Redefining a Good Roll
Redefining a Good Roll
By: Joe Hannan
Photo by Shawna Rodgers
I am a spaz — an uncoordinated tangled jumble of lanky limbs that don’t listen to my brain. They have a knack for finding soft, vulnerable places on my training partners, even though my brain does all it can to prevent it. It’s pretty easy to pick me out of the lineup at Tuesday night’s advanced no gi class: I’m the guy who’s constantly getting corrected because I can’t quite get my body to follow my head’s lead.
Being a spaz is bad enough. I made it worse with an inaccurate understanding of what it means to roll well. What follows is my cautionary tale. Don’t be like me, folks.
My lack of athleticism and general spaziness aren’t unique to Jiu Jitsu. I’ve lived in this paradox my entire life: loving sports and all the while, much to my embarrassment, sucking at them. The only sports in which I had some modicum of success were ones in which I could overcome my opponents with sheer will or tolerance for suffering. They were ones in which I could put up with being miserable longer than others, or heap more misery onto my plate than the guy next to me.
This was my modus operandi once I had a few basic concepts of Jiu Jitsu ingrained in my muscle memory. You’re going to put me in mount? Awesome. I’ll stay down here all day, bucking till my hamstrings are nothing but knotted lengths of rope. Oh, you’ve got my shoulder in a key lock now. Fantastic. Let me show you just how flexible my shoulders are. Hey, you’re ramming your head into my throat? That’s cool. I can ram my forehead into your temple.
All it took was one roll with the right person to break me of this habit. My partner at the time was a brown belt who has since earned his black belt. He’s got the type of game I can only study with a slack jaw or a stupid grin. It will never be my game. Beautiful inversions. Complex sequences from de la Riva. Always a few seconds away from leg locking you.
This day, however, he had something different in mind. We had rolled together a few times prior, and I must have worn out his patience. He had me in side control. Seeing an opening between his right arm and his torso, I shot my left hand into the gap to try to start taking his back. The pocket collapsed. I didn’t even know I’d just stuffed my hand into a trap. Within moments, the weight of his torso was bearing down on my wrist and I was tapping like a telegraph operator sending a frantic distress signal.
It was so simple. So elegant. So damn painful. The brown belt had barely broken a sweat doing it. It got me thinking about my rolls with other bigger upper belts, and how many of them had just taken to pinning me in mount or side control, letting me rage around, burning out my aggression and frustration until I was more manageable.
Suddenly, it was clear to me that this was not a game in which I could overwhelm or out suffer my opponents. I had to be more measured, more restrained, increasing and decreasing the intensity as the situation demands. I’m finally starting to understand that in BJJ, the throttle goes up as well as down.
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DEAR WHITE BELT, I PROMISE YOU, WE ALL SUCK