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Showing posts from 2010

Lemonade

Just when you think you have life figured out, it throws more lemons at you. I had finally gotten to the point where I was consistently going to practice and watching my skills steadily improve, and then in February it happened. I was thrown by one of our less experienced players, but it was a bit off-balance and even though I was able to to take a good breakfall on the throw, my Partner (who had a fair amount of weight on me) lost his balance and landed directly on top of my shoulder. In the mirror the next morning, it looked as if someone had implanted a grapefruit underneath the skin of my right shoulder. I figured I would give it a couple of days to heal before seeing a Doctor, but it definitely hurt and it was hard to use my hand for the first few days.  Of course, two days later, on Friday, as my physical pain was slowly melting away, my emotional pain exploded. You see, that was the day that my mother was diagnosed with Actue Mylogenous Leukemia - AML. Suddenly the pain in my

New Rules = New Strategies

I don't mean to harp on the no leg grab rules, but I just saw this on the USA Judo site, and I needed to share. First and foremost, I congratulate Travis Stevens on his hard-fought Bronze medal, and I also commend him on his quick thinking of how to use the new rules to his advantage. By his own admission from the USA Judo site, he coaxed his opponent into an illegal leg grab to win his match and put him in the semifinals: "I was shaking my arm out and trying to figure out how I was going to beat this guy when I remembered from watching his other fight that he was always trying to grab [Takahiro Nakai's] leg when he stuck it out," Stevens said of his strategy to capitalize on a new rule that bans grabbing your opponent's leg during a match.  "So I decided to go with that and I was able to trick him into grabbing my leg and trying to throw me with a te guruma [hand wheel throw] and it worked." Stsiashenka's failed te guruma attack resulted in a h

Baseball, Neil Adams, and the New IJF Rules.

If you are a practicing Judoka, and haven't been living under a rock for the last few months, you should already know that the IJF has put a lot of rule changes into place as of January 1st. Like everyone else, I will give you my two cents, but first, in order to paint the picture, I want to talk about Baseball - specifically about Balls and strikes. Two rules that even the most casual observer about Baseball knows: - If you hit a ball that lands outside the foul lines it is considered a foul ball, and is out of play. - If the umpire considers a pitch to be hittable, even if the batter doesn't swing, he can call it a strike. These rules are considered fundamental rules, and even my 6 and 8 year old kids know them already. The first rule, the fall ball rule, has very objective criteria. If the ball lands on one side of the line it's fair and on other side it is foul (yes, if the ball lands close to the line on either side, it is subject both the umpire's perspective