The Young Hotshot
11/5/91
Mark J. Norton
One of my students remarked recently that he felt there was a major difference in
attitude between Aikidoists and other martial arts. This person was in his mid-thirties
and had recently moved to Aikido from Tae Kwan Do. He felt that the people who studied Aikido were mostly professionals and that they shared an intrest in learning a
martial art to improve themselves. In his old TKD dojo, he would occasionally end
up practicing with some young hotshot who knew one or two moves really well and was
anxious to put it to use. These kids would "go for blood" using their attacks with full
force, in part to experience power over an older student. This inevitably lead to
injures either to the kid or the older student.
We don't encourage this approach to practicing at Northeast Aikikai, further, most students have a enough trouble remembering where to put their feet, much less using it to devastate their practice partners. Unfortunately, this is
not true of all Aikido dojos, thought certainly the track record is better than some
other arts. I have met my share of Aikido hotshots, some of which have resulted in injuries.
One of these incidents happened four days before the first time I tested for Shodan.
On the second day of summer camp (1985?), in one of the classes, I found myself
paired with another Ikkyu student, substantially younger than myself. He was eager
to practice hard in order to hone his "edge" for the tests to be conducted at the end of the week. I too
had been practicing and building up my phsical stamina to take this test. The technique we were practicing
was a kokyunage throw which involved pivoting to the rear, dropping to one knee and throwing the Uke. On my turn to be thrown, I noticed that there was a person on
the mat directly where I would land. To avoid injuring this person, I held back
from the throw. My opponent sensed this hesitation as resistance and pulled again,
harder. This caught me off-guard. I fell forward, onto his upright knee, cracking three ribs
in the process. I staggered off the mat to recover. Meanwhile, the young hotshot
had found another opponent, with hardly a backward glance at me. The injuries I
sustained resulted in failure during my shodan test. My ribs took six months to heal, four
of which I couldn't practice. I gained 30 pounds due to the loss of exercise in
my daily life. Ten of those pound never went away. All this because some young
kid was impatient to show that he was the more powerful Aikidoist.