My Fight / Your Fight (15 page)

His dad was equally warm and caring, even as he suffered from terminal cancer.

“Sure, I'll teach you how to drive,” he said. (I took that to mean “I'm probably dying anyway, so I have no fear of death.”) He would have me drive him around and play the Beach Boys. Even when I almost got us hit by oncoming traffic or turned the wrong way down a one-way street, he was calm and cool. He introduced me to everyone as his future daughter-in-law.

We were getting close to the two-year point, and I began noticing things about Dick that I hadn't seen before. For the first time I could see just how dumb he was. I remember thinking,
I'm a teenager and you're in your twenties, and wow, I'm way more intelligent than you.
No matter how hard I tried to explain to him there was a difference between
woman
(singular) and
women
(plural), he did not get it and used the two words interchangeably. It drove me insane. Then I realized he had no original jokes. He would just quote movies all the time, and he would quote the same lines over and over. He had a set playlist of stories he would tell, whipping them out the second someone who hadn't heard them before was in earshot. Everything he said grated on me and I couldn't stand being around him.

Then I saw something new: his cruel streak. “God, she's hot,” he'd say while we were watching a movie or, worse, while we were out together. “Look at her body,” he'd say as a beautiful woman would walk by. It wasn't a direct comparison at first, but soon he was telling me how their bodies were better than mine. Then how they were thinner than me. Then how I was fat.

He would grab the skin at my sides and say, “Boy, you're getting fat,” then he'd grin, pretending that it was a harmless joke.

I was already struggling to make weight. Now he preyed on my insecurities. I had never felt pretty. I had cauliflower ear. I regularly got ringworm, a gross but common fungal infection in wrestling and judo (for some reason, my skin seemed especially sensitive to it). I was bulky and thick, even though it was muscle. I had gone from being teased in middle school for having biceps that were “too big” to now having a boyfriend who told me I was “about a six.” I wanted to be as perfectly tiny as those girls smiling out from the magazine covers that papered the airport newsstands.

But what ate at me the most was how two-faced he was. We'd be hanging out with people and he'd be cool, and the second they walked away he would talk badly about them. It got to the point where I could not look at him without thinking,
Wow, you're a real fucking dickface.

When we first got together, I had felt special; now I just felt stupid. I had spent almost two years with a total asshole, and I was still with him.

I found solace in competition. I trained intensely, determined to emerge fiercer, stronger, and more focused than ever. That's when I started stepping onto the mat with a certainty that I had never had.

In April 2006, I won the World Cup tournament in Birmingham, England, the first World Cup that an American woman had won in nine years. I returned to the States and won the senior nationals in Houston three weeks later. In May, I took silver at the Pan American Championships in Argentina.

In July, Dick and I flew to Florida for a series of tournaments, including the Junior US Open in Fort Lauderdale and the Miami Youth International. I had known for a while that I wanted to break up with him, but I didn't know how. Then in Florida, the opportunity presented itself. Dick and I were staying at the tournament host hotel, as was my friend Marina, whom I had first met at Jim Hrbek's and became close with after we competed on the same team at a tournament in Belgium earlier that spring.

After the first tournament, a guy friend and I went for a walk on the beach, and as we were walking it hit me.
I think I kind of like this guy. I'm going to give that a try. I've just got to get rid of this fucker, Dick
. That was all the push I needed.

I texted Marina, who was also on the dump-Dick bandwagon (who wasn't?), then went up to the room Dick and I were sharing. My stuff was scattered all over. I threw it in my duffle bags and moved into Marina's room.

Dick was out so I sent him a text message:
When you get back we need to talk
.

Are you breaking up with me?
he wrote back.

Just get back here
, I replied.

You're breaking up with me, aren't you?

I sent one more message:
Yes
.

Then I lay down on the bed in Marina's room and ignored the dozens of messages from my now ex-boyfriend, until the panicked and apologetic messages got to be too much.

“I've got to deal with this,” I said to Marina, exasperated.

Our hotel was round and hollow in the middle, so that if you were in the center of the circle, you could look up and there were rooms with balconies all around it.

“Please don't do this,” Dick begged. “You can't break up with me. I can't be without you. The thought of it makes me not want to live anymore.”

I rolled my eyes. He cried harder.

“I mean it,” he said. “I will throw myself off the balcony. I'll kill myself.”

I lost it.

“Fuck you!” I screamed. “Don't fucking joke about suicide. Your back isn't deteriorating. You're not fucking dying. Are you becoming a quadriplegic? No, you're just becoming a pussy.”

He cried harder. I couldn't even stand to be in the same room. I left.

He headed down to the bar and stayed there for the rest of the trip.

Now, if I ever make a bad decision, my mom simply reminds me, “Look, of all the bad decisions you've made or could have made in your life, at least you didn't marry Dick IttyBitty.” And that puts everything in perspective.

When I was sixteen, I had an epiphany about my matwork. Until then, I had just been memorizing different moves. I would think, Okay, the person's here, I'll try this. The person moves this way, I'll try that. All the moves were separate in my head.

Then, one day, I went in for an armbar, and my opponent shifted, making it impossible for me to execute the move. I got stacked, then I realized that in defending against my attack, my opponent had perfectly positioned me to carry out a different type of armbar. It was like I just landed in the middle of another technique. I picked up from the middle of that move. I called it the Juji Squish Roll.

That was the first time I linked two different techniques on the ground, and then I realized you could do that with everything. From that moment on, I was constantly looking at ways that I could connect seemingly unconnected moves. Instead of being frustrated by what most people saw as a failure, I looked at it as an opportunity to create something new.

Dumping the dirtbag was one of the best decisions of my life, but I went from having nowhere
else
to go to nowhere to go.

While I was in Miami, I bumped in to Corey Paquette, who competed for Canada and whom I knew from various training camps. I mentioned that I was without a place to live. He mentioned that he was in search of a roommate to split the cost of renting a dorm room in Montreal.

Corey headed back home while I stayed for the next tournament. A few days later I messaged him through Facebook, “Does the offer still stand?” He had a bed ready for me by the time I touched down in Montreal.

My portion of the rent was two hundred Canadian dollars a month. The affordability aspect was important. I had aged out of the Social Security payments and was dependent on the USA Judo funding. The organization guaranteed $3,000 a month in funding to any athlete who won an A-level tournament. The catch was, for years, no one had. Then I came on the scene and USA Judo started having to pay up. But the checks were always late, and I had to repeatedly call to see when I could expect the money. One month in the spring of 2006, I called and the receptionist told me, “We ran out of money for that program.”

“You ran out?” I was incredulous.

“We didn't think anyone would get an A ranking,” she said.

Fuck USA Judo, fuck all these American coaches, fuck Dick
, I thought.
I'm going to go up to Canada, handle my shit on my own, and compete better than I ever have.

I had saved up a fair amount, but not enough to live off of for very long. The US dollar stretched further in Canada.

My first morning in Montreal, I found the only gym remotely close to us with a sauna, which was essential for cutting weight. Still I had to take a bus and a train to get there. Corey would get up in the morning and go to classes; I got up and headed to the gym. I did the elliptical and lifted, then took a sauna. After my workout, I showered and walked to the nearby Subway. I ordered a six-inch Veggie Delight sandwich, a Diet Coke, and a chocolate chip cookie. That was the one sweet I allowed myself all day. Aside from my Subway lunch, my diet consisted of corn bran cereal with milk, Nesquik, wheat bread with Nutella and peanut butter, and pita bread with hummus.

In the evenings, Corey and I would take the train together to the Shidokan. The Shidokan was the Canadian version of Olympic Training Center, except, unlike its US counterpart, the best judokas in Canada really did train there. I had been there several times before for camps. While they would let me in the door and everyone was stereotypically Canadian friendly, none of the coaches could coach me because I was on a rival national team. Not only was I “the American,” but I always beat all their girls in tournaments, and their girls at both sixty-three kilos and seventy kilos were really good. In that way, having me there on a daily basis so they could train with me and study my tendencies was beneficial. The sense of competition that came from having good girls to train with kept me working hard.

The practices at the Shidokan were more grueling than any practice I had ever experienced back home. They would do a day of golden score where for two-hours you would keep practicing nonstop until someone scored on you. The person who got scored on would be out, while the other person would keep going. I would be out there for an hour, no one able to score on me.

I made up for the fact that I didn't have any coaching with extra work. I thought about what I needed to do; I wasn't dependent on somebody else giving me orders. I would ask myself,
What can I do to improve now?
I never had to put that kind of thought into my own training before.

After practice, while everyone else showered and changed, Mike Popiel and I would spend hours just making shit up on the mat. We would try moves that no one had ever used in competition and that no coach would ever condone. Most of the moves were completely impractical bullshit, but sometimes, we stumbled upon something brilliant, and a few of those could actually be used in competition. Everyone would be going back home, and we'd be like, “What about this? What about this?”

At the end of the night, Corey and I took the train back to the dorms. When we got home, Corey called his girlfriend and they would talk for hours, while I lay in my twin bed, thinking up more cool moves I wanted to try after practice the next day.

Messing around in the gym and inventing moves developed my ability to think for myself. I went from just doing what the coach says to being able to think independently. That meant in a match I could strategize in the moment. Some athletes are amazingly talented, but can only do what their coaches tell them. They can't think for themselves.

When I was starting judo, there were national tournaments I could have easily won, but my mom said we were not going. I hadn't yet worked hard enough to earn the honor of going. I was annoyed at the time, but I got far more out of not going than I would have if she had taken me to the tournament and I had won.

No one is ever going to give you anything of value. You have to work for it, sweat for it, fight for it. But there is far greater value in accomplishments you earn than in accolades that are merely given to you. When you earn something, you never have to worry about justifying that you truly deserve it.

During my time based in Canada, I won the US Fall Classic and the Rendez-Vous in Canada. The success set me up as the favorite to win the 2006 Junior World Championships again. In Santo Domingo that October, I breezed through the opening rounds. Then I faced a Cuban girl in the semifinal. The match was scoreless, and time was running out. I decided to go for a sacrifice throw that would put me on my back. The referee did not see the throw correctly and appeared to believe the girl threw me. He called an ippon for her.

My opponent knew she had not thrown me, but she got up and started jumping up and down as if she had done something to win the match. My hands shook with rage. It took all the strength I had not to scream. It was so fucking unfair. I stormed off the mat and threw my gi jacket on the ground as hard as I could.

I had been robbed because of someone else's screwup, and it cost me the championship and the opportunity to be the first American to win the junior worlds twice.

My bad day was about to get worse. USA Judo saw my breach of etiquette as an opportunity to make an example out of me. Instead of holding me up as a successful American athlete, the USA Judo brass was constantly looking for ways to punish me.

I had barely stepped off the edge of the mat when the USA Judo officials at the tournament got together and decided they were going to suspend me from competition for six months. But they needed something to hide behind, like a respected referee blasting me. So the USA Judo representatives went to Carlos Chavez, a big-deal referee from Venezuela. They asked Carlos what should be done to punish me.

Carlos looked at them with disbelief, unable to comprehend why a national governing body was so eager to punish its most promising athlete. Usually when organizations like USA Judo came to him, it was to appeal on an athlete's behalf. Carlos took a diplomatic pause.