Judo Has Firm Grip on Swain

Judo offers some strange sights. The Olympic heavyweight championship in 1964 was a struggle between a 192-pound Japanese and a 260-pound Canadian. A repechage match at the Montreal Games of 1976 pitted a 5-foot-6 1/2 Japanese against a 7-foot, 350-pound North Korean. The little guy won.

Not nearly so odd, but nonetheless unusual, was the sight of 18-year-old Mike Swain training with the Tokyo Police Dept. The kid from New Jersey already had earned his black belt at 16, but since he had so few American judo experts to idolize, he wanted to learn from the best. So, Mike sold his car, flew to Japan and introduced himself around.

“They didn’t necessarily welcome me,” he remembers. “They tolerated me.”

Several years and broken bones later, Mike Swain became the first American to win a gold medal in the World Judo Championships. That was 1987, and that was just about enough. Swain already was ready to retire from judo and go to work. He became a three-time Olympian, went to Seoul and earned a bronze medal. He even stuck around for the 1989 Worlds and the 1990 Goodwill Games, taking a couple of silvers. But enough was enough.

The San Jose State graduate took a job in the marketing division of a Silicon Valley computer firm. He began to make a living. He met and married a judo champion from Brazil whose father, Chiaki Ishii, was an Olympic bronze medalist at Munich. Together they joked about tossing one another all over the living room at family reunions.

But something else was tugging at Swain’s sleeve. It was the hold judo had on him.

“Much to my amazement, I found that I just couldn’t give it up,” said Swain, back in training for next month’s Olympic Festival in Los Angeles, which he hopes will be a step toward the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. “There’s never been a gold medal won by an American in Olympic judo. As long as I’ve come this far, I have to take one more shot.”

So, on April 15, a tax-paying working man and newlywed found himself taking a leave of absence from his job, not knowing whether it will be there when he returns. Along with diver Wendy Williams, hurdler Roger Kingdom, skier Phil Mahre, swimmer Steve Lundquist and others, Swain joined a Nuprin comeback team traveling around the country, raising money for the American squad. Olympic dreams don’t easily die.

Swain, now 30, can’t forget how close he came to that South Korea gold, how both the gold and silver medalists turned out to be athletes he previously defeated. Other Americans won bronzes in judo before--James Bregman (1964) and Allen Coage (1976)--but to become the first U.S. gold medalist in his sport, well, how many chances in life such as this came along?

When Swain was a teen-ager and went to train with the judokas in Japan, he had no notion of what to expect.

“I had heard all the horror stories,” he said. “How they didn’t accept gaijins . How you had to prove yourself if you were lucky enough to be permitted a chance to prove yourself. The American who went there to train before me? He ran away. Couldn’t take it. The last anybody saw of him was when he bee-lined for the airport. That was my introduction to judo in Japan.”

Swain spent two months in Japan each year. Among his souvenirs were three hyper-extended elbows, a strained knee tendon, broken toes and fingers, a torn ankle ligament, a pulled back muscle and a torn hip flexor. He was a walking Nuprin advertisement. At times, the strain and pain became almost unbearable.

Seven hours a day, Swain trained: In the morning with the Tokyo police, who had neither the time nor patience to baby-sit young foreigners. In the afternoon at Nihon University. Swain was awake by 6 a.m. and exhausted by 6 p.m., realizing by now that wrestling practice at his school in New Jersey was never anything like this. Judo school, either.

“You know what the Japanese say: ‘When you get your black belt, you become a beginner.’ ”

After high school, Swain enrolled at San Jose State because the school is considered “the Mecca of judo,” where most of the American collegians serious about the sport come to train. Swain’s sensae , Yone Yonezuka, taught him well. He made the 1980 Olympic squad as a half-lightweight (143 pounds) but missed Moscow because of the boycott. Then he made it again in 1984 but didn’t place among the top eight.

Winning the World championship three years later in Essen, West Germany, was as much as any American could ever hope to achieve, and Mike is pretty sure he gulped down a magnum of champagne by himself. By the end of last year’s Goodwill Games, he felt fully satisfied that his had been a successful career.

“I thought it was over,” he said. “But I guess there’s still some weird need in me to throw people around.”