The Whitest Belt
Friday, November 23, 2007
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
A few weeks ago I visited my friend Bill Odom, a retired Army colonel whom I met during our grad student days together at Ohio State. He was then a captain tapped to become a military history instructor at West Point and one half of a pair we called the “Ranger Twins,” since both he and the other captain (David Gray by name) wore the Ranger tab and Bill had actually commanded a Ranger company.
Bill has been a student of the martial arts since the age of twelve, and is a 6th degree black belt in karate. For as long as I’ve known him, he harbored the ambition to run a martial arts academy once he left the Army. Sure enough, he now owns Norfolk Karate Academy, the largest martial arts facility in Norfolk, Virginia.
In addition to karate, Bill offers instruction in Gracie Jiu Jitsu (aka Brazilian jiu jitsu), and in laying out the itinerary for my visit he said that on Friday we’d go out to dinner and Saturday morning I’d take a lesson in Gracie jiu jitsu. Sure enough, Saturday morning I found myself wearing a gi and lying on my back with a sparring partner mounted over me. If you’ve ever seen a bully atop a weaker kid on a school playground, you’ve basically seen what we looked like. Trust me, I still vividly recall what it felt like to be that weaker kid.
The only significant difference between my position then and now was that now I had my legs clamped around the back of his thighs and my hands hunched up close to my face, partly to protect the face but mostly so that my elbows would block him from improving his mount so that he would be squarely on my chest. I was in the “guard” position, and I was about to learn how to get my sparring partner off of me.
