By Joshua Hagen

Main photo by Jade Osman of Punishment X Proxy

I grew up in a town with a population of 2,700. Southampton had one stop light, would be buried in mass amounts of snow every winter, and every Sunday and Wednesday, Judo class was held in the Town Hall. The tatami were kept under the stage, and were as rigid as a board. We would have to lay them out at every practise, and stow them away again afterwards, but I don’t remember ever minding it. My parents would drag all five kids to the dojo every Sunday and Wednesday from before the time I was born, so I quite literally have no memories from before judo.

My father practiced judo as a child for a few months, and decided that it was a good way to deal with my eldest brother Travis’s energy. As time went on, we got better, and we started traveling to other dojos. It would take us a minimum of two and a half hours by car to get to any city that had a major dojo. When I reached about seven or eight years of age, we started going to a dojo in Hamilton every Saturday, which was a three-hour drive from Southampton. My grandparents lived there, so it was also a great excuse to visit with them.

When we would get promoted to a higher belt level, my mother would take out the bleach and soak the belts all night, then would dye them with a box of Rit powdered dye, which is the reason I don’t remember getting a new belt until I got to Blue. The old one was so deteriorated at that point that it wasn’t much good anymore. For my tenth or eleventh birthday, I wanted a really nice judogi. My mother bought me a gi that must have been about four sizes too big. The pants and sleeves were hemmed, but not cut, to an almost impossible degree, and she of course did the hemming herself. Still wearing the same gi at the age of 16, I remember laughing at the 3 different permanent seam lines on the sleeves, from where the gi had previously been hemmed and was let out.

By the time I was ten years old, we had started driving two and a half hours to a Toronto dojo on Fridays, after which we would drive to Hamilton, and spend the night at my grandparents’ house, in order to do judo literally all day on Saturday, and then drive all the way home to Southampton. By the time I was thirteen, our lives practically revolved around judo. We started driving three hours to judo on Wednesday nights, as well, adding this to our weekend schedule. It was just what we did. In hindsight, I think my parents were crazy to do all that driving.

I think my blog probably really started in the car on those long drives, because, although we did talk about other things, the majority of the conversations always led back to judo. My father would help us with the details of technique, and tell us where he thought we needed to improve, while my mother constantly reminded us of how proud she was. She would glow when some sensei would tell her how well Sean and I were progressing, and we would be reminded of those stories many times over. We of course loved hearing them, so we rarely interrupted her in these moments.

After tournaments, we would proudly present our parents with the medals that we won, and they would in turn have the local newspaper swing by the dojo for another little write up and photo opportunity to promote the local dojo. The National Championships were always the best, as my mother would hide gifts for us in our luggage in the middle of the night after we finally settled before the three-hour drive to the airport the next day. Mine was always various chocolates from Mill Creek Chocolates, with at least a couple of their Mint Smoothies, along with a note about how proud she was, of course.

I think that judo was the glue that kept our family together in some ways. The constant travel definitely caused strain at times, but the family seemed to bond by this single-minded purpose. My siblings who never competed, Shannon and Ryan, would oftentimes go to events to cheer us on, and rarely complained about how much of our parents’ time we monopolized.

I honestly don’t know where I would be, or what I would have done with my life without judo, because I can’t imagine my life without it. Judo is as ingrained in me as walking, and although it has brought me my share of heartbreak, it has made me who I am.

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