BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 6 : He Had Some Hard Judo Questions, but Answers Didn’t Come Easily

I don’t go to judo much. Growing up in the Midwest, I never saw a whole lot of judo as a boy.

So, when I went to see some Olympic judo Thursday, I had to ask a few understandable questions first.

Such as: “Judo? Is that the one where they break bricks with their feet?”

No, I was told. That’s karate.

“Well, is it the one David Carradine used to use when his head was shaved like a volleyball player?”

No, I was told. That was kung fu.

“Oh,” I said. “Then is judo that thing they teach in those self-defense courses?”

Yes, I was told, except in the Olympics you don’t get to spray anybody with Mace in the face.

Ah, I said, and sat back to watch.

Judo was something I wanted very badly to learn more about. In Hollywood, the more you know about martial arts, the quicker they will make you a movie star.

Two women came out wearing white bathrobes.

They didn’t look all that tough. It was only later that I realized either one could rearrange my face like a Rubik’s Cube.

One of them tugged at the other’s robe. The belt came undone.

“Is that fair?” I asked.

“Everything’s fair,” I was told.

“What about Velcro?” I asked.

Quickly, one woman got the better of the other. Sent her to the mat with a splat.

“What do you call that?” I asked.

“An ippon,” I was told.

“But she’s from Israel,” I said.

“Not a Nippon. An ippon.”

I asked what an ippon was.

The explanation took about three minutes. I still don’t know what an ippon is. I wouldn’t known an ippon from an ippopotamus.

A point was scored and it went up on the board. It went right under the word koka .

Not speaking Spanish, I had falsely assumed until then that koka was an advertisement.

The two women began scuffling horizontally, legs entwined. They looked like kids at a party playing Twister.

“Any kokas in there yet?” I asked.

No, I was told.

“Any pepsas?”

No.

The referee took a closer inspection at the two women and their interlocked arms and legs. For a second there I thought he might reach into his hip pocket for a shoehorn.

Suddenly, I remembered a phrase I heard as a child.

“Do they have judo chops?” I asked.

Nobody calls them that, I was told, but yeah.

“What about jiu-jitsu?”

I was told to be quiet and watch the match.

“What about those Mutant Turtles?” I asked. “Do they really use that ninja stuff? Did they have to learn judo or taekwondo or taebabilonia or any of that stuff so they could become ninjas?”

I was told to be quiet or to go watch volleyball.

A few hours later, I was still trying to figure out who beats whom, and how.

The woman from Israel and her opponent from Germany went down in a heap. The referee took one look at them and called off the match.

The German got up and raised her arms in victory. The Israeli got up and closed her robe. The referee pointed to the Israeli and named her the winner. The German looked at the referee as though she would like to judo him.

“Even the judo people don’t understand judo,” I said.

Of course they do, I was told.

“But the German thought she was the ippon-er and actually she was the ippon-ee,” I said.

They know what they’re doing, I was told.

“Did she koka her or what?” I asked.

Shhh, I was told.

The two women walked off in a huff, or perhaps in a minute and a huff, then turned to face one another like Wyatt Earp and some outlaw.

They each took a deep bow.

“I don’t think they mean it,” I said.

Before I went home, I looked up the final box score. There were 29 contestants in the half-middleweight division, which I figured meant that there were 58 contestants in the full-middleweight division. Wrong again.

According to the statistics, there were 19 ippons, 13 waza-aris, 22 yukos, 35 kokas, 13 shidos, three chuis, two keikokus and no hansoku-makes.

Boy, don’t you hate it when you spend an entire day at judo without even one hansoku-make?

I went home wishing I had known more about judo as a child back when I was wasting all my time playing baseball.

Better still, I wished that I had known judo as a child back when some foolish pitcher hit me with a baseball. I’d have ipponed him into the middle of next week.