Flying Gogoplata

Yoshihiro Akiyama - Photo Via Sherdog

“I think a lot of people tend to focus too much on nationality, and when they try to assert or put me into either category [Korean or Japanese], I’m saddened by it,” he says. “A lot of ‘Zainichi’ Koreans (ethnic Koreans living in Japan) feel the same way — where they don’t know if they’re Korean or if they’re Japanese.”

“I often get this question from fans asking, ‘Which do you like better: Japan or Korea?’ Or if it’s a Korea versus Japan game, ‘Which side do you support?’” Akiyama says. “And it’s an extremely difficult question because it’s like asking, ‘Which parent do you like better, your mother or your father?’”

I remember reading that Akiyama actually had his name changed from Korean to something more Japanese-sounding, though I don’t actually have a citation for that. He still played the heel through most of his fights in Japan.

He has a very interesting post-national perspective, something that is rare in MMA, and in sports in general. In a time where The Ultimate Fighter can only pick up ratings by doing a country vs country, US vs UK, jingoistic schtick, this is incredibly refreshing. TUF 9 actually had the opportunity to address this in an interesting way, where one of the UK cast members, James Wilks, has expatriated to the US. He’s actually been living and training in Orange County, CA for years. They instead chose to shove him in the UK box, with the US team further alienating him for being a traitor(?).

People have been moving and bleeding through borders for way too long to make the claim that an arbitrary territorial land mass composes one’s ‘blood’. I suspect that Akiyama’s ability to transcend his borders and his ‘blood’ has a lot to do with the particularly exclusive view of ethnicity and nationality in Japan.

Read more of the piece over at Sherdog.

UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Rashad Evans gets a scolding from his mother.

“She got mad at me after the ‘Rampage’ thing,” said the UFC light heavyweight champ. “She was watching on TV and she’s like, ‘Rashad, I don’t like all that cussing and s—. Rashad, you don’t get on TV cussing like that now, shoot.’ And I’m like ma, he made me mad. ‘Rashad, still, you don’t do that. People don’t want to see that s—.’”

Evans burst out laughing as he recounted the irony of the situation.

“I’m like, looking at the phone, saying, ‘Mom, you’re cussing right now.’”

This has got to be the funniest thing I’ve read in a while. Apparently this isn’t the first time she’s had to scold Evans over things that happened in the cage. Read the rest over at Sherdog.

The Light Heavyweight division is continuing to prove itself as the most exciting division in MMA.

Following Anderson Silva’s controversial title defense against Thales Leites, the UFC decided to go all out in bouncing him back in the eyes of fans by matching him up with none other than Forrest Griffin. I LOVE this matchup, for many reasons:

1. Forrest Griffin is a live underdog. He was tagged to lose against both Quinton Jackson and Mauricio Rua, both while they were considered #1 in the division. He is easy to take lightly, one of the worst mistakes you can make against him. He will come to fight, and he will grind you out if you are not ready for him.
2. Anderson Silva has no size advantage against Griffin. Forrest Griffin is a HUGE LHW, both long and solid. Though Silva has a technique advantage, he certainly won’t be able to toss Griffin around like a rag doll in the Thai Clinch. I also doubt Silva will be able to get the figure four body lock on the ground that he likes so much. The physical metrics are even and negligible in this one, something that hasn’t been the case for Silva in a while.
3. Forrest Griffin is the kind of fighter that will bring out the best performance in Anderson Silva. In his own words, Forrest Griffin is a dog, and he may not beat you, but he WILL fight you. Griffin is an emotional fighter, someone who likes to have fun in the cage, and he leaves everything there. But he’s also not an idiot; one does not get to be top 5 in the world by being an idiot. He has an incredible pace and conditioning which he uses to his advantage. He is not content to sit and wait for the fight to come to him, but he doesn’t come barreling in, hands down and chin up, either. He has an excellent gameplanner in Randy Couture in his corner, who brings a mantra of “imposing one’s will” on their opponent. Forrest Griffin WILL FIGHT Anderson Silva, and given his counter striking nature, Anderson Silva WILL FIGHT BACK.
4. For the first time, Silva will hold the part of the heel. Fans love Forrest Griffin, and many of those same fans are upset with Anderson Silva’s most recent performance. Griffin will, once again, be the underdog in this fight, and every punch he lands will bring drama to the event. Silva has a HUGE opportunity to regain some support in this fight, as many eyes will be on it in spite of the taste he left in peoples mouths in his last two outings.

Along with this fight is the Rashad Evans-Lyoto Machida title fight at UFC 98. Quinton Jackson will get the winner of that one. Mauricio Rua catapulted himself back into the LHW ranks with his knockout of Chuck Liddell, with a possible matchup against up-and-comer Luiz Arthur Cane. Thiago Silva has been matched with Keith Jardine. And outside the top ten there’s Brandon Vera vs Matt Hamill (both being built into possible contenders), and prospect Jon Bones Jones has a fight against Hall-of-Famer Mark Coleman.

This division is a chum-filled shark tank and I feel sorry for anyone that hast to fight in it. But as a fan, I couldn’t be more happy.

I also gotta look at the fact that Nick Diaz dude is a tough club thug vato loco that learned him some fighting and is the taller of the two Mexicans.

-Shonie Carter on Shamrock vs Diaz

I’m very excited

It’s funny to me how quickly things change in a few days time. Annoying, but kind of funny. Within a few days of my last post, I proceeded to feel really really miserable and had to take the next few days off work and training due to illness. Precious, precious training days that I really could have used considering how shitty my skills have been these last couple of days. That being said, by Monday I was feeling just fine, aside from my noticeably reduced endurance and awkward positioning. I’ve long since accepted the fact that the only likely outcome of my participation in this competition (now only days away) is me receiving a complete and thorough pwning. But the way things have been flopping back and forth, perhaps I’ll feel a lot better about it on Thursday, only to return to my current state on Saturday. It makes me feel like the Taoist Farmer.

I’ve been considering buying a rash guard recently, as it seems to be the unofficial no-gi grappling/mma uniform. Aside from the sweat/grip benefits and mat burn protection, there are also identity associations that I’m not sure I’m ready for. It’s funny how clothing can do that. Also, it’s been quite a while since I’ve looked good in lycra/spandex . But judging by the fairly sizable mat burn seated on my triceps, I think it’s about time. For functional purposes, of course.

My weight has been pretty stable, which is comforting and annoying at the same time. I certainly had no delusions of dropping an entire weight class, but I feel like I should be able to break 250. The scale says otherwise. It made for an interesting conversation in class today, though. We were discussing weight divisions, and it was obvious the larger weight divisions would be a little thin (no pun intended). I’ve seen at most 2 other people who would come close to my weight from my gym. One of them was there today.

AF*: We probably have 3, maybe four heavyweights for the competition. [To the other big feller] How much you weigh?

Other Big Feller: like, 230

AF: [To me] And you?

Me: 250

AF: 250??!?

Me: [Patting my belly with my leathered fist] I’m trying, man! It doesn’t look like much, but it’s pretty heavy.

AF: Nah, man. Heavy bones. You probably have heavy bones.

*(Coach? Sensei? Master? Badass Motherfucker? I don’t know what to call him. It’s hella informal.)

Uh… right. Heavy bones? Hey, I’ll take it. I didn’t have it in me to tell him that was UP from 179 in my high school prime. Which, further, was down from 215 with my football bulk. I suppose bone weight can fluctuate with time…

There was an inspiring snippet for aspiring jujutsukas in a Sherdog.com article today on the winners and losers of UFC 91.

Winner #2. Jiu-jitsu

Believe it or not, there was actually a period recently when MMA fans and experts alike were questioning whether submissions had become obsolete in professional MMA competition. Sure, the best of the best grapplers could still use their submission skills, and the control that wrestling and jiu-jitsu offered still had applicable value. But triangle chokes and armbars? Overrated and useless, it was said. Some plainly insisted submissions could not regularly be applied if any fighter simply trained defensive techniques enough.

Those who asserted such nonsense were not the clairvoyant among us, and UFC 91 was the personification of all counter argument to their absurd views. While every facet of the MMA game is both important and necessary, UFC 91 was a keen reminder that whether one is a jiu-jitsu world champion, black belt or fan of Skoal, submissions can still be effectively applied at the highest levels of modern MMA.

I certainly wasn’t among those claiming the death of jujutsu in modern MMA, but I loved to see world-class jujutsukas neutralized using excellent defensive technique (especially those espoused by wrestlers . See Dan Henderson vs Rousimar “Toquinho” Palhares). But I still love to see a pretty submission, an arm snatched out of nowhere, a choke sunk where there was seemingly no neck exposed. But even more than that, it’s the danger of the submission that makes for some beautiful, chess-like matches. Folks like Demian Maia, Kenny Florian, and Dustin “McLovin” Hazelett reminded us that the danger remains and is ever present.

(In case you were wondering, I was chomping on my fingernails throughout the entirety of the Couture-Lesnar fight, and my heart broke thoroughly for Couture when he fell to the mat).

All that being said, if you’re interested in seeing some pretty good newbies roll, or if you’re interested in seeing me choked unconscious, or one of my joints bent in the wrong direction, drop me a line and I’ll give you the details.

Some people have asked how my training is going, others have just asked what in holy hell I’ve been up to lately. Hopefully this will cover both.

I have an opportunity to compete in a beginners-only no-gi submission grappling competition sometime within the next couple of weeks, and I’m fucking taking it. It’s very difficult for me to make myself go and train in most anything without something to train for. I had hoped to be able to do some MMA competition, but without a CSAC sanctioned amateur MMA circuit, I don’t really have many opportunities to do so. “Excited” was not even close to what I was feeling when I heard about this competition.

I wrestled for a while (quite a long time ago) and despite a lot of the fundamentals of positioning and body control that I have from that background, I’m an awful jujutsuka. I realized that preventing myself from being a complete chump in this competition required some more dedicated training and possibly even some (blerg…) body conditioning. Inspired by a friend’s post that included some sweaty, painful workout details, I thought I might be able to kill two birds with one stone by blogging a bit on the topic. I could motivate myself a bit by holding myself accountable to a very small public while also having a bit of an excuse to write. I was glowing on the inside. I may have been glowing on the outside, too.

And then I was almost immediately crushed from above; I was staying at work until 8 or 9, and was entirely unable to make a training session more than once a week. Fail. I was unable to wake up early enough to run in the morning due to that silly spiral of work-related exhaustion, and unable to drag my ass out of bed on Saturday due to pathetically stupid “it’s the weekend!”-minded binge drinking. I’ve been asked by multiple people how training was going and had nothing to say. It hadn’t been going at all, actually.

I go from odd extremes to happy mediums, and I think I’ve found myself in the latter finally. I’ve strung together a good habit of daily training so far, and I hope to get a good 6-day-a-week schedule. My diet has not changed at all, but it’s something I find difficult to even think about. I’ve not done any conditioning outside of what is offered in the training sessions, and I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I still need to be working roughly 40 hours a week and I hate (HATE HATE) running. Perhaps all these things can work something out. Or perhaps being choked unconscious by someone I don’t train with, and in front of people I don’t train with, will be a motivator unto itself for future competitions. It isn’t so much looking like a chump that burns me, it’s knowing I could have done better.

The scale has been particularly unkind to me lately. In the months since I’ve started training, I’ve seen my weight hover around 270lbs to its current hovering point of about 250lbs. I’ve not been able to break through the floor of the 250lb mark (250.1 has been my lightest valid weigh-in so far). I’m sure this has a lot to do with my entirely inconsistent eating schedule. Also, my digital scale does this really funny thing where it will give you a reading then tell you that it’s screwy. Early in its life, it would err on the heavy side, and you’d be relieved to see, on your second hop, that you were actually 3 – 5 lbs lighter. Lately it’s been doing this really nasty thing where it’ll say “247.3!” or “244.8!” and then it’ll be all “whoops! I fucked up. It’s actually 253.1.” What an asshole.

I hurt. A lot lately, actually. But as usual, it hurts so good.

Are you ready for this?

O. M. F. G.

This has to have been the best fight card of the year so far. Easily. There was not a single bad main event fight, and Sugar topped it off with that little beauty. Again, a little context, if you need it. More on this later, when I’ve gotten some sleep.

I’m well aware that I have been quiet for quite a while lately. But I really could not help but share these:

Before –

After –

And a little context in case you needed it.

This must be short and sweet because of the loads of other crap I need to have done by tomorrow…

Berkeley High is having a wrestling tournament and the attempting-to-form Cal Wrestling Club will be volunteering to work the tournament in the hopes of finding a good scrappin’ space with mats. If you’re interested in Rasslin’ at Cal or helping out with the tournament or in Berkeley High’s tourney, please let me know, or check out the facebook event.

Until tomorrow…I still have reading and a résumé…

Definitely commentary on this later.

Confusion abound but there is still no word from Zizou at the time of this posting. There are rumors of Materazzi saying something about Zidane’s mother, or of calling him a “dirty terrorist,” neither of which have been confirmed.