Will and grace
On the day we moved the Coke machine to my office (I'll post more on this later), I was given custody of maybe a hundred dusty VHS tapes. I've been sifting through them, and there is some good stuff. There is also some gold.
The good stuff includes highlights from major judo and wrestling tournaments, including footage from the Olympics. There are also instructional videos for kata, grappling, and such. There is a copy of Shane, which makes sense to me, considering Sensei's favorite movie is High Noon, or so I've been told. There's a copy of Blood on the Sun, starring Jimmy Cagney, who learned judo for the fight scenes. We all know Sensei is a golf nut, so of course there are a couple of golf videos.
All good stuff, but to me the real gold, the stuff we should put in a museum and hire a curator for, is the videos of some dojo tournaments between 1993 and 1998. There are some great matches and some great nostalgia value. I wasn't around during those years, so it's been a lot of fun seeing younger versions of Nina, Will, Bob, and Jeff, to name just a few, and to contemplate how far they've come since then.
I'd love to know who the videographers were. I know there were at least two, because for one tournament I have two camera angles.
After I've digitized all the tournaments, I'm going to select some clips to put on a DVD. I'll post some of them to YouTube as well. In the meantime, here's Sensei doing nagekomi with Will, shortly after a dojo tournament on April 9, 1994. It's this clip that inspired the title of this post.
June 3rd, 2007 at 5:10 pm
This Is GREAT real GOLD as you put it, keep em' coming!
June 5th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Now THAT is some good judo… as Paul said, keep them coming, Andy!
(and thank you!!)