The good: we finally got to see some Judo on an American TV station! The 2010 World Cup Miami was televised on Versus yesterday, and we were “treated” to two hours of finals. The bad: it was boring, terrible Judo, and painful to watch. If USA Judo thought this telecast would garner interest in Judo, it probably had the opposite effect. What we got was too much grip fighting, too many penalties, and too little Judo. Who wants to do a sport like that? The new rules are making what was already a relatively boring sport to watch even more boring. Thanks a lot, IJF!

Since I had announced to my club members that the World Cup would be televised, I now feel compelled to issue an apology for wasting their time. I hope that many of my juniors were unable to watch the telecast. It’ll be hard to get them to do real Judo after watching this garbage. I don’t fault the World Cup players for this ersatz Judo. They play to the rules, and do what they have to do to win matches. The guilty parties remain the IJF and the rules.

My gut feeling is that many players are more focused on not losing, rather than winning. By embracing what I call negative tactics, far too many matches are won because a player received one less penalty than his opponent. Doing Judo is passé. Who in his right mind wants to watch this, even when it’s free?

Listening to Mike Swain, the commentator, was interesting. He emphasized the grip fighting aspect of Judo, and the penalties, primarily because that’s just about all that was happening. I can’t imagine that generated too many warm fuzzy feelings in Judo neophytes. I can only remember two good throws- a Seoi nage and an Uchi mata. Normally, I would double check my facts, but I’m categorically unwilling to sit through another viewing of the Miami World Cup to confirm my count. Missing, in addition to the big Judo throws, were transitions to ne waza, ne waza, and counters. Have players lost their ability to do these things, or have the rules simply made these skills risky or less important than the ability to get one’s opponent penalized? You be the judge.

If Judo telecasts are to engage the neophytes and attract them to the sport, then something needs to be done with our vocabulary.  I can’t really fault Mike Swain, but he went back and forth between educating the non-Judo viewing crowd and commenting for the Judo savvy community. It seems to me that we need to train our commentators and develop a media specific language that makes both groups understand what is going on without throwing around superfluous, foreign terminology. For example, “that was a nice Uchi mata” is meaningful to me, but not to my neighbor who doesn’t do Judo. “Nice throw” would have been adequate for both groups of viewers. “Nice sacrifice throw” is better than “Nice Sumi gaeshi.” “Shido” also means nothing to Joe the plumber. Listening to Swain grapple with the waza aris and yukos makes me long for numerical scores like they have in wrestling.

In spite of the lack of real Judo during the World Cup, I must commend USA Judo for making the telecast possible. I have one suggestion though. Rather than showing entire, penalty-laden matches, perhaps a better approach would be to show positive highlights from all medal matches. Surely, we can find enough of those moments to fill an hour telecast. Two hours of boring, tactical Judo will not win us many fans, even among Judo die-hards.

In a few days, I’ll be flying to Japan to see the World Championships. It’s with trepidation that I do so. I’m not sure whether I can stomach to see five days of boring Judo.  My next blog post will be issued after I return home.