Judo Night Makes a Comeback

BJJ (12/23/08 6:00pm)

Our head instructor Kazeka Muniz, besides being an all around bad ass, holds a black belt in Judo as well as his BJJ black belt. Not only is he belted, he's quite accomplished as a judo player. In fact, when I first started training with him (we were under the Gracie Barra banner) every Wednesday night was known by the guys as "Take-down" or "Judo" night because all we did on Wednesday were throws. Brutal, bone crushing throws.

Over time, the attendance at the Wednesday night classes started to dwindle, Kazeka was traveling to train Michael Bisping for his UFC fights, and not too many of the guys complained that they weren't being thrown on their heads any more. As a result "Judo Night" went by the wayside.

Well, last night we had a bit of a reprisal. When I got to the gym, the kids class was in full swing. And there they were, chucking each other over their shoulders like coffee farmers unloading gigantic sacks from the days harvest. I watched for a minute, the remembrance of "Judo Night" and my time spent at the Japanese Ju Jutsu school all began to flood back. I knew to take extra time in stretching out my back and preparing to RELAX.

So after a pretty intense warm-up we began the training. I think that Dr. Evil and I were probably the only guys in there who have been through Judo Night before. The rest of the class had never experienced the joys of being thrown over an opponents shoulder.

When I asked the Boss what the name of the particular throw we did was he said....."shoulder throw" and I let it go at that. When I looked up throws online, according to a couple of sites it seems that we were doing the Ippon Seoinage. Just a single shoulder throw.

The really cool thing was that I picked right up like I had been doing them the entire time. Kazeka even said "Perfect" a couple of times when he was watching me. That was pretty awesome. I''m hoping that Judo Night makes a comeback in 2009.