Note to Self

MJJ Tournament: Fight 1

This was my first fight in the tournament against my own friend. Meet Mateja, a brother from the dojo and the guy I car pooled with :p

We were hoping to fight in different divisions but they merged weight categories. Mateja is 18 years old and on route to professional mma. He claims to train up to 4 hours per day; 1 hour of weights at lunch, 1 hour with his brother after school and then a 1 to 2 hour class at the dojo. Wow. I can’t say that my heart was as devoted as his. At least we were both guaranteed another fight. There were 9 fighters in our division and it was tiered for a double elimination (lose 2 fights and you’re out).

To fight for first place in the tournament you needed to win your first two fights. Then you would have a third fight for first place.

If you won one and lost one, you got a 3rd fight for third place. If you lost your first two fights you were out of the tournament.

Here’s what’s funny, I wasn’t even suppose to fight him. There was another contender named Christian who was around when they called the names to the ring. We’d have likely had this fight in the finals had I not walked into the ring instead of the other Christian.

To my credit Mateja (who won 1st) said that I was the most difficult fighter to submit… You see that’s his style, thats how he wins all his fights. He likes to go for he submission and he landed himself a nice arm bar the third time.

In this fight, I am going to say that my heart/spirit was lacking. I just wasn’t firing off enough aggression. I seem to have soften up over he years but I don’t feel bad about it. I’ll just note is as something that is crucial to winning a match. SPIRIT!!!

Kudos Mateja

This entry was posted on Monday, February 21st, 2011 at 8:08 pm. It is filed under Videos and tagged with competitions, mjj. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.