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Bob Thomas 7th Dan - article by Stan Brogan |
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Bob first became interested in Judo in 1955 when he was seventeen years old. This came about because someone he knew was boasting about his own ability at the sport and invited Bob to come along to his club in Bridgeton. They arranged to meet but the guy did not turn up so Bob went to the club on his own. The first thing he noticed was the strenuous physical activity, which was going on, and this was an inspiring sight. Tam McDermott was the Sensei there and he was urging everyone on. Bob realised very quickly that this was the sport for him. At that time Tam McDermott was the most prominent judoka in Scotland and John Fraser was his very able assistant. Between them, they worked everyone extremely hard. Bob was a member of a group of teenagers between 17-18 years of age and they all practised very hard indeed. All of them without exception took some terrible poundings from the higher grades but this was accepted because they were so keen to learn and improve. Bob recalls going home on after training at weekends and evenings with his kit literally sodden with sweat! He also remembers a divisional curtain being put across the mat, which was to separate high and low grades. Some wag put a notice on the high-grade side, which said, “please do not feed the animals.”
In 1961 Bob and some friends went to London in order to continue their judo training. They trained in the Budokwai and Renshuden. Bob attended the famous Budokwai Sunday class many times where the standard was very high. He also recalls the Koreàn team who were visiting Paris for the World Championships, calling in to the Budokwai Sunday class to give instruction. The team consisted of Dongbae Kim, Dukyong Kim, Kim en Tae and HanhoSan. Interestingly Bob and Hanhosan met 35 years later in Holland (incidentally neither of us has changed at all!) and the Korean remembered the Sunday class which was run by Trevor Leggett. Hanhosan is now a top trainer in Germany. While at the Budokwai. Despite the fact that Bob was a black belt of the Scottish Judo Association, he was advised by Trevor Leggett that he would have to through another grading for his BJA black belt and he therefore agreed and attended a grading at the London Judo Society. He remembers the line up that day for Black Belt was eight brown belts and everything had to be done on the day, incidentally two of the brown belts had done their line up for first Dan. There was no points system then I! He got his Black Belt and later returned to the Budokwai ready to practice.
His first success in London was when after eliminations were held at the Renshuden for the British Club Championships. He was selected as first reserve to a strong team, which comprised of international 3,d Dans so Bob was quite flattered to be chosen as lst reserve. Incidentally this team won the championship. It is now 1963 and Bob was living in Preston and the same year after eliminations in the KNK Manchester, he was selected for the North West Area team for the Inter Area Championships but unfortunately they were not placed. He is now back in Scotland and it is 1964 and time to enter the eliminations for the Inter Area team and he was successful. At the Crystal Palace after many gruelling contests �� the Scottish Team won, beating the British Universities. 4 — 0 in the final. (No weight categories) The same year he was in the Scottish Team against Holland at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow where he fought Anton Geesink and lasted 40 seconds including the hold down. The team then consisted of George Kerr, John Young, Jack Cocker and Bob. It is now 1965 and the Inter Areas crop up again. The Scots team reaches the finals losing to the NEC. Bob got his second Dan that year. And was a member of the Inter Area Team for the next three years. He also recalls the same year he and his friend, Bob Oliver went to Split for ajudo competition called the Jadran Cup The opposition was very strong with a powerful contingent of East Germans attending. The best known were Otto Smirat and Herbert Niemann. Smirat was a Katagiiruma specialist and Herbert Niemann was European heavy weight champion of that year. They were both immensely strong and skilful. The competition was held in Hadjuk, Split’s football stadium. Rain stopped play on the Saturday so it was postponed until the Sunday. Bob remembers how friendly the Germans were and Niemann’s quiet dignity. They were able to communicate a bit because Bob has a slight knowledge of German.
Eventually he advanced to the quarter finals where he was held down by Niemann after about four minutes. Bob Oliver fought extremely well, throwing two men with Tsurikoniigoshe. He also advanced to the quarter finals but he lost to a large German called Schulz. Niemann of course won the heavyweight and Smirat won the middleweight. 1966 Promoted to 3rd Dan and also got married (my wife insists I mention this)! There was a line up of 15 and the examiners were George Kerr and Andy Bull. He fought in three home internationals along the way and won the Scottish heavyweight championship twice. In the early 70s Bob took up refereeing. He has been a National (A) referee for many years, a Senior Examiner and also a member of the Panel of National Katajudges. An amusing incident occurred at the Scottish Championships during which he had been promoted to 6th Dan and George Kerr had presented him with a red and white belt. After that Bob refereed a very contentious final. As he was coming off, he heard a voice saying” Well Bob never got his 6”’ Dan for his refereeing — that’s for sure.” On one occasion while Bob was conducting a Dan grading — one of the contestants had an unusual name. Bob asked the man if his name was Czech and when this was confirmed, Bob said “Well I hope today that you don’t become a bounced Czech!” Afterwards when the competitor came for his points card and Bob added the 30 points — he said well I am glad to see that you are still legal currency!!. 1990 Bob had his 6th Dan confirmed by Mr Kawaniura at the Kodokan. Mr Kawamura was the teacher of Bob’s sensei Mr Tam McDermott. He is currently still refereeing, examining and involved in Kata. Although he has spent over four decades being involved with Judo, he has gained a lot from the discipline and has made many friends he would never have met otherwise, He is grateful for the help, instruction and inspiration he received from judoka in particular of course Tam McDermott and also John Fraser. Too Little Too Much—Part four- Trevor Leggett 1997 This article is the fourth of a series of pieces by Trevor Leggett which first appeared in magazine form in 1997 In the last article, I explained how I understood from a lecture of Dr. Kano about sixty years ago that most of us are either Too Much men or Too Little men in life. Still later, I saw, or at least I thought I saw, that nations too are mostly Too Much or Too Little nations. I gave as an example of a Too Much nation the French, and I recalled that in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century they had executed the King and some 2,000 aristocrats. But they went on executing; they could not stop. Finally they began to execute even their own leaders. Altogether about 30,000 were guillotined. Then about a hundred years after that, the workers in Paris rebelled against the government, and set up a Commune. The French President crushed them, killing or exiling about 30,000.
Then in
the middle of this century, when France had been defeated and occupied by
the Germans, the Allied forces invaded France from Britain, and drove out
the Germans. It took a few days to set up a new French government and
administration so for a very short time, there were no police and no public
order. In those few days, the French citizens lynched many of the Frenchmen
who had accepted jobs under the German administration. Frenchmen never talk
of those few days as far as I know there are no official figures for the
murders, but the estimate is...yes, 30,000. Some Frenchmen who were there
say that the figure was nothing like that: ‘a few
people were shot’. But others, who were also there, say it was a three-day
civil war. Perhaps the truth will be known only when everyone concerned is
dead. From the British point of view, there is sometimes an extreme bitterness in the French attitude to enemies, and even a certain acidity in their attitude to friends. This is summed up by a maxim (!) of the famous French wit, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, in 1665: In the misfortune of our best friends we always find something which is not displeasing to us. Would we like a friend like this? It is true that this was said a long time ago, but every Frenchman knows this writer: he is in the schoolbooks. The French say that British people feel the same way, but do not talk about it. There is some truth perhaps in this, but I think the difference is that the Frenchman says ‘we can always find something pleasing in the misfortune of our best friend’. This is too much cynicism. If we look at French civilization, however, we can see that their great geniuses were countering this hardness and bitterness. The greatest French poet is probably still Victor Hugo, who was also a supreme novelist. He depicted the miseries of the poor, and awakened the sense of compassion in France, as Dickens did in Britain. But Dickens could not create the beauties that the poet Hugo could express, even in translation. When I was a boy, I found Hugo’ s Les Miserables on my father’ a bookshelves. At the age of eight, I read it again and again; I find that I know details better than most French people, who have I suppose, read it only once. It is a classic, most of us read our national classics only once at most. Whether it made me more compassionate I do not know, but it gave me an insight behind the scenes of our vaunted civilization. It also showed me that happiness does not depend on being with many people. It can be solitary. The scenes of happiness in Dickens are often set in noisy parties and groups; Victor Hugo showed serenity in lonely contemplation of an ideal. I think I see in cases like Victor Hugo how the spirit of the nation rises up to correct some of its faults — in this case hardness and a satisfaction in wounding. If we look at the British, we find that they are not so vindictive when they win, moreover they do not take special pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Many nations find particular satisfaction when they see that others are less well placed than themselves. This is not a general British vice. An old Shanghai Chinese once made an interesting remark to me about my country: ‘You British are hypocritical and foxy. But you have one very good point. You are selfish like everyone else, but if you get what you want, then you are satisfied with that. Most other nations, when they get what they want, are still not satisfied : they try to prevent anyone else from getting it toot I felt pleased by the last remark: I had never thought about it in that way, but it has some truth. As to the ‘hypocritical’, most of us admit to that, and many of our greatest writers have satirised it. But when I tell them that we have the reputation in the East as ‘foxy’, most British people are amazed. They deny it at once. I say: ‘Don’ t think of us individually; think of us internationally. Don’ t you think it has some truth?’Alter thought, many say ‘Yes, I suppose so But still, all nations play foxy tricks; at least (as the French would say) if they can think of any. No, the besetting weakness of the British is complacency and inertia. ‘Oh, it is good enough, it works quite well. Why change it?’ It is difficult to get the British excited. It sounds like a formula for disaster, and sometimes it has nearly been so. But we have been saved by certain counter movements. The parallel with Victor Hugo and French vindictiveness and hardness would perhaps be George Bernard Shaw. If we are asked to name the six best English plays of the 20th century, they would all be by him. And he ruthlessly exposed our laziness and complacency, as well as hypocrisy, in these masterpieces. He was laughed at, but finally honoured. This is a second saving characteristic: tolerance of eccentrics. Often eccentrics are mad, but sometimes they are geniuses. In Britain as a rule, they have not been persecuted, but left alone to develop their ideas. Among the many eccentrics in science, for instance, some turned out to be men of genius; they were mostly ignored for a time but not persecuted, whereas in France the wonderful Pasteur was bitterly opposed by the medical profession. He once remarked: ‘I did not know a man could have so many enemies What about Japan? We see sometimes traces of the vindictiveness which British people think is French. The extermination of the Heike, pursued through centuries, and the remaining prejudice against hisabetsu buraku even today are examples. Like the French, Japanese have developed a wonderful culture of small things. (‘Small things’ — the patronising phrase reveals the British yabottai, doesn’ t it?) The words of their popular songs are poems, which stand by themselves, and even get into poetry anthologies. Words of the American and English songs are boorish in comparison. Even in aesthetics, the Japanese Too Much tendency shows itself. The artistic may degenerate into the artificial. We are amazed to see a traditional dancer wearing thin trousers covering the feet and trailing out some distance behind. The dancer periodically kicks the trailing ends away It must be difficult to dance in this fashion, but as a matter of fact it is not attractive because it is so artificial. It seems to us that Japanese people have a mass of trivial rules and practices which they rely on to give a feeling of safety and identity. Some of them once had a meaning, but now there is often none. They are like the buttons on the sleeve of a man’ a jacket: when men rode horses, these were used to button back the cuffs to keep them clean. Today they are merely ornamental, and we do not feel lost without them. In Japan, when the load of trivialities becomes too great, they are not gradually reduced as in British history, but there is a violent convulsion which changes everything. This tends to go too far, and so loses meaning The incredible tangle of the Manyo gana is replaced by the Kana syllabaries. They become artistic and beautiful, but more complicated. Some Japanese books and papers are written in columns from the right edge of the paper, and others in horizontal lines from the left. First year foreign students of Japanese, who do not know this, sometimes try to translate quite a long piece backwards, trying to find the backwards okuri—gana in the grammar, force the words to make sense. It may soon be time for another convulsion. Periodically, Japanese great minds try to check the Too Much drive by critical assessment. Kano examined the systems of jujutsu, and in his critical assessment rejected many tricks which depended on surprise, or unreasonable strength, and so on. He was brilliantly successful in bringing out his new system of judo on rational principles.It seems to a foreigner that Japanese people feel resentful, and nervous, in the face of the 5% doubt or uncertainty in any assessment. Before a decision is taken, they try to foresee everything that may happen. But once the decision is taken, they went to carry it out 100%, and not 95%. They do not like a fox-doubt, as they feel it to be, and they are inclined to think of such a foxdoubt as traitor. This is the fourth article on the subject and now I will stop. To do more would be Too Much.
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