My Fight / Your Fight (12 page)

I walked out onto the mat and bowed in. My faux coach shouted something to me from the chair, but without even processing what he said I determined it was nonessential information.

The Russian girl didn't stand a chance. I ran up the score against her by so much that she must have been embarrassed. We walked off the mat and the US coach tried to give me a hug. I held my arms by my side.

I slammed the girl from China to win the final. The entire match took four seconds. (That is not a typo—four seconds, which is less time than it takes to read this sentence.)

I became the first American to win the junior worlds in a generation. I stood on the podium and watched as the American flag was raised to the rafters. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something about it looked off, like it was a bootleg bought at a ninety-nine-cent store and noticeably smaller than the other flags. It might only have had forty-nine stars, but I couldn't tell. I was too distracted by the crunchy sound of the national anthem, it sounded like someone was playing it into a microphone off a Walkman.

A few months after the junior worlds, I flew to Spain for an annual training camp in Castelldefels, a coastal town right outside of Barcelona. Of all the training camps I attended, Castelldefels was my favorite. Not only was it in a beautiful setting, but it was one of the only major training camps not attached to a tournament, so no one was coming into it disappointed over having lost or worried about making weight. It was an opportunity to go up against the best in the world as I sought to establish myself as one of them.

It was also at this training camp, and the camps that would follow, that I saw the enormous disparity between the resources provided to athletes from other countries and what we had as members of the US judo team. At Castelldefels, USA Judo sent one coach, which was more than we usually had. Other teams had a 1:1 coaching ratio. I saw my competitors' coaches observing them intently, scribbling down notes not just about their own athletes but about their athletes' opponents.

It wasn't only about coaching. I would have traded our coach for some athletic tape and ice. The French team had a dedicated physiotherapist who had dozens of rolls of tape and a cooler full of ice. The Germans, Spanish, and the Canadians had physios as well. The Americans did not. I looked into my bag at the single, now depleted, roll of white athletic tape that I had brought and realized that I was going to need to ask someone from another country for tape.

“Look at this, it's so unfair,” one of my teammates lamented as she watched the French physio wrap his athletes' ankles with professional precision.

“If we had this . . .” she trailed off, but her implication was clear: If we had this, we'd be better.

Fuck that
, I thought.
They can have their tape and their coolers full of ice and their nine hundred coaches, and I'm still going to kick their asses
.

Training practices were the most grueling workouts of my life. We would do ten rounds or more of randori in the morning. I went all out every single round, every single day. Between sessions, I would lie on the mat, uncertain if I would ever have enough energy to move again. Then they would bring in lunch, and I would roll to my side and hoist myself up slowly to eat.

“Please let it be fish,” I would whisper. On days when it was
jamón y melón
—or as I referred to it, raw bacon and cantaloupe melon meat—I would just eat bread and cheese.

In the afternoon, we would do another fifteen rounds of randori. The level of competition was so high you would see practice rounds the caliber of Olympic finals happening all around. After camp was over, we all headed out to a bar, drinking sangria and communicating in broken English and mangled Spanish or hand gestures.

As the week wore on, there was one notable difference from day to day: the worsening smell. Staying in a hotel where there was nowhere for anyone to wash their gis after training in them from morning to night, the scent of body odor became more and more overpowering. Everyone smelled of sweat and mildew, except for me. I smelled like sweat and mildew and the not-quite-overpowering scent of Febreze, which I packed for every camp and used to spray down my gi every night, before hanging the stiff cotton jacket out of the window to dry.

My relentlessness earned me respect. I was someone that other girls wanted to go up against because they knew I would challenge them. I used that to my advantage. I memorized all their tendencies, all the moves that worked especially well for them, all the techniques they relied on. I didn't have a coach to do that for me, so I had to do it for myself.

I watched as a member of the British coaching staff took out his little notebook where he jotted down observations and scribbled out strategies.

“You don't need to write up this one,” I wanted to say. “After we're done out there, this bitch will remember me.”

Most athletes at the training camps are just trying to get through the day's workouts. I was trying to leave an impression on every single person in my division. I used every training camp not only to learn about my opponents but to beat the living shit out of them. I wanted to intimidate my opponents. I wanted all the other competitors in my division to leave thinking, “Fuck, this chick's good. She threw me fifteen times today.” I wanted them to get used to the fact that I would beat them.

They could tell themselves, “It was just training camp.” But, the next time they saw me, they would remember that I slammed them fifteen times.

I might not have had the tools at my disposal that my opponents had, but I created advantages of my own.

Judo grew out of Bushido, which is Japanese for the “way of the warrior.” The original Bushido martial art was used in samurai warfare; it was a means to survive. To me, judo is about the fight, and the person who wins the fight ought to be the best fighter.

But there are many elite-level fighters who don't fight to lay it all on the line. They fight for points. They will get ahead by a minor score, then spend the rest of the match trying to make it look like they're fighting when they're really running away. It's like fighting a lawyer. It's not about who's right or wrong, it's not about justice, it's about who can find the loopholes in the rules, and eke out a win.

I cannot stand points fighters. Points fighting is cowardly. Points fighting is fighting without honor. If you are fighting for points, you're not fighting at all. Points fighters are just there to compete, even if that means running and hiding the entire match. You should give one hundred percent all of the time.

It's not just about winning, it is about how you win. It's not about winning pretty, it is about winning honorably. I'm not there for competition. I am there for a fight.

I met Dick IttyBitty at a camp in Chicago in 2002, but he didn't leave an impression on me. (Knowing this guy, he will still probably take satisfaction in being referenced. However, I can live with the fact that in order to do so, he will have to say, “You know that backstabbing boyfriend who constantly put Ronda down? That's me! I'm Dick IttyBitty.”) A year later, something had changed. I had been successful at the US Open, but I was still recovering from my knee surgery. The biggest challenge wasn't actually the physical pain but the mental block. Deep in the back of my mind, I was worried about hurting my knee again. My injury had shown me that I wasn't as invincible as I thought. My signature throw before I got injured was a left
uchi mata
. It translates to inner-thigh throw because you plant your right leg, then sweep your left leg between your opponent's legs, up to their inner thigh, and while turning, throw her over your hip. It's one of the most effective throws in judo and a solid uchi mata is hard to defend against. My mom noticed that I was favoring my right leg. There were moments in practice where I wouldn't go in for the throw. Or I tried a less effective throw that didn't require putting full weight on my right leg. In competition, that hesitation means the difference between being on the podium and being eliminated. My mom called Nick, an acquaintance from her judo days who was running the camp, and told him what she had seen.

“I'm not going to say anything to her, but she's going to do one thousand uchi matas over the course of the week,” Nick told my mom. “We're going to drill her on that with all types of people. Big, little, old, young, guys, girls, anyone who walks into our club. And by the end, she'll see that if her knee was going to go out again, it would have happened within the first one thousand times.”

The first day, I took it slow, but my knee held up. By the third day, I started picking up speed, just wanting to get the throws over. By the end of the week, it sounded like a machine gun as I slammed person after person into the blue crash pads.
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
When I left Chicago, I had a renewed level of confidence.

I was used to being around guys in judo, but they always seemed to see me as a sister. Dick was not interested in me in a sisterly way. At first, I didn't think it was anything, just some flirting at the camp. Then he tried to kiss me. I froze. He laughed off the awkwardness and we kept in touch.

Dick was persistent (of course, it's easier to be persistent when you're sleeping with several other people), and after I left Chicago, he would message me online and text me constantly. I was flattered.

Two weeks after I had returned from Chicago, my mom and I were headed to practice when she said, “I heard Dick IttyBitty and you hit it off.” Her tone was casual, but I wasn't fooled; there was nothing casual about this conversation.

“He's cool,” I said with a shrug.

“Really? I've heard he's a dirtbag,” my mom said.

“That's not true,” I said.

My mom gave me a skeptical look. “From what I hear, he sleeps with anything that has a vagina,” my mom said. “Despite looking like he got hit by an ugly stick, it sounds like he gets more ass than a toilet seat. I guess he's not very selective.”

“Those are just lies started by these girls who were jealous because he was not interested in them.” I spouted out the explanation he had given me.

My mom stared at me with a look that said,
You can't be that fucking stupid
.

I slid down in the passenger seat and looked out the window, debating whether opening the door and hurling myself out of a moving vehicle on the freeway would be better than continuing this conversation. “Ronda, you know why a guy in his twenties goes after sixteen-year-old girls? Because they're dumb enough to believe his bullshit. I would like to believe you're smarter than that. Seriously, it's creepy.”

“OK, enough with the lecture,” I said exasperated. “It's not like anything happened or is going to. Let's just change the subject.”

“Nothing better happen,” my mom said.

Two weeks later, I moved east to train with Big Jim. I had limited my communications with Dick when I was at my mom's, but now we started texting more regularly. Then one day, in the middle of practice, he just walked into the club.

My jaw dropped. My stomach flipped. A little piece of me wanted to break into a happy dance, but the rest of me knew this was not going to go over well.

Mom was pissed. And the way Big Jim acted around Dick made me realize that he wasn't a friend of the
entire
Pedro family. Big Jim had little tolerance for people who said they were training to be elite athletes, but failed to put in the effort. Dick was one of those people. And, while Big Jim would never have admitted it, he had become protective of me. Big Jim wanted him gone as much as my mom did. He made it clear under no circumstance was I to be near Dick.

“Don't do anything stupid,” Big Jim said.

But Big Jim couldn't watch us every second. While he was working at the firehouse for the weekend, his youngest son, Mikey, decided to have a barbecue.

While Mikey fired up the grill, Dick fired up one of the Jet-Skis. I jumped on the back and we sped off to the middle of the lake, out of clear sight from the shore, we slowed to a stop and Dick leaned over and kissed me again. I froze. A deer in headlights. It felt awkward, but it was also exciting and forbidden.

Two nights later, with Big Jim still at work, Dick made sure I was drunk and kissed me once more, and I don't remember much, but I didn't freeze. Then he went back to Chicago, and all of my focus shifted to the Olympics.

But we kept in touch, hooking up at various tournaments. We thought we were slick, but it was an open secret.

In February 2005, we were in Hamburg for the Otto World Cup, where we were both competing. I lost in the preliminaries. I got caught in an armbar and didn't tap. So the girl dislocated my elbow, and it swelled up the size of a grapefruit. I won that match, but I lost the next one in the first exchange. I entered into repechage, where I won one hard-fought and painful match, before I lost the next match and was eliminated from the tournament. I went back to the hotel, and Dick IttyBitty, who was knocked out of the tournament early, came with me. I knew it wasn't a good idea, but I was depressed over losing and hurting my arm and wanted the company. We were lying on the bed, on top of the white comforter, when I heard the whoosh of the door being unlocked by a keycard.

“What the f—” I didn't even have time to get the words out when the door flew open and Big Jim was standing in the doorway.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Big Jim screamed. “You just can't listen, can you?”

He had crazy eyes.

Dick jumped up and tried to explain, but only managed a stutter.

“You shut the fuck up,” Big Jim said in Dick's direction, but without taking his eyes off me. Dick fell silent.

“That's it,” Big Jim said. “I'm done with you. You're your mother's problem now.”