I think everyone that practices Jiu-Jitsu, especially those
that have been in the sport for more than a year or so, experiences some form
of tunnel vision. You practice a move
and become obsessed with it – constantly refining a move until you know it
inside and out, operating within a position that you know so well and
continuing to develop it. What happens
when two people meet that have both practiced a position so much? More often than not, there is some sort of
stalemate. Nothing can be done by one
person that will trick the other person into giving up a submission or giving
up control. One person will not gain the
advantage for more than a split second.
Of course this is the archetypal representation of such a situation –
usually there is a slight difference in technical ability or a slight
difference in who is fighting “better” on that particular day that the two
hypothetical practitioners meet, and one ends up as the victor. Has tunnel vision helped or hurt these
practitioners?
Much of this above scenario was meant to highlight the
concern that many people have over what many dub “footsies”, the somewhat
common berimbolo/leg-lock game that people are practicing in tournaments
today. Some people are against it, some
people are for it and of course some people remain indifferent. I had a tough time deciding my position on
it, and my conclusion is that I have no immediate conclusion on this game. As someone who likes to think of himself as a
well-rounded Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, I’d like to explain a bit of my
development in the sport to help support my theory on why people choose to play
this game.
I started off small – well, I stayed that way – in the art
of Jiu-Jitsu. As a small, weak player, I
found it very difficult to keep my balance fighting not only my opponent, but
also gravity. My passing game was not
horrible, but it wasn’t excellent. My
guard, however, is what developed first and continued to develop in a
relatively streamlined way to help me fight against the biggest guys in the
gym. I had not wrestled previously and
had a very under-developed takedown game, and in the few tournament matches I
had done, I would typically pull guard unless the other guy pulled it first.
As of now, I’d say my passing game has improved quite
dramatically and I am much more “even” than I used to be, but I imagine that in
some alternate universe there is a Dean that never focused on his passing and
continued to be a guard player – his guard is probably very developed compared
to myself in reality and he must feel very confident there. Knowing that there are indeed people out
there that have spent the majority of their time improving their guards, having
faced the same situation as I have when starting in Jiu Jitsu, it is a bit more
understandable that two players may meet up that want to pull guard
immediately. They are most confident in
their guards and prefer to play that game rather than take their chances
playing their weaker game against someone that wants to be in their guard. When the tournament is over and the person
perhaps lost by an advantage (almost having their back taken in a berimbolo
war), would this person choose to develop his ways of passing his opponents
guard so that he can get to side control – one of his other undeveloped
positions – or would he instead focus on filling the holes he has in his nearly
perfect guard game? When the opposition
is so adept at one position and can shut down guard players and passers alike,
it may be better to continue working on his weaknesses in his guard rather than
letting his guard lag behind to develop his passing – which, at the end of the
day, could be insufficient to beating this opponent the next time the two
meet. Being able to win sometimes means
prioritizing one’s training time and becoming advanced enough at one thing to
implement a winning strategy in a competition, and becoming the coveted master
of all trades is often unrealistic – one instead often becomes the jack of all
trades and master of none.
This is how tunnel vision can often shape one’s Jiu-Jitsu
career, and it may start before people even choose to become major competitors
– it starts with what is being practiced early on in one’s career, what is
being drilled and what the focus of training is on. Practicing only one’s strengths in the gym
may be satisfying, and it may feel good to know that one is the master of a
certain position (for the sake of argument, we’ll stick with the berimbolo, but
this applies to many other positions and moves), but if one never practices how
to pass and is shut down in a double guard pull scenario where both players are
fighting to take the back, it won’t even seem like an option to “work on
passing” because “that’s not really my gameplan”. It isn’t one’s gameplan because it was never
practiced and never stressed early on in one’s development. This is the same with takedowns – being able
to take any person down works until this strategy is shut down by somebody
stronger, or by someone that, in some way, is better at takedowns. What happens when one is taken down by
someone even better and is placed on his back where he is out of his
element? The person may try to get
better at takedowns so that he is not taken down ever again, and it may
work. It also may not work, and he may
end up having the second best takedown game in the world. Having practiced to have a better guard may
have been a better investment of focus and time in the past rather than
practicing takedowns to an obsessive degree, which eventually created diminishing
returns in the grand scheme of one’s whole Jiu-Jitsu game.
Simply regretting one’s gameplan isn’t the answer – training
to overcome the deficiencies in one’s game, even if it means bruising the ego
that you thought you didn’t have, might be the best decision to make in the long
run. In conclusion, it always depends on
the situation and the fighter at hand, though I generally think that people
should practice a well-rounded game from the start in order to avoid situations
such as these where they believe they “cannot” or “should not” try to get
better at some other aspect of Jiu-Jitsu because it doesn’t fit with their
style. That is not to knock the
technicality of these practitioners, whatever the focus of their game may be,
but more to play devil’s advocate and challenge their preconceived notions.
