The Gentle Art

The kid had a devil in his eyes. I watched him in the last match, witnessed the violence with which he bent the other ten-year-old boy’s arm before the referee stopped the fight. It terrified me how willing he was to continue pulling, how disappointed his face was when he had to let go. He adjusted his black kimono and tightened the green belt around the waist, then walked across the mats back to his father—an international champion and head coach of the most famous Jiu Jitsu school around the globe.

With a furious look on his face, the father grabbed his son by the arm and knelt down beside him. He started to poke deeply into his chest, shouting something that I couldn’t make out from the distance. Despite the win, he was clearly disappointed in his son, whose wet eyes were fixed on the floor. I would feel bad for him if it weren’t for the fact that his next fight in the bracket was against my daughter.

I looked down at Amy, jumping in one place, warming up in her crisp white kimono, her long dark hair tied in a high ponytail. She looked determined, focused, ready—the total opposite of what I must have looked like. My hand was shaking. I was sending her away to give her arm or a leg. I was sending her away to lose. "I need to stop this, I need to tell her that it’s a bad idea, that I regret agreeing to all of this," I thought to myself. I knelt down, and as I did, off she went, and the match started.

Jiu-jitsu, from Japanese, “the gentle art.” It sure as hell didn’t look like it when the boy grabbed my girl’s leg and pulled it hard along with the rest of her body down to the ground. He mounted Amy, and I saw as she struggled to put her elbows inside his thighs, trying to escape. The referee raised his arm with four fingers pointing to the ceiling—four points for the boy. The crowd went wild, and my heart stopped as I watched the kid slowly make his way towards Amy’s arm. He grabbed it tightly, and then the impossible happened—she pushed her hips, threw the boy to the left, and landed on top of him. Two points for my little girl.

The fight went on, bodies rolling on the ground so fast I lost track of what was happening. I admired the fierceness of Amy’s moves, and then, the most beautiful sight of all—her wide, pristine white smile produced in the heat of the battle.

She lost, but she wasn’t submitted. The decision was left to the judges. They granted the slight advantage to the boy. In the frame that now hangs on the wall of our house is a picture of Amy, proudly holding her silver medal. Her huge grin contrasts with the absent look of the boy bearing gold.