BTG 128: My Most Humiliating Losses

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the guard on today's episode I'm going to talk about how to deal with humiliating loss right so if you've ever suffered just being humiliated on a competition stage or even in training I I will share with you some of the well this one experience it was Mutual both my brother and I suffered humiliating losses at the same time and uh how we're able to bounce back from it now this is going to be 25 years ago uh it was 2000 I am just about a year intoing into MMA and grappling training and our coach Randy says hey look there's this tournament uh state championships or or PanAm or something like that that in Orlando you guys are going to go and compete there I'm like oh okay and my brother and I were you know starting to compete pretty often so in whatever we could do we had done a few shoot fights uh so this um we had done some grappling already so we're like okay we're down he goes okay oh yeah by the way you're going to need a ghee so here I order you a ghee and uh you guys are going to go in Black Belt Division and I'm like oh okay now it turns out it was a ibjjf pan Americans right which was being held in Orlando that year I I believe it was a pan Americans I could be wrong but it was a ijf tournament and um I know at the time I didn't think anything of it because like I said we weren't training you know in a Brazilian school you know my instructor is a Cuban American guy he was good you know uh Judo blackbell Japanese U Jitsu blackbell Taekwondo blackbell he was a true mixed martial artist before the term had even existed but he wasn't giving us you know cultural Brazilian jitu right so my brother and I didn't realize the major taboo that we were committing jumping into a black ball division without being a quote unquote Brazilian jiujitsu black belt and I was 18 at the time yeah I don't think I was yeah I I think I was 18 my brother was 20 19 sorry and uh we're going to the division so mind you that would be very young for a black belt especially in that era right remember most people were not training from 4 years old especially in the US and when we go to do the the weigh-ins I remember uh the people there were looking at us like super suspiciously right and uh you know we were both in shape and whatnot so I guess Fitness wise wasn't an issue but like they never heard of us they were asking us some questions and oh whatever you know to me it wasn't a big deal as far as competing up a division because in wrestling you do that when I was in high school I was competing in men's open divisions which is for like adults right uh I never thought anything of it like if I want to challenge myself more by going up a division no big deal but obviously in juu it's seen as disrespectful or whatnot now my brother and I probably put in like three or four sessions training with the with a ghee and learned just some of the basic collar chokes PE choke and I don't even remember like my get my g game is not really there uh so when we go to compete we are warming up and I remember people were watching us warm up in awe because we were warming up like wrestlers we were drilling takedowns and working very explosively and I remember at that time nobody was warming up that I could see there they just Ste BTO the mat as it was and the pace was so slow so anyhow tournaments progressing it finally gets to the black belt divisions and you know for the most part the tournament sounds like a wrestling tournament there's noise going on and you know there's occasional chatter here and there the occasional Roar the crowd as it moves up and down uh once they call the back belt Visions I forget if I went first or my brother went first but I get called on to the mats and it suddenly goes dead quiet like you're watching a a tennis match like okay so I'm facing this guy and uh it doesn't last long folks we grab on Match starts he drops guard arms guarded me immediately me and I tapped right away like my arm was locked out completely I think that was like the quickest loss in my career of all Combat Sports it was just so fast I was like what the hell and you know of course I'm not familiar with the grips he was able to grab onto my sleeves so like it just sucked me into like a really deep armar and there was no way of me driving in or pulling out I was like oh man what a freaking scrub right like I felt like such a schmuck that I got like Tapped Out it must have been less than 10 15 seconds you know like it was just super quick nothing in the match happened I just got pulled into guard armb bar I was like I'm like well I got another match I'm like I can maybe redeem myself my brother goes and he has a match and he also loses uh not as bad as I did on that first match I think he just lost by points or something then the second match I'm facing this really big guy uh and he's just smothering me so I forget I think he pulled guard or something then swept me and then he was mounting me and then I think he ended up getting me in a cross choke or something like that at least that one went longer like it didn't finish in a minute you know but I still just totally smashed and like definitely did not belong right like I was not at that level uh especially with the ghee you know I think mainly the problem is the ghee I just it's a very different animal right um especially if You' just never really trained with anybody decent uh you just are not familiar with the grips or getting whatnot so I get destroyed both my matches and then I'm like well my brother still has got one more and then my brother ends up facing the guy that I faced on the first match and he's having a little bit of a Wrestling Judo match with him and the guy is setting up like a uchima as they start going out of bounds when my brother goes out of bounds he makes the beginner mistake of kind of stopping and then the guy throws him at that point and my brother lands flad on his back on basketball hardc court with the guy slamming on top of him completely knocks the wi out of him and uh he's not able to get up right away and they called it a TKO basically I didn't know they did jiujitsu but he wasn't able to get up quick enough because he was just to completely got the wind knocked out of him and like oh God and I seeing I'm like me man like it just did not go well so we both went 0 and2 that completely with our tail tucked between our legs and then we just walked out of there and of course I was filming because we were filmed each other's matches and uh uh we were just pretty silent you know when we left there because it's just such a such a slap in the face right like it's like what the hell just happened here and uh we ended up driving to I think a Wendy to get you know something to eat and we're just just sitting in the parking lot we got like our camcorder and we're watching the video just to see what happened which like I said didn't take long the matches were not long so we just watch both our matches we just looked at each other and we just start laughing you like like oh I think we I I don't think those videos exist anymore I'm sure somebody got it somewhere you know it's the internet but at least at our end I don't think we kept those videos there wasn't much to learn there you know uh but we were able laugh it off and I think a month later I was going to compete in another shoe fight and I was actually rematching the guy that was that had beat me in my first ever uh shoot fight this guy Eon Ruiz who really good uh fighter I lost to him in double overtime sudden death in this shoot fight uh so I'm like I wanted to get that one back in so I was training really hard for it and when we went to to the fight it turned out that uh he wasn't there I forgot what happened if he was injured or something but just no showed so I'm like crap and then the only person that was there was this Brazilian kid uh that was like destroying everybody uh he was doing grappling right but then I guess they announced that I was missing an opponent and he stepped up turns out this Brazilian kid was Pavo Popovich and at the time he was a brown belt but he was obviously a stud and he looked just as chiseled as or not as bulky as he got it towards later but he was my size uh and they matched us up and what ended up being a great fight I believe I took him down first he tried to Kimora me I reversed I went for an ankle lock he escaped he went for something else like it was a back and forth match but one of the deciding factors was that this was a shoot fight so there was ground pound there was striking uh but it was mostly ground work because he didn't stay in his feet long but I was doing a lot of ground on pound whereas he was trying to just focus on grappling and the grappling exchanges as I can recall were pretty even but uh because we both traded sub missions but I was dominating on the ground and pound so I ended up getting the win of that match although it was a really difficult match uh and the crowd was not very happy with that win it was a mostly Brazilians in the audience and as far as uh my team it was my brother me and my my coach Randy so we didn't have a lot of backers right we're kind of like these Outcast uh people there so there was a lot of rumbling and I remember it was like some Warehouse jam and I was just laying on a bench like totally gas because it was a really tough match right and uh I was only supposed to fight once that day cuz it was a shoe fight right so I'm like oh okay well I won my match I'm pretty happy right and then my coach is like hey Dave you got one more I'm like one more like we sign up for one he's like you don't understand if you don't fight this guy right now you're going to have to fight a bunch of Brazilians in the parking lot because they're not leaving without blood I was like what and you know you could hear there was a good Rumble in the in the audience so I'm like oh maybe he's not and you could tell they were not happy with that this decision so I'm like all right who is this guy and it's like oh they point over and it's some tall Brazilian guy you know so I'm like and I thought he was this guy um who was a kickboxer because I've seen in this same promotion a guy who looked similar that was just like around a mu Thai Fighter so I looked at him and like okay I'll just take him down and I'll ground and pound him just like the other guy when I go to fight this guy he is significantly taller than me he's got feet like paddle boards uh I do take him down but then he ends up scrambling to my back and I end up being pretty much shelled up for most of the round and he just like Eble me the back of the head which he's not supposed to do but you know he starts punching and whatnot or open handing or whatever no it was close fist the shoe fight roles but he ultimately got a rear naked choke sometime uh into the match and was able to win and I remember Le being there upset I'm like H like I was so lame you know like I was just totally fatigued you know like the other guy was much better I could feel it and I had people come up to me afterwards you know goes you don't know who that was I'm like no it's like oh that's mot and this is again this is 2000 right so I'm like who the hell is mot like oh he just fought in rings he won this and this and that like I don't know I thought the first guy was better uh but it turns out I fought a young motat not the the brother mototo the the the original one that we knew and everyone fell in love with Minot uh and apparently he was just a spectator at the time but because the Brazilian squad lost with their favorite fighter Pablo they ended up recruiting motato and getting him a pair of batula shorts just so that he can fight to defend the honor I guess kind of crazy uh but uh he was not a I guess he was probably pure pressured into it just like I was because he was pretty nice uh as far as afterwards and I know I trained with him or his brother uh not too long after that but uh long story short I went from perhaps one of my most humiliating performances I know definitely my most humiliating performance uh in my martial arts career to a month later beating one of the the top Grapplers in the state at the time and then facing a guy who was a MMA Legend who who at least became an MMA Legend and fairing pretty well and I think a lot of it is just has to do with having the right mindset when you lose you you can't dwell on the loss and take it personally and feel like oh everybody's looking on me with shame or I embarrass myself and I can never come back from this that's all Bs you can come back from just about anything and uh especially in my case where and you know my brother like we didn't have any serious injuries it was just a very strong uh perhaps a mental injury as far as like oh man this was embarrassing you know but that's only as severe as you allow it to be right and I I think what my brother and I were able to do just being seasoned competitors was we were able to look at that and just laugh at it right like hey okay we got we got scrub that day right um and move on and uh I think being able to do that is so important if you're a top tier competitor because otherwise if you just D in the loss and you just keep reliving it over and over again and you don't forgive yourself or you don't see the Learning lesson in there you're going to have a hard time moving on but despite that being one of the most or like I said the most humiliating loss uh of my career I can it never didn't even phase me for one second like I was able to okay whatever you know I'll move on from it and I I'm wondering about that now because I mean it was such a bad loss like I have never lost like that ever again that that badly and I don't know maybe because I was in the ghee and you know I'm not a ghee guy so I was able to say oh a different sport you know whatever but I I don't think it was that I just think that uh the shared experience of getting smashed alongside my brother and both of us just being able to laugh it off kind of relieved any you know internal guilt or you know any feeling of blame that I would have placed to myself and just realized you had a bad day you didn't prepare properly for this you underestimated the difficulty of it and this is what happens when you do that it's like okay lesson learned uh because I've lost other matches where like I definitely dwelled in it a lot more and like thought about them and relived them over and over again I thought man if I would have done this instead of that you know everything could have been different but but those matches never really thought about them too much I mean I know the mistakes I made and I'm like okay that I I only had to play it in my head like once or twice I'm like I got it now like I understand what went wrong versus sometimes when you have a hard loss it's like you see it over and over and over uh and this is where that saying I like to use Which is less is more is uh key here right like we living something for weeks and months or even years is not helpful right like you got everything you could usually after one or two times right especially when it's something that's difficult you're probably paying a lot more attention to it than the average person is so your your playthroughs are much more intense so it's not like I'm not that interested so I have to watch or reread a book over a few times until it really sinks in like now when you lose in a harsh way like it is a really you're fixated because you're trying to figure out what went wrong and then there's a part of you also that's kind of fantasizing about like how things could have changed uh if you would have played your hand differently and uh I would definitely tell you here less is more right and I I think watching a video with a third party to review the a match that's troubling you is useful here big because they'll give you some outside perspective and the learning lessons can be picked up immediately and then we can just okay we're done with this we don't have to keep looking at this again we we picked out the parts of this match which could have been improved the parts that you did well and now we know what we have to to work on in training and that's it I think that's a good practice and generally what we do with our Fighters even whether they win or they lose uh it's good to review matches and review tape I my brother is a big proponent of this which I agree which is before you review tape always review memory first especially as the fighter because chances are the things that you remember are going to be uh pivotal parts of the match uh that really stuck out to you so it's it's good to go through those parts first and then Resort back to video and for the the gaps in between what you don't remember which in most cases it's a good amount of a fight um and then work through it that way but I share these with you because actually I'll share you with you one more and this is when I was saying my most humiliating loss I'm like well and maral Arts cuz I did have one wrestling match where I lost that was super humiliating to me uh and this was also the one time I cut a lot of weight and that's why I say normally when you do when you have bad uh turnouts it's normally uh multiple things going wrong at the same time right just like uh any type of disaster it's not just one event that makes it right it has to be a Cascade of bad things rolling up and snowballing together to become a huge event that becomes a disaster right otherwise it would just be a small mishap but when you have a disaster where you like in in competition scenario you're you're super underperforming or you know you have a severe accident and whatnot that is something that is a culmination of mistakes and then my case I was competing in high school wrestling 171 uh this was my junior year and uh I was finishing practice really low on weight and I I think I was like finishing and weighing in at 165 and then the next weight class would have been 16 160 right I'm like man that's just 5 lbs and I'm not even trying to cut weight right now it's like I could definitely make it and I was kind of telling my coach that my coach was like and then at one point like fine if you want to do it do it I was like well okay and you know I I fell into that same trap that everybody does oh you know if I can lean out more I'm going to have more of a strength I Edge or whatnot well it turns out those last five pounds were pretty tricky to get off all right um and we had a try meet where basically in wrestling you're not only facing one team you're going to face like two teams and I think in our case it might have even been three teams I'm not sure I can't recall correctly if it was two or three teams that were facing but uh anyhow it was in the west coast of Florida and I remember I finished training that day and you know it's like 6:00 at night when we get back home I'm 165 and then I'm trying to basically sweat off the rest of the way and it was my first time really cutting any serious weight and of course I did everything wrong I was you know trying to spit out you know all my sweat didn't drink any water didn't eat anything and I remember waking up at 3:00 in the morning and then jumping rope in the garage and we ended up having to drive out around like 6:00 a.m. and I wasn't the only one who was also suffering I know my brother was cutting weight and he was suffering and then a couple other guys in the team were suffering so we had to make this drive and you know although it's Florida it was like it's winter Florida which for everybody else like that's not cold but for us it was and harder to to sweat when it's like you know cold 60s again I say cold but in Florida it definitely feels colder because of humidity so everybody's pretty much sitting in their car with the heater on you know trying to in the Plastics and whatnot trying to sweat and the whole team had a real rough go of it but we eventually all made weight and I made another classic beginner mistake which is I just chugged on Gatorade and I think I had like a half gallon of Gatorade like in one sitting and a bunch of like Wheat Thins and lots of carbs check mix just total garbage food when I look back at it and it hit like a freaking Rock like I remember after I just gorged myself to try to replenish my fluids and get some energy in me I felt so sick and nauseous and again I wasn't only when my brother was passed out like the Dual meet started people were competing and it seemed like a whole team was getting slaughtered like it was just so poorly prepared right like we shouldn't have uh like just driven there that morning right like we should have probably driven there the night before and you know been able to sleep well so anyhow just total disaster I remember when I came up I ended up facing see the state champion uh of the of the region or I guess you know because there's like six a you know the the different like kind of like there's a wrestling D3 D2 D1 the Florida States has similar breakdowns so I was facing one below where I normally compete at but he was a state champ and uh I go up there immediately get HED on throat just like starts like one two three poof and he puts me on my back now this is before I really knew any submissions or whatnot but at the time this guy was cranking his head and arm so tight and he also I believe had my arm crossed over that it was like an arm triangle so I was trying to bridge to keep myself from getting choked I mean from getting pinned but I was feeling choke pressure but I didn't know how to describe it so I started telling the ref I can't breathe and what really I meant is that I'm being choked right or you know strangled if we're using Iden her terms right but the ref just totally ignores any of my complaints I'm like I think I said it a couple times like I can't breathe I can't breathe and they eventually Bo boom sticks me and when the match ends the referee looks in my eyes and goes you're a liar I'm like what he's like if you couldn't breathe you couldn't talk I like I just felt so embarrassed like this guy called me out and like in my you know 16-year-old head the logic seemed F like it seemed correct like yeah you were being suffocated you wouldn't have anything to say right like you would need all the air you could have breathe only laid around no I was getting your arm triangled so yeah like what I meant to say was he's he's choking me you know or strangling me or whatever but I remember leaving that match I'm like H God just like so embarrassed I got pinned you know and that one was probably less than I minute also and then my very next match I faced the guy who took second in States and that same thing and he teched me just 15-0 totally just wiped the mats with me I was like what the hell man it was just just a rough day at the office there but that's another one of those where again I I felt perhaps because it was shared humiliation because my brother also got destroyed and most of our team just got wiped and uh we just kind of laughed it off and then competed again the next weekend you know and like nothing ever happened and I I feel being able to brush off these losses is so important if you're going to be a good competitor and if honestly if you're going to be a good student of the game if every time you take a loss it's like you're get a crying fit and you start like punching the walls and you have to like isolate yourself for like a couple weeks and not show up to practice you're not going to grow at the same rate as anyone else who has a healthier approach to LA right at the end of the day losing is just a sign that you mistakes are made and we have to recalibrate and what whatever lessons that we can learn we learn and then uh go into practice and work those things out don't take it any harder than it has to be at the end of the day we are playing a silly game right we grown adults trying to simulate murder on each other you know uh don't take it too seriously right uh especially for grappling although to be fair grappling nowadays is probably a bit more dangerous than MMA is just because the joint locks are so severe now that it's like man you can blow out your knee pretty easy nowadays uh and MMA like the worst thing that's probably going to happen to you is getting a concussion again it isn't great but I'd rather get a concussion than get my knee torn apart I've done both concussion at least you wake up and you don't remember much and you feel okay afterwards your knee getting torn apart doesn't feel the same uh ever right so yeah I think the scales have definitely shifted quite a bit now with how prevalent the submission game is and I think a lot more people are being a lot more stubborn and not tapping which is not great anyhow I Shar this with you guys just because I think that it's important to understand what a good mentality is for absorbing a loss and then bouncing back from him and that first story in particular I felt was a great bounce back because like I said suffered a pair of humiliating losses and then a month later had one of my best early victories and then even though I lost the second match it was a good performance by me so uh I think some people when especially when they lose like the way I lost they retire right there especially if you're a young competitor I've seen people they do their first ornament they lose quickly and they just quit never show up again right and that's sad right because that means the loss actually became you right instead of just being something that happened to you um it's important to be able to come back from these and to show up and continue continue to persevere in the face of obstacles so uh hopefully none of you ever have to suffer humiliating losses but the reality of life is chances are at some point you will but it's okay right uh I think the one things important is that to understand is that whatever you feel as humiliating or embarrassing that you might think it's Unique to you but it isn't like everybody has suffered this in some shape way or form it's part of Being Human right maybe they didn't lose by flying armar in 5 seconds but maybe they got dumped by a girl in front of the whole class you know in a very embarrassing way like there's some type of embarrassment that has happened to some uh somebody before you know so that feeling that you may have is not unique and if you learn how to lean into it and like I said you can laugh about it it's going to make your life a whole lot easier and you'll be able to move on from these things much quicker and and if you're able to move on from it that means you also able to learn from it so that's all I have for you guys today keep it a little bit on the shorter side uh hopefully you guys picked up something from that where if you ever do suffer a big loss you can bounce back from it if you need help with it send me an email I'll laugh at it for you all right guys take care