James Proclaims!

On Saturday, my eldest daughter, Little Proclaims, and I took part in a martial arts tournament. I’ve had an on and off relationship with various martial arts since I was a small child, although I’ve never stuck with anything long enough to achieve the coveted black belt. I’ve been at my current club since my youngest daughter (Mini Proclaims) was a baby though, which equates to just over three years. I wouldn’t say I’m especially talented, but some muscle memory from previous efforts at karate and taekwondo in my youth appears to have endured and, despite having all the flexibility of an iron girder, I’ve made fairly rapid progress since 2022, to the point where I’m potentially only a few months away from the black belt. Only because the club I attend is a derivation of the Korean martial art Tang Soo Do, it won’t be a black belt, it will be a very dark blue. But it’s basically the same thing, and I will be telling everyone I am a black belt.

But I’m not a black belt yet, and that was something of an advantage on Saturday, because I went to a tournament. I’m not a big fan of martial arts tournaments. I’m not really all that competitive when it comes to sport and that comes from a lifetime of being quite bad at sport. I mainly got into martial arts because, in my experience, it’s a form of physical exercise that you can do while being generally bad at most sports, because for the most part you do it on your own. It’s not really a team sport, so you don’t need to worry about letting anyone else down.

There is a small amount fighting involved when I go to classes, but it’s all very safe and friendly and no-one is really trying to hurt anyone else. It’s normally pretty fun.

This wasn’t entirely the case on Saturday, and the black belt fights looked genuinely terrifying. The problem mainly is that once you’ve achieved the status of black belt, you are then expected to fight other black belts, which means that someone who has been a black belt for two months, could well end up fighting someone who has been a black belt for twenty years. That can often lead to some mismatches, and even with every precaution being taken, this can lead to some people getting a few bumps and bruises.

Fortunately, being one belt below black (which in my iteration of Tang Soo Do is a red belt), I was mainly pitched against people who were roughly around the same level as me. This gave me slightly better odds, although I was still not overly optimistic about doing very much on the day.

My pessimism stemmed partly from the aforementioned inaptitude for all sports, and partly from my very real experiences of previous martial arts tournaments. I did a few Taekwondo tournaments in my twenties and in all cases was eliminated in the first round. I was never completely outclassed or anything, but I always managed to lose, which didn’t endear me to the idea of competing. In Tang Soo Do, I had only competed in one tournament, reluctantly, about two years ago. Unlike Taekwondo, which was mainly about fighting, there were two competitions to enter. One was fighting and the other was forms. Tang Soo Do forms are a bit like the Karate Kata and I am generally considered by my fellow martial artists, to be quite good at them. So much so that I was quite confident of doing fairly well in that part of the competition two years ago. But I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t finish in the top three of my event, and therefore didn’t get a medal. I was a bit disappointed in myself, because the guy who won the gold medal in that event trains with me, and I don’t think I’m being arrogant in saying I am normally a bit better than him. So when someone I’m a bit better than wins a competition, I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to expect that I would at least have got a bronze. But I got nothing at all. And then, in the fighting event, I found myself up against a competitor who was a good twenty years my junior, and I was very convincingly beaten. Were that not bad enough, because there was an odd number of participants, it wasn’t a straight elimination and I got to fight again, this time against another clubmate of mine, who I normally do ok against in class, and he also very soundly beat me. It was all very chastening, and I hadn’t gone in with particularly high expectations to begin with.

I still really enjoy going to my club to train. It’s a nice crowd, it’s something to do that isn’t work or looking after the kids, and it means I can generally say yes to a second slice of cake (which if I’m honest I would definitely be saying yes to even if I did no exercise). But I was pretty keen to find an excuse to not participate the next time a tournament rolled around. Which took two years.

Except that in that time, Little Proclaims has also taken up the noble art, and trains with my club once a week. And she really wanted to go to the tournament, so I couldn’t really get out of it.

Little Proclaims was pretty sensible though and only wanted to enter the forms part of the event. She’s still pretty new to the whole thing and didn’t really want to fight anyone. She’s a gentle soul at heart. Her sister, I fear, will not be quite so reticent when her time comes.

So off we went, early on Saturday, to a leisure centre a mere two-hour drive from where we live to take part in a martial arts tournament.

I was up first, doing my forms and, amazingly this time I got a silver medal. That’s right I came second!

Second!

Me!

It was a genuine moment of catharsis.

Except it wasn’t really, because, bizarrely, there were only two people in my event. So I came second out of two people. Which is actually not all that great. And then I had to wear that stupid medal for the rest of the day and smile as people came up to congratulate me.

For the sake of context, the guy who won gold was really good. Like really really good. He was clearly of an athletic persuasion. He could actually do the splits. And he only beat me by half a point, which if you were familiar with the scoring system, you’d know was as close as it’s possible to get. And we split the judges. One of the three judges scored us the same, one went in my favour and one went in his, but the one who favoured him scored him slightly higher than the one who favoured me. So it was genuinely close. And when I say the guy was good, he also went on to win the gold in the fighting bit later on. And there were more than two people in that. So I sort of did deserve my medal in a way. It’s not my fault there were only two people in my event. It was clearly a slight miscalculation on the part of the organisers. But it’s still hard to celebrate winning a silver medal when the only available options were to win silver or to win gold.

Next up was Little Proclaims. And there were three children in her event. And she did pretty well. I don’t envy the judges, it’s pretty hard to objectively score seven-year olds, but Little Proclaims was about as good as the girl who was given gold and considerably better than the other boy, but somehow she scored the same as him. I’d assumed that because they were small children, they might just give them both a silver medal and be done with it, but they actually made them go again in sort of ‘play off’. At the second attempt Little Proclaims scored higher than the boy and actually her second score was higher than the girl who won gold. Somehow, though, she ended up being given a bronze medal. Little Proclaims was delighted with her medal. Genuinely delighted. But slowly I noticed that she started to have the same realisation I’d had about my medal. That just like I’d come second out of two, she’d come third out of three. And the smile became a little less genuine and a little more stoic. And that didn’t sit well with me. So, having managed to overcome my internal fear of causing a scene, I politely asked the judges to have another look at the score card and they concurred that Little Proclaims had indeed been robbed of her second place finish and duly upgraded her. The little boy was not stripped of his medal, because it wasn’t his fault, and I was happy with this until I saw him showboating in the fighting competition later, being cheered on by his overenthusiastic parents and then I thought it would have done him no harm at all to have been given a little reality check.

But Little Proclaims had her silver medal and all was well in the world.

Except that I still had my fighting event to look forward to. And that wasn’t until the end of a very long series of other events, several hours later. I was incredibly nervous and also had to look after an overexcited seven year old. Those were some difficult hours to navigate.

And then, finally, when the tiredness of my early start and a day of standing around were really starting to kick in, I was summoned to my first round match.

I had no ambitions of a medal. I didn’t even care about winning my first fight. I just wanted to not embarrass myself and get the whole thing over with.

The guy I was up against was the same belt as me, and he looked in better shape. No sooner had we started and I was a point down. Then I was two points down. Then, in trying to block a kick I accidently caught his leg briefly (which is completely against the rules) and he was on the floor. He got up, dusted himself down and looked at me like he wanted to kill me. And then he kicked me in the ribs, which scored him another point and winded me. I still have the bruise. Technically he broke the rules there, but he still got the point and I was reliving my horror story of two years earlier. He came again and some kind of self-preservation instinct kicked in, and I kicked him. And I scored a point. And then I did it again. And I kept on doing it, and then a buzzer sounded and I was in uncharted territory because, unbeknownst to me, I’d won the fight.

I sat down and all the other competitors were patting me on the back and telling me how good I’d been and how that last kick to the head had been amazing and all I was thinking was, I can’t possibly have kicked him in the head, because I’d struggle to kick a garden gnome in the head. But apparently, when I’m in fight or flight mode, I can kick a grown man in the head. Who knew?

I had a little rest and watched my friend from the earlier competition destroy his opponent without breaking a sweat. And then there were a few other fights and then it dawned on me that because I’d won a fight for the first time in my life, I’d have to do another fight. And it was against my gold medallist friend. He obviously beat me. He beat everyone. But I did the best against him. Indeed we had such an emotionally draining back and forth that we hugged at the end. The referee congratulated us on having such a competitive match and suddenly my earlier silver medal started to shine a little more brightly in my mind.

I did have one more fight. It was the bronze medal match and I lost. I only lost by a point, and to someone that was nowhere near as good as the two people I’d already fought, but by that stage I was wiped out and I’d already banished my demons from two years ago. Plus the Proclaims family were already drenched in silver, so I didn’t care too much about a paltry bronze. He was welcome to it.

I will still quite happily never fight in another tournament as long as I live, especially if I do achieve the coveted dark blue belt that I’ll be calling black.

But I am still quite proud of myself.

And of course even prouder of Little Proclaims.