June 30, 2003
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saturday was the IWKA tournament, in dallas.
friday afternoon was the seminar with master shimabuku (who is actually apparently going to the dojos in berkeley this week – if i had chosen the other schedule, i could have seen him there as well, oh well).
anyway, the seminar was neat. the tournament was….enlightening. it was very obvious that the various sets of judges were scoring (mostly) for…i don’t quite know. speed. power. i really felt like they were looking much less for artistry and elegance and understanding. although i do suppose that with speed and power it is somewhat easiser to look like you are actually fighting someone.
all of our senseis did sai kata, and basically got smacked down in the scoring. the greatest majority of the other dan ranks did bo or tonfa kata, both of which look much flashier. dave also did bo kata, but his performance was mostly just ok (i’ve personally seen him do it better).
in the open hand kata,they also didn’t much like our senseis. i guess they weren’t flashy enough (same goes for my performance). dave did what i would swear was his best ever performance of sanchin kata. unfortunately, this kata involves a lot of sanchin breathing, aka, slowness and controlled breathing and whatnot. and the judges didn’t like it much. jake was doing really well, but messed up a bit. for all that, he scored ok. steve they liked, he got 3rd in his division (despite also making a mistake, which he almost didn’t show. he got 2 really high scores, who are the ones we think didn’t notice). in my division though, it was cool, katherine did her kata (seiuchin) , which, as we do it, also has a lot of slow bits. i was sitting there thinking “damn, she looks good. but i bet the judges won’t like it. she’s too graceful” much to my surprise and pleasure, they scored her really high, and she won 2nd.
sparring is sparring. a lot of the people were kind of out of control. our two senseis who sparred, well, let’s just say that in the black belt divisions, you get some crazy people, and they just lost on points in the first match. steve lost his bout, although this sort of hyper guy he was sparring was getting kind of freaked by steve being unflappable. but steve still got third in his division, on points.
jake won two straight bouts on points, lost his third, got 3rd in *his* division. way to go. he was doing really really well for his rank. his comment “if you come at my head screaming, i say , hmm, you seem to be screaming and attacking my head. well, i block and punch you. point!” katherine was taking it easy and lost her bout. this also was my division, of course. i won my first bout easy, 3-0, although we did get tangled at one point and i took a fairly heavy fall, which was fine except for the jamming of the finger. but then i lost my second, 3-1, although, meh, i wasn’t going for headshots at all, i’m leery of hurting people, but whatever, i still got 2nd.
the best part, really though, was talking to all my clubmates about everything and everybody we saw there. that was really great. we all love the karate we do, and analyzing it and why we do it , and what exactly we and others do really makes the day.
Edited to add a pic of Banks-sensei. Most of the pics I took are garbage, but I do love this one:
