Tournament day 1

First day of competion and the tournament was to be held at the local mall. Now we're not talking American Malls here. These suckers have 4 floors. We're talking colossal. We showed up somewhat early for the ad-hoc "rules and officials" meeting, held downstars at a Starbuck outside. Consisted of groups in two rooms separated by glass and one guy communicating things back and forth. OK, to be expected. So with anticipation we headed to the mall location and staked out chairs.
And then we waited. If you're familiar with FMA, then you understand the term "Filipino time". Starting at 9AM could mean anywhere up to 2 hs later. I've even seen tournaments in CA advertised as "NO Filipino time". Having experienced and gotten used to this last time, I had low expectations. Little did I realize there's two floors of lower than that. By a mile way worse than I've ever seen. Many of the usual suspects that helped run these were not to be involved. I suspect there was some of the usual politics and the locals were wanting to run the whole thing as a matter of pride or whatever. Big mistake.
All the registrations from the day before had disappeared overnight. Everything was being hand written on legal pads by Pinay's who hardly spoke english. See any problems there?
I'd have to say this was again an auspicious start and even saying " I expected this" didn't cover it. Needless to say we were disgusted and bored. I consequently have very few pics at this point.
At one point I did sub as center judge for one of the forms rings for a while. That was fine, I don't mind judging. I knew eventually my division was coming (there wasn't too many left after what had to have been 4-5 hrs) so I excused my self. Sure enough, I was called. Which ring? Yep, same one. It was just Ernie (doing a traditional DP form) and I again. At least three of the judges were DP folks. End result was we both had all 9's and 9.5's. I think Ernie had one more 9.5. No surprises with that judging, NBD.

I ran a good form so I'm happy with that. They'll never see anything like it again.



A few hours later we got around to Cole's division.

I sticking with the debacle of how the tournament was run they decided (for what brilliant reason we never got) to combine the 14-15 with the 16-17. Nothing we could say would change that. Cole's first fight was with a 16 yr old Brit who had a serious push checking problem. Finally close to loosing a point at the thrid round. We had prepared for this eventuallity and Cole had no problem handling him despite getting continually shoved three steps back and knocked off his feet.

There was a bit of broughha after the third round as I took Cole's helmet off. Seems the Brit follow rules that do not allow removing the helmet until there is a winner declared. They wanted him disqualified. Typical stuff. Believe me, I know the rules backward and forwards. It's not in there but that's how they "practice" them in Europe. It's certainly not that way on Britian's website, I checked the rules on their site.

In the end it didn't matter. Cole won unanamously. For first place cole had to fight a guy who will be 18 in 6 months and was at least 3" taller.

Cole got accidentally disarmed in the first round and it proved to just not be enough to recover from. It was a good and close fight. I think ultimatly the other guy just had more reach and could come over the top more.




The end of a somewhat disappointing (in several ways) day. We headed back to the hotel around 9PM and never even got dinner.