Year: 2017

Judoka James Bregman Part 1: To Be a Waza-shi

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Bregman and his bronze medal_from James Bregman’s personal collection.

It was October, 1964, the Olympics were in Tokyo, and the Japanese were expected to sweep their home-grown martial art. And in fact, Japanese took gold in three of the four weight-classes at the Tokyo Olympics.

American James Bregman won the bronze medal in the middle-weight class at the inaugural judo competition at the Olympic Games. His accomplishment was the result of years of training, as well as a dedication to mastering technique or “waza“, and being the best judoka he could possibly be. But it was never about winning a medal.

Bregman, like a handful of other determined foreign judoka in Japan, trained with members of Meiji University, the dominant judo power in the 1960s. Training at Meiji was what you might find in a judo dictionary as meaning “glutton for punishment”. But Bregman trained, learned, and was proud to become proficient enough to earn the respect of his Meiji comrades. “My sempai was the captain of the Meiji University team. And when he put his hand on my shoulder and called me a “waza-shi” (a technician), that meant more to me than a medal.”

Bregman remembers judo in Japan as being a meritocracy, where attitude, grace and technique were the measures of a person. He said that twice a year, there would be public and open competitions called “koh-haku shiai“, where any judoka could come and compete. They would line you up in terms of your level, from the beginners’ level of “sho-dan“, then to “ni-dan“, “san-dan“, and upwards. You could have a line of hundreds of judoka, and the process is the first person in line gets on the mat with the next judoka and has a go. Whoever wins, stays on the mat to take on the next guy, and the next guy. Sometimes, a person from a lower rank takes on a person from the next rank up and wins a match or two. But very often, judoka are in the right rank, getting that feedback real time in front of all to see.

Bregman told me that when he first started attending koh-haku shiai as a ni-dan, “you’re basically a flying machine” getting tossed all over the place. But as you train, you get better, and over time, you’re throwing people, and eventually beating people above you in rank. “It’s a real learning experience,” Bregman told me, “putting to test all the things you learned from your training.”

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From the autobiography of Syd Hoare, “A Slow Boat to Yokohama”

One of his most impactful teachers was Bregman’s sempai, a judoka named Seki who was a year ahead of Bregman. He said he trained every day with Seki, who was third or fourth best in the middleweight class in Japan, learning the right way to stand, mat work, choke techniques, and mat presence, lessons that served him well in the Olympics. Bregman explained that Seki would train Bregman about mat presence by practicing near the “joh-seki“, a wooden floor where shrines were placed for special occasions. Since the joh-seki was hard, falling on it was something Bregman wanted to avoid.

It was hard enough thrown on the tatami, which are not exactly cushions. Even though we know how to fall, it hurts. What he was teaching me is that you have to be conscious of where the edges are, to have total mat awareness. You need to know where your opponent is going, and where you want to go. Most of us were taught to fight in the middle of the mat. This was due to the early rules of judo. If you go to the mat, and you stepped out, they brought you back after stopping the match, so throwing a person outside the mat was, in a way, wasted effort. So Seki taught me how to anticipate the other person’s move and maneuver him to where you want to go.

At the Tokyo Olympics, Bregman faced off against a judoka from Argentina named Rodolfo Perez. In the video, you can see Bregman pick up Perez’s right leg, putting him off balance. But Bregman notices that he is just about to push Perez off the mat, which would have stopped the match and resulted in no points. Noting where he wanted to go, Bregman planted his right foot at the edge of the mat, and while still holding Perez’s leg suspended, he turned the two of them nearly 180 degrees so that Bregman was facing the middle of the mat. Then with his left leg sweeping from behind, he tripped up Perez in a kosotogake. Perez fell safely in bounds and Bregman moved on to the semi-finals.

 

Judoka James Bregman Part 2: The Stoic Professionalism of Judo

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The Unfortunate Tale of Buster Mathis: Almost an Olympian, Almost a Heavyweight Champion

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Buster Mathis in May 1964.

He wobbles. He quivers. He rolls. He shakes. He is a dripping mass of flesh, a monument to fat. He is 6 feet 3 and weighs 295 pounds. His waist is 44, his chest is 52, but sometimes in the heat of action the measurements seem the other way around. Sitting in the corner, he looks like a melting chocolate sundae.

That’s how Sports Illustrated described heavyweight boxer Buster Mathis in an article on the results of the US Olympic team boxing trials, held in May, 1964. Mathis, despite his bulk, was surprisingly athletic. There are pictures of him playing basketball, flitting about on roller skates and dancing. And his ability to move deftly around the ring, weaving and bobbing, led one reporter to say that Mathis “floats like a baby elephant and stings like a bee.”

In the finals of the heavyweight division at the Trials, Mathis took on another promising heavyweight named Joe Frazier. Frazier, the butcher from Philadelphia who would go on to be heavyweight champion of the world in the glory days of Ali and Foreman, was no match for Mathis. Here’s how SI described Frazier’s futile attempt to go inside.

Frazier was a solid 195, but Buster still had a 100-pound pulling the weights. And he had his speed. Instead of hunting for the head, Frazier moved in to pound Buster’s belly, which shook and glinted under the lights. Buster managed to keep Frazier at bay with a whistling left hook (each one thrown with a loud grunt, “uuuuunnnnhhh!”), and even when Frazier did manage to get inside, his punches were smothered by flab. As Pappy (Gault) says, “Buster’s got an extra layer of fat on that stomach that stops the punches.”

buster-mathis-on-roller-skatesMathis, not Frazier was heading to Tokyo. Until he wasn’t. On September 19, just three weeks before the opening ceremony of the Toyo Olympics, it was announced that Mathis had a broken bone in his hand – some say it was a finger, others a thumb. It didn’t matter – Frazier was asked to go in Mathis’ place. Ironically, it is said that Mathis broke the bone in his fight with Frazier, learning the unfortunate lesson that winning isn’t everything.

Frazier would go to Tokyo and win the gold medal in the heavyweight division. However, when he broke his thumb in a semi-final match, Frazier told no one. Clearly favoring his right, Frazier managed to win the finals on points.

After the 1964 Olympics, both Frazier and Mathis turned professional, and began winning streaks. When Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the American armed forces, in the midst of the war with Vietnam, he was stripped of his titles and his license to box in the US revoked. Suddenly, the heavyweight title was up for grabs.

On March 4, 1968, Buster Mathis with a record of 23-0, took on old amateur rival Joe Frazier, with a record of 19-0. Mathis had beaten Frazier not once, but twice preceding the Tokyo Olympics. And when the bell had rung ending the sixth round of the 12-round title fight, Mathis was ahead on points. But Mathis had never gone so deep in a fight with the ferocious and determined Frazier. While Frazier’s patented body blows had little effect over short fights, over a longer period of time, Frazier’s blows began to wear Mathis down. And then suddenly, towards the end of the 11th round, a lightning left-hook by Frazier crumpled Mathis.

Hard-luck Buster Mathis could not win. He lost his biggest shot at the title against Frazier in 1968. And in 1964, he beat Frazier in the Olympic Trials, and still loses his shot at the Olympic glory. If not for Frazier, he coulda been a champ. Twice.

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Michael Jordan: The Star of Space Jam and His All-Star Pick-Up Games on the Set

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What’s the highest grossing film about basketball in history? Ivan Reitman’s 1996 film, Space Jam, featuring the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan.

Where were the greatest pick-up basketball games of all time played? On the set of Space Jam in 1995, on a custom-made indoor-basketball court built on the location of the studio where Space Jam was shot.

Starring in the movie with 1992 Olympic gold medalist, Jordan, were his teammates on that Barcelona Dream Team, Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley. Jordan had come out of retirement in 1995, but fell just short of taking his Chicago Bulls to the NBA Finals, which lost to the Orlando Magic in six games.

According to this great ESPN article, Jordan wanted to make sure he was able to train hard and gear up for the following NBA season while filming Space Jam, so he asked for and got the construction of the indoor basketball court, dubbed the Jordan Dome. Jordan put out the word that he was looking for people to play in pick-up games, and the stars made a beeline for LA. In addition to co-stars Ewing and Barkley, all stars like Grant Hill, Rod Strickland, Glen Rice, Dennis Rodman, Juwan Howard, Shaquille O’Neal, Magic Johnson and Reggie Miller came to play some of the most intense shirt-skins matches ever.

Tracy Murray, who played in these games, said “it was like an NBA all-star game every day.”

Michael Jordan, a man not satisfied with semi-final finishes, was determined to make sure these pick-up matches got him razor-sharp ready for the NBA season. According to the ESPN article, Don MacLean, a power forward for the Washington Bullets at the time, was being guarded by Jordan. MacLean got hot and scored the majority of his team’s points to help his team to victory one evening. MacLean had to leave town after that match, and Jordan came up to him and said, “Thanks for coming, make sure you come back.” MacLean thought that was cool of Jordan to say that, so he looked forward to coming back a couple of weeks later. Here’s how ESPN explained Jordan’s revenge.

When MacLean did show up a couple of weeks later, he played in the first game of the night. “[Jordan] walks on the court, says, ‘I got MacLean,’ and did not let me touch the ball for the entire game,” MacLean said. “And I was trying. And he was not letting me touch the ball. “Right then and there, I was like, ‘My God.’ For a pickup game in the summer that means nothing, two weeks later, he remembers that. I couldn’t believe it.”

No one was more competitive, or more skilled than Michael Jordan in his prime. And therefore, no was better.

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Judoka Ben Nighthorse Campbell Part 2: The Secret Sauce of Emotional Intelligence

 

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President Bush and Senator Campbell

 

Ben Nighthorse Campbell was a member of the first American team to compete in the fledgling judo competition at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In order to prepare for the Olympics, he moved to Japan to train, where he said he was the outsider, the newcomer. “You learn by watching and doing whatever the newbies did. I scrubbed uniforms, toilets. And they’re watching you. If you’re willing to do it, they treat you with respect.”

That’s not an easy thing to do – to subsume your ego for the greater good of your ultimate goals and earn the respect and assistance of others. Campbell told me most other Americans could or would not do so, and did not continue with their training in Japan, excepting two other Americans at Meiji on his Olympic squad: Paul Maruyama and Jim Bregman.

So many factors result in the seemingly random way successful people and leaders emerge. In addition to his high level of physical skills, Campbell’s emotional intelligence – his ability to show respect and humility in a new cultural milieu, to build relationships that will help him drive toward his and his colleagues’ goals – appears to be a key factor in the success he has had through his life. Campbell would serve in the House of Representatives and the US Senate for nearly 20 years. Broadly speaking, success is due to a mixture of skills, naturally gifted through DNA or developed through experience and effort, as well as circumstance and how one reacts to it.

While Campbell said that training in Japan was tough, in some ways, he had gone through even more challenging experiences as a child. He was the son of Albert Campbell who suffered from alcoholism, and of Mary Vierra, who had to live and work in a sanatorium much of her life due to her contraction of tuberculosis. Since his father struggled to find work, as did many during the Great Depression, and his mother could have only minimal contact with her children due to the contagiousness of her disease, both Ben and his sister Alberta Campbell had a nomadic childhood of foster homes and orphanages.

According to Campbell’s biography, Ben Nighthorse Campbell: An American Warrior, the siblings grew up hungry, feeling abandoned, and had to negotiate the randomly rough relationships of life in the orphanage – situations ranging from disciplinary beatings and haranguing for not washing one’s hands to fear of sexual abuse. And because the orphanages would keep males and females separate, Ben and Alberta could not support each other as brother and sister during these complex emotional times.

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Siblings Ben and Alberta, from the book Ben Nighthorse Campbell: An American Warrior

As it turns out, Ben and Alberta had different reactions to these trying times. At the age of 44, Alberta overdosed and died on a potent combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. Ben somehow found lessons of life in his childhood struggles, as noted in his biography.

Sadly Alberta seems to have crumbled under the same pressure that made Ben strong. Although the orphanage experience may have contributed to her destruction, Ben thinks he benefited in some ways, “‘That must have been so terrible,’ people always tell me, but as I look back on it I think it was one of the best things that happened to me. It made me very self-reliant and independent. If you have nobody to rely on, then you have got to do it yourself.”

These were not lessons that were learned over night. An underachiever in school who would have run-ins with the police on occasion, Campbell eventually learned after a 2-week stint in juvenile lock up that he needed greater discipline and direction in his life. Campbell was 17 when he decided to enroll in the United States Air Force, where he served in The Korean War, and sharpened his judo acumen.

But there was always an inner dialogue taking place within Campbell, a key ingredient in honing a potent emotional intelligence. After the Tokyo Olympics, Campbell began to more strongly identify with his native Indian roots. As he explained in his biography, his father was Cheyenne, a native Indian tribe based in the Great Plains of the United States. Native Indians were an oft-discriminated peoples, and so Campbell kept his Cheyenne connection quiet, revealing it to his son only in his love for making jewelry. But it became important for Campbell, the Olympian, to better understand who his ancestors were, and thus who he was.

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Campbell learned of his connection to a family line named Black Horse, and developed a deeply personal relationship with the Cheyenne. As successful people do, he understood the story of his life, how he connected to the past, and his obligations to his people in the present and the future. His love of the outdoors and art was not a random interest but a connection to a culture he was ingrained within to a degree he was not conscious of until late in adult life.

Self awareness in leadership is key. Campbell’s coach on the US men’s judo team of 1964, legendary judoka Yoshihiro Uchida, believed that Campbell was inspired to understand his roots during his time in Japan, according to Campbell’s bio:

I believe the time he spent there was a period where he learned a great deal more about himself as an American and as a Native American, because only when confronted with another culture do you truly begin to question and appreciate your own heritage.

Campbell is retired from politics, but running a successful jewelry business and still in good health and expectant to return to Japan in 2020, as are his teammates from the men’s judo team. For a kid from California, who grew up without a home, he now has three, real and symbolic – one in Colorado, another in Montana where his of Cheyenne family reside, and a third in Tokyo, where years of hard work first began to blossom.

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Judoka Ben Nighthorse Campbell Part 1: 1964 Olympian and Statesman

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Members of the US Olympic Judo Team in 1964: George Harris, James Bregman, Yoshihiro Uchida, Paul Maruyama and Ben Nighthorse Campbell

When it was announced in 1960 that judo would make its Olympic debut in 1964 in Tokyo, Ben Nighthorse Campbell knew he had to be there. He had to be there not only to compete in the Olympics, but also to train. Japan was the mecca for judo, a martial art developed by IOC’s first representative from Japan, legendary Jigoro Kano.

So after years of training in the United States in high school and college, as well as in the US Air Force in South Korea, Campbell resolved to go to Japan and train at the Japanese judo powerhouse, Meiji University. In the 1960s, there was no organized funding system to train and support American athletes in judo, so Campbell sold his car and his house, and even cashed in his life insurance policy to pay for his trip to Japan.

“I’m not sure what I was thinking,,,it’s really hard,” Campbell told me. “You can’t believe the difference (between training in the US and Japan). You have to live with a lot of bruises. I was training 5 hours a day, first at Keishicho (where the police trained) in the morning, and then at Meiji in the afternoon. If you broke your nose, you had to show up. If you broke something else, you had to stand at attention for hours until you healed.”

Campbell, who would go on to serve in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate from 1986 to 2005, representing the state of Colorado, said in his biography, Ben Nighthorse Campbell: An American Warrior, “the training, in fact, was absolutely brutal. My nose was broken a couple of times, I lost two teeth, and I guess I broke or dislocated virtually every finger and toe I’ve got and suffered any number of bruises, contusions, and swollen ears.”

Training with the very best judoka in the world twice a day every day in Japan shaped Campbell into a champion, as he won US national titles from 1961 to 1963, and a gold medal in the open weight division at the Pan American Games in 1963. He also attended the Tokyo International Sports Week, which was held precisely one year prior to the actual start of the 1964 Olympics. This was a dress rehearsal for officials and planners, a way to test out preliminary operational plans, including the opening ceremonies. But it was also a legitimate sports competition for athletes who were invited.

Campbell was already in Japan for Tokyo International Sports Week, and pulled off what was considered an upset at the time. He defeated the captain of the Meiji University team, someone who was considered a strong candidate to make the Japan judo team. So when Campbell went to New York City for the Olympic trials, he was at the top of his game. He went on to win seven out of seven matches, five of them on falls, and won a spot on the US Judo Team.

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With only four months to go before the Tokyo Olympics, Campbell had to stay in shape and stay away from major injury. Unfortunately, he was not in Japan, where the competition was keen. Instead he trained against a large number of inexperienced judoka, which according to Campbell, can be unpredictable, and lead to awkward maneuvers that can lead to injury. As it turned out, Campbell had just such an experience, tearing his anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. With the Olympics around the corner, Campbell felt he had no choice but to grin and bear the pain.

In his first bout in the Budokan during the last days of the Tokyo Olympics, Campbell faced off against Thomas Ong of the Philippines. The match was over in seconds, as Campbell simply rushed Ong and swept his legs out from under him for an ip-pon. His second-round opponent was a far heavier opponent from Germany, Thomas Glahn. And in the midst of battle, Campbell’s knee gave way, and then so did any chance of winning a medal. Campbell forfeited and hobbled off the mat. “If my knee was OK, I could have beaten him,” Campbell told me.

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Campbell and Geesink, from the book Ben Nighthorse Campbell: An American Warrior

Glahn would go on to earn a bronze medal, but could not do better as he lost to Japanese judoka, Akio Kaminaga. As it turns out, Kaminaga was the only Japanese not to win gold when he lost famously to the huge and hugely talented Dutch man, Anton Geesink.

And then the Olympic Games ended. It was time to say farewell. Campbell was hanging out with one of his friends from California, Don Schollander. Having won four gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics, the swimming golden boy Schollander was pegged to carry out the American flag for the closing ceremonies. But according to Campbell, Schollander had to leave, literally during the closing ceremony. So somehow, during the march in the stadium, Schollander handed Campbell the flag for the rest of the march. Campbell’s knee was aching. Cold winds were whipping through the late October evening. And the flag and its pole, apparently, is not so light. But according to Campbell in his biography, it was a weight he would bear with pride, not just on that day, but throughout his days of service.

Campbell has never forgotten that moment. He remembered it clearly twenty-five years later when, as a member of Congress, he voted for the amendment to make desecrating the American flag a crime. “I got some heat from the liberals for that vote, but it made no difference to me. I told my colleagues on the House floor that I didn’t fight in Korea or carry our flag in the Olympics so some fool could burn it.”

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Siberian POW and Pop Singer Minami Haruo and the Song of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

 

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A New Year’s Eve tradition in Japan is to watch NHK’s “Kouhaku”, which is a five-hour songfest of live music that continues on until just before midnight. This is a light-hearted battle between women singers and bands (“kou” or “red”) and male singers and bands (“haku” or “white”).

This year, singer Kouhei Fukuda performed the 1963 hit, “Tokyo Gourin Ondo”(東京五輪音頭), which roughly translates to The Tokyo Olympic Dance Song.

In 1963 and 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, Tokyo Gourin Ondo would go on to sell 1.3 million records, and in some ways, made the singer of that song, Haruo Minami, the face of the Tokyo Olympics. Minami was already a well known singer in Japan, performing the popular music of the time which would later be referred to as enka. Minami stood out because he performed in kimono, which was not common for men in the 1950s.

But what makes Minami very interesting is his war past, or more accurately, his post-war past. At the age of 20 in 1944, Minami (probably under his actual name Bunji Kitazume), was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria. Just after the Pacific War ended in August, 1945, Minami and hundreds of thousands of other Japanese were captured by the Soviet Union army. Minami eventually served four years of hard labor in Khaborosk, which is in Siberia.

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Repatriated Japanese soldiers returning from Siberia wait to disembark from a ship at Maizuru, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan in 1946
Although about 60,000 of approximately 600,000 Japanese POW died in the Siberian labor camps, Minami stayed alive until 1949 when he was allowed to return to Japan.

According to a music critic, it is said that Minami sang this song with such passion because of how hard Japan has worked to re-build after the war, and nobody understood that more than a man who returned from the labor camps of Siberia.

Here is Haruo Minami performing “Tokyo Gourin Ondo” at Kouhaku, on either December 31, 1963 or 1964.

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The Sports Marketing Giant Dentsu: No Longer Flying Under the Radar

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Dentsu CEO Tadashi Ishii
Dentsu is a $15 billion company, with a 25% share of the Japanese advertising market. It’s #1 in Japan, but not dominant, at least in terms of revenue. That’s fine, because Japanese companies, even large ones, don’t like to draw too much attention to themselves.

And yet, you can argue that Dentsu has become one of the most influential sports marketing companies in the world. Currently, Dentsu represents Tokyo2020 as exclusive agent to secure Japan sponsors for the upcoming 2020 Summer Games, signing up over 40 sponsors. It represents such international sports agencies as the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF), the International Football Association (FIFA), the International Swimming Federation (FINA), the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB), as well as the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), among many other sports organizations.

As sports marketing authority, David Cushnan, once told me, “if you are an international sports federation, or an international sports league that wants to go to Japan, then your first call is Dentsu. They can get you access.”

And as the Financial Times puts it, once you’re a client, they are so powerful it’s sometimes hard to tell who the client is. “It is not like any company in the world,” says a board member at one of Dentsu’s biggest clients. “You are the customer, but they are the master. Nobody ever says it, but over the years, you need them more than they need you. It is like an addiction.”

Dentsu may be glad to see 2016 over, however, as it was a tough year, nearly impossible to avoid the glare of the red-hot spotlight.

  • Black Tidings and AMS: In May, 2016, The British newspaper, The Guardian, revealed that a USD1.5 million payment was made in July, 2013 from a Japanese bank to an account with a person in a company called Athlete Management Services, affiliated with both the IAAF and Dentsu. This payment was prior to the vote for selection of the 2020 Olympic host city. After Tokyo was selected as the winning city in September, 2013, a second payment was made to the same account for another USD2 million.
  • Caught Overbilling: Toyota raised an alarm that they suspected Dentsu, hiding behind a notorious curtain of opaque transactional costs for online advertising, was overcharging them for ad placements. They were right. Not only that, over a 100 other companies were cheated as well, resulting in an announcement in late September, 2016 that Dentsu will reimburse an estimated 230 million yen ($2.3 million) back to customers.
  • Working Employees to the Extreme: Dentsu recently received the odious recognition being labeled the worst of the “Black Companies” in Japan. A “Black Company” in Japan is one considered a firm that blatantly exploits its employees. Much of this recognition was due to the horrible news that a first-year employee at Dentsu committed suicide. According to this article, the 24-year old woman, Matsuri Takahashi, jumped from the top of her company dormitory on Christmas Day in 2015, after working 100 hours of overtime the previous month.

Apparently, the notoriety around being considered a horrible place to work was the last straw. Dentsu’s president, Tadashi Ishii, announced last week that he would resign in March, 2017.

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Matsuri Takahashi and parents
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Olympic Fever Hits Tokyo as Japan Hits the New Year in 1964

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Hotel Okura under construction in 1961
It was the middle of winter, and yet on January 1, 1964, Tokyo was hot! In fact, the way the foreign press described it, Japan was running a temperature!

“Japan Feverishly Prepares for the 1964 Olympic Games” – AP, January 1, 1964

“World’s Biggest City Suffering Olympic Fever” – UPI, January 2, 1964

Here’s how the major American news services – AP and UPI – explained the state of Tokyo only 10 months before the opening of the XVIII Olympiad:

A strange fever previously unknown in the Orient is gripping Japan. Symptoms include intense worry and a driving compulsion to build things. It’s called Olympic fever. Japan is lunging helter skelter toward that magic day when the 1964 Olympic games open in Tokyo. (AP)

The entire city is afflicted with “Olympic hysteria”, from the prime minister whose political future hinges on the games to the man in the street who curses the inconveniences he has to put up with for the Olympics: the high prices he has to pay, the scaffoldings he had to duck, the torn-up streets around which he has to detour. (UPI)

Again, this was 1964, less than a generation removed from the devastating effects of the Pacific War. Indeed, Tokyo was still emerging (and groaning) from the physical and emotional remains of war rubble, at least as the AP described it:

Tokyo essentially is a city just 18 years old, built on piles of ashes and rubble left by American bombers during World War II. Tokyo has grown haphazardly since 1945, with small, almost ramshackle, houses springing up in disorderly profusion along twisting, narrow streets. Trains are overcrowded. Prices are high. The city chronically has been short of housing, water – just about everything today’s tourists wants and expects. The population has grown so much (to more than 10 millions) that the city fathers have pleaded with the youth of Japan to stay on their farms in the villages and not come to the big city. But on they come, crowding in where there is no room.

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The National Gymnasium complex under construction in Tokyo on June 6, 1964, just a few months before the games were to begin. (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
While it might be hard to imagine today in Tokyo, where large-scale construction is on the whole, relatively and remarkably quiet and unobtrusive, it was for Tokyo denizens in the early 1960s, the bane of their existence. And safety was at times taken for granted, according to AP:

Tokyo, the largest, noisiest, most crowded city in the world, is getting a needed facelifting. The roar of new buildings and bridges going up – and occasionally falling down – fills the night and day. Bamboo scaffolding is everywhere and thousands of workmen clamber up and down, painting and plastering, putting finishing touches on new hotels, restaurants and night clubs.

At least two major Olympic construction projects have collapsed – an elevated expressway and the steel frame roof for a swimming pool. One person was killed and 25 were injured…. In an editorial titled, “no Fun and Games,” Yomiuri declared inexperienced workmen are being used on many Olympic projects and elementary safety precautions are being ignored.

We are three years away from January, 2020. Will history repeat itself? Will Tokyo be an overcrowded, noisy, chaotic city creaking its way to the Opening Ceremonies on July 24, 2020? I doubt it. Will Tokyo again be gripped in Olympic fever? Most definitely yes.

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New Year’s Resolutions: It’s Not Just About Inspiration, It’s About Breaking Big Goals into Small Goals

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  • “My cousin lost 10 kilos in three months! I’m going to lose 20 kilos this year.”
  • “My father passed away from emphysema at the age of 63. For the sake of my family, I will quit smoking this year.”
  • “I want to go to and win a medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics!”

Big goals can inspire. And we see the new year as a chance to wipe the slate of our past efforts clean, and commit to significant resolutions with vigor and determination. But even if initially inspired by them, big goals can seem overwhelming, and thus can demotivate to the point of surrender.

Very often, the key to achieving a big goal is to break it down into smaller, more concrete, more manageable goals.

You don’t develop a killer serve by just practicing your serve 100 times a day. You break down the mechanics of the serve and practice with a conscious effort to ensure the key parts of the serve are repeated accurately. That means you need to understand what the key components of a good serve are, and ideally you need to have someone observe you so you can get immediate feedback. Over time you will likely see great results.

Bob Schul didn’t become America’s first Olympic gold medal winner in the 5,000 meters by just running every day. He followed the disciplinary approach of coach Mihaly Igloi, who taught him that the interval approach. Schul’s typical day was filled with mini-goals of – for example, ten 200-meter sprints, followed by a 400-meter easy jog, followed by eight 100-meter sprints, then twelve 160-meter runs. Schul didn’t become an Olympian overnight, but he worked on his mini goals every day, and actually, during his training, every minute.

Here’s a great article from Forbes Magazine called “Why Thinking Small is The Secret to Big Success“. It focuses on this idea of chunking, and that you don’t achieve your big goals because “you’re not thinking small enough.”

  1. Decide what you want
  2. Proclaim your dream to your friends and family
  3. Set a deadline
  4. Break down the goal into smaller steps
  5. Identify someone who’s accomplished a similar goal and model their attitude and belief system
  6. Believe it’s possible
  7. Take massive action
  8. Repeat steps 6 & 7 every day

For so many of us, when we set New Year’s Resolutions, or aspire to some great goal, we do the first three steps. But we often don’t take a project management attitude to our dreams. While we may imagine what the final, wonderful end state looks like, we don’t break it down into mini-goals, identify the key actions that other actions are dependent on, and set milestone deadlines. We don’t because that level of thinking and planning is likely a muscle not often exercised. But exercise it we must. Find a friend or a coach to help you think it through.

Just remember what Al Pacino said in the locker room, when he gave his inspirational pep talk to a demoralized American football team in the 1999 Oliver Stone film, Any Given Sunday. He told the team that coming back to win would be monumental, but that they shouldn’t focus on the big goal of trying to win. They should instead stay in the moment, focus on the inches in front of them. Football, like life, he told them, is about moving forward, inch by inch.

You find out life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half step too late or too early you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in ever break of the game every minute, every second.

On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch. Cause we know when we add up all those inches that’s going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and LOSING between LIVING and DYING.

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