(Over) Confidence
The tournament is over. I went 1 -1 for the day. Over all it was a lot of fun, but very frustrating at the same time. I arrived about an hour early and sat around with the other BTT fighters. I stretched a bit, but didn’t really warm up thinking that It was still early and I didn’t want to cool off again before my fight. Eventually Fabio called everyone together to announce how things would begin. He said that the White belts would go first, then the Blue belts, etc. They would be starting with the lowest weight class then moving up. First would be 147 lbs and then my 160 lbs division would be next. ‘OK’ I thought. ‘Time to warm up, I could have to fight in about 15 minutes.’ Unfortunately I was wrong. Fabio called my name immediately after and said I would be fighting first. Apparently another ref had showed up so they were going to run the 147 and 160 lbs divisions simultaneously. I had drawn the first fight of the day and was going in completely cold.
My opponent and I locked up pretty fast and he fell back into butterfly, then quickly switched to a closed guard. After a little testing on my part, he opened his guard and tried to move back to four points and attempt a take down. I secured his head when he tried and I got a good grip by cupping his chin with my hand. After a brief stink in half guard he went back to four point and I put on an Anaconda choke. I thought it was pretty deep, and I rolled him once and tried to walk my body in to finish it but he survived. After another scramble I mounted him and sunk in a Guillotine. He swept me but I maintained the grip and got back to my feet and torqued it a lot. I’m amazed he didn’t tap. Very tough guy. After the guillotine failed I attempted an X -Choke but he proved again to be un-chokable. The last few moments of the match my arms felt like rubber I had come in cold and was paying for it in my grips. He got some points on me but managed to play defense and hold onto a narrow one point lead. I tossed up a last minute triangle but time expired. The final score was 6 -5.
My second fight was against a fighter that I had not seen yet, so I think he had a first round bye. Right off the bat he scored a brilliant take down. He got a hold of my left leg and used his foot to sweep out my right leg and I went to the mat hard. He took north south on me and held it. And held it. And held it for three and half minutes! I tried everything I could think of to escape; inside, outside, over the top. Nothing worked and we stayed in the same position for nearly the whole match. Eventually he did try to move in to attack and arm and I was able to get out of north south and make some progress. I managed to pass to side control but we went out of bounds and the ref called for a restart in the center. I looked at the clock and had less then 30 seconds to act so I went right for him and slapped on a triangle. I couldn’t clear his arm so I tried to Kimura it instead. That failed so I went back to the triangle, just got it locked in and pulled his head down and the time sounded. Saved by the bell. I lost on points. I felt so frustrated to have spent so much time trapped in north south when all I needed at the end was a few seconds for the triangle to work.
1 -1 isn’t bad though and I shouldn’t complain. I’m 4 -2 overall in competition now so I should still be happy. I learned some thing I need to work on, North South escape is first on the list, but I also need to watch how far I leave my leg out during the stand up, and I guess I should work on my finishing my chokes as well.
Click here, or in the media section for the videos of my fights if you are interested.
Back to class on Monday.
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