It’s hard to tell half the time sometimes people post in threads from many years ago but I hadn’t seen this so read it all from the start and was like hang on a sec haha
I’m going to take a slightly different take on this. Not why I started training combat sports, but why I started grappling.
I wrestled a little bit in my pre-teen years. Then spent a few middle school years doing Tae Kwon Do with a Jhoon Rhee school in Maryland that was run (like all the Jhoon Rhee schools in Maryland in the late 1970s/early 1980s) by full contact karate fighters (Rodney “Batman” Batiste, Michael “Cobra” Coles, and my instructor Dan Magnus, to name a few).
I was always grateful for the full contact/PKA influence on my early TKD training. But for years I used to have dreams in which I was fighting with someone, some stranger, trying to punch and kick, but always being out of range or off the mark. In the dreams, the only way I could win the fight was to close the distance and try and wrestle them.
As a kid, I never remembered my dreams. But this one was ridiculously recurrent. And as someone who had trained and competed in TKD as a youth - including light rounds with full contact fighters (I was 14 after all), the repeated failure of my striking was more than a little dismaying.
All the stranger because it wasn’t as if my wrestling in real life was any good. But in the dreams, it was the only thing that worked.
Over the years, I’ve realized there are a number of psychological/philosophical aspects to that dream (which I’ve since stopped having). But I’ve always thought that it was one factor pointing me in the direction grappling in general and jiu-jitsu in specific that I eventually chose.
I started so I could hone my skills better. All these kids I was bullying were going so I thought I’d better keep up if I wanted my bullying career to keep going.
Not really.
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I always wanted to learn to fight. When I hit 30 I was thinking “man I ll need to be able to defend my family” and signed a kick boxing class. Later went to boxing, because kicking injuries were too heavy. Not training for a few months now. But it is great to learn you are not made out of a glass and to be able to throw a punch. Also the ability to be relaxed in a fight helps a lot with handling stress in different life situations. If you are able to handle the adrenaline in a fight or spar, some situation where people will normally lose it, feel like a joke to you.
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When I was a kid I thought WWF was real. Parents sent me to a wrestling summer seminar when I was like 12 to prove otherwise. Feel like that sentence is funny enough on it’s own without further explanation.
Entered a tournament at 13, showed up in like a t-shirt and shorts and my opponent walked out in a singlet, head gear and proceeded to double leg smash me into another dimension. Fell in love with the mat and grappling after that and wrestled until I left for college. Missed grappling so I joined a BJJ gym so I could learn ground karate in my 30’s about two months ago.
Steven seagal movies. Nico, Hard til kill, under siege etc. It was like watching asterix & obelisk with people flying around left and right.
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