Neil Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just something hardened through lots of battles and randori and that kind of stuff. But it’s cool that humans are able to generate that kind of power. It’s cool. When I was ’84 Olympics, but I’m just going to go there now just quickly, but we had a freestyle wrestler. He’s American actually, but he had the English nationality. Noel Loban, his name is. And he competed for Great Britain. He got third place at the Olympics in ’84. We were training at Budokai and he was training. He came to do some judo, and put jacket on. And of course he was training with some of the lower levels and he was really handling himself well. When we did randori, so he did some randori with me, and I immediately thought, “I got to catch you. I got to stop single leg and double leg.” Because he was really quick. So strong as well, 90 something kilos. He’s a big guy. I caught his sleeve, immediately caught, and controlled him. And then he couldn’t start. So he said, “I needed to feel the difference.” So then I thought, “I better reciprocate this.” So we did the randori and I throw them a couple of times. He said, “I’m really glad we did that.” So then I said, “I need to feel the difference as well.” So we take the jackets off. So we took the jackets off and he was a nightmare. This guy was a nightmare. And like a monster. He was single legging me. And it was just totally different. So the jacket makes a massive difference. Huge difference to something. And people think it’s just the jacket that we’re wearing, but it isn’t. It’s our only tool actually. Yeah, and it’s a way of establishing control over another body. And it’s a whole art form and a science. And I don’t even know if you understand it really. You understand it subconsciously through time, because there’s so much involved. Because pulling on one part of the jacket pulls other parts of the jacket and the physics of that is probably insane to understand.…

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