The brown belt that never was

Somewhere in my teenage years there was a version of me who was going to be a brown belt at judo.

I know this because I’d already bought the belt.

I was a blue belt by then and brown was next. I hadn’t actually earned it, obviously, but apparently I was sufficiently confident in the inevitable march of progress that buying one in advance seemed perfectly reasonable.

I never wore it.

There wasn’t a dramatic ending to my judo career. I didn’t get injured, fall out with anybody or decide that judo and I were finished. I just became a teenager. Other things gradually became more interesting and, at some point I can’t even remember, I stopped going.

I’ve occasionally wondered what happened to that brown belt. More recently I’ve started wondering what might have happened if I’d actually worn it.

How I ended up doing judo in the first place is another slightly hazy childhood memory. My brother Rich had started going to karate lessons and I dimly remember going along and watching. In my memory at least, it bore a slightly alarming resemblance to Cobra Kai from the original Karate Kid film: lots of shouting, discipline and an instructor who seemed considerably more frightening than anybody involved in a children’s hobby had any obvious need to be.

Whether it was actually like that or whether forty years of memory and repeated exposure to The Karate Kid have gradually merged the two together, I couldn’t possibly say.

Either way, we didn’t become karate kids.

Somehow judo entered the picture instead, and Rich and I ended up at Nottingham Olympic Judo Club on St Stephen’s Road in Sneinton.

It was walking past there recently that started me thinking about all this again. The old club is flats now, because apparently nearly forty years is sufficient time for the world to rearrange itself without asking permission. Seeing the building again dislodged a collection of names I hadn’t properly thought about in decades.

Our instructors were John Mewett and Dave Lawrence. I could probably make this sound rather more martial-arts-like by referring to them as Sensei Mewett and Sensei Lawrence, but that isn’t how I remember them. They were John and Dave. That’s what we called them then and that’s still how they exist in my head.

I had no real idea who Dave and John were outside that room. Why would I? Adults don’t really have biographies when you’re a child. They’re just the adults who happen to occupy a particular part of your world.

There was Bruce too, older than us, dark-haired and exceptionally good. I remember him as something of John’s protégé. John’s son Dan trained there as well, although I’m not sure I ever thought of him as Dan. He was Diggy.

Then there was Rolly and his sister, whose name frustratingly refuses to come back to me. I remember her, though, not least because she managed to break her collarbone during one of our club trips, which is an unfortunate way to ensure you remain part of somebody else’s childhood memories even after they’ve forgotten your name.

There was Siân, on whom I had a bit of a crush, and her sister Karen. I’m sure there were others. Perhaps their names will come back tomorrow while I’m making a cup of tea or doing something else entirely unrelated.

It’s peculiar which names survive.

One of the strangest additions to that list came more recently. A friend called Mark, whom I met many years later through an entirely different part of my life, happened to mention that he’d trained at Nottingham Olympic too, at around the same time. Neither of us remembers the other being there. Perhaps our periods at the club didn’t quite overlap. Or perhaps we stood ten feet apart every week for years without ever really noticing one another.

I rather like the possibility that we did.

At the time, of course, none of us were nostalgic characters in somebody’s future story. We were just kids doing judo.

Nearly forty years later, naturally, I disappeared down a rabbit hole.

It turns out John and Dave weren’t simply two blokes who happened to be good at judo. John had been a British lightweight champion and competed at high level himself before becoming heavily involved in coaching, apparently spreading himself across something of a Venn diagram of clubs and schools around the East Midlands.

Dave had considerable pedigree of his own. He’d been a three-time British Open champion and represented Great Britain internationally. Between them, Rich and I had somehow wandered into a little judo club in Sneinton and ended up being taught by two men who’d operated at the top end of British judo.

We had absolutely no appreciation of this at the time.

John was John. Dave was Dave. They were the blokes who taught us judo.

Bruce really was as good as I remembered too. He went on to become a British junior champion, joined the national squad and competed internationally. Better still, in a contemporary newspaper interview he specifically credited John with giving him his start.

Again, none of this particularly impressed the younger me because I didn’t know any of it.

We even made a club trip down to the Budokwai in London. At the time I knew it was a famous judo club and that going there was exciting. Only now do I appreciate quite what sort of place we’d been taken to: one of the oldest and most important judo clubs outside Japan, and somewhere John himself had trained and competed as a young man.

Mostly I remember that Rolly’s sister broke her collarbone. I want to say her name was Emma, but I can’t be sure.

Children are remarkably unimpressed by history while they’re standing in it.

I stuck at judo for quite a long time and, without wishing to blow the trumpet of a considerably younger version of myself, I was actually quite good.

I’m comfortable saying that now because sufficient time has elapsed for it not to constitute boasting.

I was built slightly differently then too. I was tall and thin, and because judo grouped us by weight rather than height I frequently found myself facing opponents who were considerably shorter and chunkier than me. They generally had a lower centre of gravity and could be bloody difficult to shift.

Eventually I discovered a throw that suited me perfectly.

Tsuri-goshi.

My height suddenly became useful. I could reach over an opponent’s shoulder, grab their belt, turn and get my hips underneath them before lifting them over.

Always the same way.

Over the shoulder. Grip the belt. Turn. Right hip underneath.

It became my speciality.

Years later I needed a fairly intensive course of osteotherapy to sort out problems around my hips and pelvis. Apparently repeatedly twisting my growing body violently in one direction while using it to launch other human beings through the air may not have been entirely consequence free.

Who knew?

There are other fragments that come back now I’ve started thinking about it. Gradings. Randori. The feel of a judogi. Japanese names for techniques, some of which remain instantly familiar while others have disappeared completely. The slow progression through different coloured belts.

Although, as I’ve discovered while disappearing down this particular rabbit hole, even my memory of that progression isn’t quite right.

As a junior I was on the Mon grading system. You didn’t simply work through a succession of adult coloured belts. There were eighteen Mon grades, represented by coloured belts and then coloured tabs added to them as you progressed.

I’d reached 15th Mon.

Blue belt, three red stripes.

There were only three Mon grades left.

Brown belt – one tab, two tabs, three tabs – then surely black?

At least, that’s how it appeared to me at the time.

I don’t remember us using red belts at all as juniors. We started with white, then progressed through the colours and tabs. Brown therefore felt significant because in my child’s understanding of martial arts there was only really one meaningful destination beyond it.

Black.

I’d vaguely assumed I’d get the brown belt, carry on progressing and eventually there would be some junior version of a black belt waiting for me.

Only now do I realise there was a rather important complication approaching. At sixteen I’d have moved out of the junior Mon system and into the senior Kyu grading system.

And rather wonderfully, having spent years proudly working my way upwards through the colours, I’d effectively have found myself going backwards through them.

The Kyu grades count down towards first Kyu. Brown, Blue, Green, Orange, Yellow, Red.

Only after that do you reach the Dan grades.

Only then does the coveted black belt finally appear.

So the brown belt I’d bought wasn’t actually the penultimate step on an uninterrupted march towards black at all.

It was the end of one childhood grading system, just before another one began.

I find this oddly delightful.

The younger me had bought a brown belt for a future he thought he understood, completely oblivious to the fact that the rules were about to change.

Still, within the world I actually inhabited then, brown was next.

So I bought the belt.

Presumably I thought I’d need it soon enough.

Then something happened.

Or, more accurately, nothing happened.

That’s perhaps the strangest part when I look back. There was no final session that I knew was the final session. I can’t remember putting my judogi away for the last time. I can’t remember telling Dave or John that I wasn’t coming back. There was no conscious decision that this thing I’d spent years doing was over.

I just became a teenager.

Interests change remarkably quickly at that age. Things which have occupied enormous portions of your childhood suddenly find themselves competing with friends, girls, music, laser quest probably and the increasingly exciting business of becoming whatever you think an adult is supposed to be.

Judo lost.

And somewhere there was a brand-new brown belt waiting for a grading that never happened.

It’s tempting when looking backwards to imagine that every road you didn’t take led somewhere extraordinary. It probably didn’t.

Perhaps I’d have passed that grading, earned my brown belt and packed it in six months later anyway. Perhaps I’d have moved into the Kyu system and discovered that starting again wasn’t nearly as appealing as I’d imagined. Perhaps Dave or John would have encouraged me to compete more seriously. Perhaps I’d finally have started going to those area gradings. Maybe I’d have stuck with it into adulthood.

Maybe I’d eventually have made it through the Kyu grades to Dan.

Maybe I’d still be doing it now.

There’s an alternative version of me somewhere who spent another forty years on the mat, eventually becoming the middle-aged bloke standing at the edge of a dojo teaching another generation of lanky teenagers how to deal with opponents built considerably closer to the ground than they are.

Although, knowing me, there’s an equally plausible alternative reality where I got my brown belt, discovered beer the following weekend and never set foot on a mat again.

That’s the trouble with lives you didn’t live. They’re remarkably accommodating to whatever story you want to tell about them.

Writing all this did have one unexpected consequence, though.

I mentioned to Mum and Dad that I was writing about the old judo club, and they went digging.

This was before digital photography, of course, when photographs were things you took rather more sparingly and then entrusted to envelopes, albums and drawers for the next forty years.

But somehow they’d survived.

And there I was.

Tiny, solemn and wearing a judogi.

There was Rich and me together in our early belts. There were glimpses of the club itself, looking simultaneously exactly as I remember it and strangely less cavernous and massive.

And there was me holding a little gold trophy.

Even better, the label on the front has survived:

JUDO WINNER
1986
ALAN FISHER

So apparently I wasn’t entirely imagining being quite good.

There were photographs from birthday parties we’d had at the club too, which unlocked another memory I’d completely forgotten.

Moon Rides.

A Moon Ride involved partially inflating one of the club’s enormous inflatable pieces of apparatus, placing a child at one end and then having an adult launch themselves from a considerable height onto the other.

The resulting displacement of air propelled the child upwards.

Sometimes very upwards.

It was the 1980s. Improvised trebuchets for launching children bodily into the air were fine.

Apparently this constituted organised entertainment.

One photograph captures Chris, dad of my childhood friend David, in full flight towards the thing, about to send whichever unfortunate child was lying at the other end into low Earth orbit. He looks like an Eagle about to take his prey.

Chris sadly isn’t with us any more.

Which makes the photograph rather more precious than anybody taking it could possibly have imagined at the time. He’s just somebody’s dad arsing about at a children’s birthday party, suspended in mid-air for a fraction of a second. Dave looking on from the sidelines with a look of genuine concern on his face.

And nearly forty years later, there he still is.

That’s perhaps the strangest thing about going looking for your childhood. You start with the things you remember, and occasionally they lead you back to things you’d completely forgotten.

And there’s another road not taken before any of that.

Had Rich not tried those vaguely Cobra Kai-ish karate lessons, perhaps we’d never have found judo at all.

No Nottingham Olympic.

No Dave or John. No Bruce or Diggy. No Rolly and his unfortunately unnamed sister. No Siân or Karen. No trip to London. No tsuri-goshi. No osteopath wondering years later why my hips had apparently spent my adolescence being pulled in one direction.

And no brown belt that never was.

I don’t particularly regret stopping. It’s difficult to regret a decision I don’t even remember making, and the things that gradually replaced judo became parts of the person I actually became. Had I carried on, something else might have been squeezed out instead.

But I do wonder.

That’s probably why the brown belt has stuck in my memory. I don’t know where it is now, or even when it disappeared. Perhaps Mum and Dad eventually threw it away. Perhaps I did. It doesn’t really matter.

What interests me is what it represented.

I bought it for a future version of myself because, at the time, becoming him seemed inevitable. He was going to pass that grading. Then, although he didn’t actually understand it yet, he’d leave the Mon system behind and start working his way through Kyu. Perhaps eventually he’d reach Dan. Perhaps he’d keep going for the rest of his life.

He never existed.

Instead, nearly forty years later, I walked past an old dojo in Sneinton that’s now been turned into flats and suddenly remembered Dave and John standing at the edge of the mat, Bruce being irritatingly better than the rest of us, Diggy and Rolly, Rolly’s sister and her unfortunate collarbone, and Siân, on whom younger me had a rather more-than-judo-related interest. I remembered Karen too, and discovered that Mark and I might have been sharing the same mat years before either of us remembers meeting.

I remembered travelling down to London. I remembered being tall and skinny and invariably finding myself opposite somebody shorter and considerably chunkier.

And, most vividly of all, I remembered exactly what I’d do about it.

Reach over the shoulder. Grab the belt. Turn.

Right hip underneath.

Tsuri-goshi.

Some things apparently stay with you.

I still never earned that bloody brown belt, though.