Anterior Cruciate Ligament. It’s known to most athletes as the ACL, and it is the one thing absolutely nobody wants to hurt. As an athlete in any sport at any level, you think you understand what it means to hear the heart wrenching “You have torn your ACL.”
But you don’t.
Three weeks ago, on a regular Saturday morning Catch as Catch Can (CACC) wrestling class in the Snake Pit gym, in Koenji , Tokyo, I tore my ACL. It’s almost a complete tear, with no option other than surgery and 9-12 months of apparently grueling rehab and recovery.
What is an ACL?
I didn’t know much about it when I first got the injury. I knew that Golden State Warriors star Klay Thompson had it twice, and former NBA MVP Derek Rose had it and was never the same player again.
Your anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is one of the four main ligaments, or bands of tissue, that keeps the bones of your knee joint together. It also stabilizes it and allows you to control movement of the knee in different directions. The ACL connects your thigh bone (femur) with your shinbone (tibia) and works in tandem with your posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) to allow you to move your knee back and forth.
Basically, it is the main band that keeps everything together in your knee. When it is torn, nothing is connected.
I was sparring, heard a massive popping sound in my knee, and fell to the ground. I knew it was bad the minute it happened.
How can this happen to me? Why now? What did I do to deserve this? Those questions cycled through my mind.
How did it happen?
Sparring. And me be too aggressive. And possibly carrying too much weight.
A month or so prior to the injury, New Japan Pro Wrestling star Katsuyori Shibata had visited the gym. I was very eager to train with him, and to legit shoot wrestle/spar with him. He’s a very very talented professional wrestler, and also doing other grappling arts I believe. However, he himself was the first to admit to us that he wasn’t that good at CACC, which is where today’s stunt man show of professional wrestling originally came from. He told us so, and that’s because it was his first few times doing it. That’s normal for anyone. It took me years to get comfortable doing CACC and to finally understand what it is.
I was indeed very keen to show Shibata exactly what I have. Alas, for two weeks straight when he came to the dojo, he seemed to avoid me and the other guys in favour of training with a British wrestler he knew from LA who was also visiting the dojo for two weeks. Both had never done CACC before, so to say I was disappointed not to be able to train with Shibata is an understatement. In our CACC training, we usually do sparring as well as techniques, but I think my coach got so excited that a big New Japan star was in the house, that he forgot about sparring and just wanted to show all the cool submissions and throws that we have in CACC. That’s how I couldn’t get a chance to wrestle with Shibata either. I was going to do my best to test him in sparring and had been looking forward to it all week for both weeks.
So after he went back to LA, I was frustrated and took it out on the guys in the gym. For two weeks in sparring, I stepped up a gear and just went on a rampage. I had stupidly taken the Shibata slight personally and was a bit angry. How childish of me. I would soon pay for it dearly.
Fast forward to the day of the injury.
We get a lot of visitors to the gym, because CACC is an almost dead wrestling art, lost to the world. My coach Yuko Miyato is one of the few guys keeping it alive. Shout out to Jake Shannon in the US who is also keeping it alive and building it up very well over there. We need that here, and in my native Australia too. I do dream of being the “Aussie CACC guy” one day.
My sparring partner when the injury happened
So this Japanese guy comes in as a visitor for the first time. I later found out he was 51 years old and has been doing amateur wrestling for over 30 years and seems to be a coach. This was his first time doing CACC. He was about the same height as me but much more wirey, and with lots of amateur wrestling experience. Amateur wrestling is very different to our style of wrestling. In CACC, you are always on the hunt for submissions, take downs, and pins, and it’s a very aggressive style of wrestling. Amateur wrestling is all about take downs and pins only. In CACC, you cannot win a match or get points from a take down, you have to either submit someone (make them tap), or pin them. It’s the sport of gladiators.
I had just finished two rounds of sparring when I called him over. He was wary of me due to my weight advantage, and for the first 90 seconds of sparring, he was really not doing anything in our sparring. He was super defensive with zero offense, which is usually how it goes when you close the distance on an amateur wrestler (that takes away their ability to shoot in and take you down, which is their bread and butter). Then suddenly I went for “ashi guruma” kind of “ashi barai” which I am fairly good at. It’s one of my strongest techniques actually, because it embodies the CACC mindset. You play chess with your opponent, see what they do, lay some traps, and think a few steps ahead. In this case you throw your foot out knowing he’ll either try to escape or not see it. When he counters, you counter his counter. This is the system I’ve implemented into Aikido and was exploring, so the ACL injury timing is very unfortunate on that front. In fact, Husein and I were doing this in Hombu Dojo just last month, ashi guruma from Aikido techniques. Our fellow students looked at us with disgust as we dared to go outside the basic 1-2-3 of the Aikido syllabus. One comment I got was “oh you are wrestling”…. Anyway…
Here is the Judo version of ashi guruma. Ours is the same almost, but we don’t hold onto clothes in CACC because we don’t wear jackets. I hade my over hook in.
As I go to throw, he pulled his leg out. This was one of the options I figured he’d do, but for whatever reason, our legs collided. My foot was on the ground, and as he pulled his leg out, he accidentally pushed my knee inwards. It was identical to what happened to Klay Thompson’s knee, below.
I heard a massive pop, and crumpled to the floor immediately. And life as I knew it changed forever. Will I be able to wrestle at a high level again? I cancelled three matches in April and a big tag team match with Tatsumi Fujinami’s Dradition at Korakuen Hall in May straight away.
It was stupid of me to be so frustrated and determined to smash everyone in sparring. That, and the weight gain (my upper body has too much weight for the lower to maintain I think), meant that this ACL tear has been a kind of a blessing in disguise, to teach me to slow down and take it easy.
Surgery will be in May, and I will begin the slow road to recovery. No martial arts or wrestling for all of this year and early next year. I’ll come back better and stronger than before.
You will be back Rionne, have faith and persevere.
No way! So sorry to hear man!