thing in Japan since rice, and for a while I was the star of the show.
The organization was growing so fast that they were in desperate demand for fighters. The Japanese public particularly liked the matches between Japanese and foreign fighters, so part of my job became recruiting Americans to fight over in Japan. The organization basically wanted fresh meat, bodies for their fighters to beat up in the ring. I wasn’t about to do that. I wasn’t going to go up to someone on the street and say, “Dude, I got this fight, you want to go?” If I did that, I knew what would happen. The guy would get his ass handed to him in the ring, and then he would come back to me and say, “Why did you do that to me?” I didn’t want to have that on my conscience. I made it real clear to the organization that if I was going to send fighters over, they were going to be prepared.
In order to do that, I moved the gym out of the strip mall and into a warehouse in an industrial district of Lodi. In one room I had weight-lifting equipment, every machine you could think of. In another room, I had 2,550 square feet of mats. And in the third room, I had a full-sized ring and dozens of punching bags hanging from the ceiling. There were no fancy pictures or weapons hanging on the wall. It was a hard-core training facility. It was perfect.
Once I had the gym set up, I then had to fill it up with young fighters. It was different from trying to get people packed into a karate school. There was no way I could accept just anyone who wanted to learn how to fight. A lot of people think they want to learn how to fight, but when it comes time to actually climb into that ring, they suddenly realize that they can’t handle the stress. Then all that hard work and instruction just goes down the drain. I wasn’t offering self-defense classes. I wasn’t trying to boost anyone’s self-esteem. I was in the business of turning out fighters.
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