s numbers dwarf those ancient competitor counts.

After a few more tries (and another medal at purple belt adult), I finally returned to win—this time, the division was called “masters”, which means “over the age of 30” in BJJ-speak. I was able to win gold in my division, and further, this was the first year IBJJF did the no-gi version of the same event. I won that event as well, along with the open weight division there, so I actually won 3 IBJJF Pan Ams golds in one year, oddly enough:

Over the next several years, my focus turned more toward running jiu jitsu tournaments myself with US Grappling, and to Revolution BJJ, which is sort of the hub of the three jiu jitsu schools I own today.

While the Pan Ams medals are, collectively, among my biggest accomplishments in BJJ, I think this trophy from a tough tournament I won is the coolest looking one:

If you know about the sport of jiu jitsu, maybe some of this will resonate with you. If you’re not a practitioner, I hope my little story (with visual aids) came across in the spirit intended: nostalgic, but fading into the past.

Does this trigger any memories of your own time competing in a sport or art? Do you have any awards you’ve kept over the years? What do the awards mean to you?

Don’t be shy: the Beer Olympics totally counts! Just tell me what sorts of competitions you’ve had over the years, and thanks for indulging my nostalgia today.