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Old 10-19-2007, 06:28 AM   #2
G DiPierro
Location: Ohio
Join Date: Mar 2002
Posts: 365
United_States
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Re: Organizations- How important are they to you?

Quote:
John Riggs wrote: View Post
Interesting. My sensei gets upset if you don't try to attack or hold him strongly although he will often back off if he feels he will hurt someone by executing. I'm curious if you took ukemi and tried to stop him. Now I'd really be interested in seeing if you could reverse him-even get a technique to work on him. Or stop him if he really wanted to do the technique with full force. Especially, if you were the same age. I'm sure he's not as strong as he once was. I have video of him in his 50s and would not want to be on the receiving end.

I was not aware you trained with him. Houston?
Yes, a couple years ago. I touched hands with him many times. I don't want to say anything bad about him because he was such a nice guy, but yes I gave him some resistance and he had enough trouble with for me know that he's not used to getting that kind of thing very much. I felt like I could have put him on the ground without too much difficulty if I tried but what would that prove: that a young, 6ft+ gaijin can beat up a little old 70 year-old Japanese guy? If you don't want to believe that because you didn't see me do it, that's fine, but for me the cost of embarrassing the guy in front of his students would have too high for me to worry about proving anything to anyone else.

I thought he was very polite and generous to me within the context of his knowledge and abilities and that's about as much as you can ask for from a teacher. And his technique is certainly not bad. I like his general style and I thought he could do some interesting stuff as long as I decided not to really attack him but to just "take ukemi". In fact if I wavered even for a moment on my commitment to really attacking he moved in and quite quickly took my balance, which is a nice skill that even some other shihan might not have, but for me the gold standard is someone I can give my best attack and still not be successful. I've met a couple of people who I think are or might be in that category, and even though I don't consider your teacher to be one of them I liked him a lot personally and thought his aikido was fine, so he's still in the group of people with whom I would train again if I had the chance.

For Carl Thompson and Peter Goldsbury, I want you to know that I really do appreciate your interest but I won't be able to get back to you right away. Believe it or not, I'm actually on my way to an aikido seminar this weekend (gasp!) and I need to get going. Yes, it does still happen once or twice a year. If I can't find time to get to your messages earlier I will be sure to respond early next week. Thanks again.