Diary of an Ex-Wimpy Kid — Battles of London

A new ‘comedy memoir’ documents one man’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu journey – we talk to the author and present an exclusive excerpt.

White Belt is the first book from Ben Wilson, a journalist who’s played electric guitar with Steven Seagal, interviewed Sly Stallone wearing full costume on the set of Rambo 4 in Thailand, and been hospitalised with concussion after sparring with David Haye.

It’s the true story of him taking up BJJ aged 42, where he hopes to exorcise twin demons: teenage bullying and the casual belligerence flaunted by both himself and his fellow commuters. In the process he learns an even more valuable life lesson – ‘to stop gritting my teeth and thrashing around, and just feel the flow’. He grows from an average agitated middle class chump, to heavyweight English BJJ Open silver media winner.

The book covers Wilson’s three years of training at Mill Hill BJJ, under coaches Dan ‘The Raspberry Ape’ Strauss, Nick Brooks and Ed Ingamells, as he transitions from ‘spazzy beginner’ to winning medals at heavyweight in the English BJJ open. At one stage he catches the bug so bad that he was on the mats seven days a week, and military self-help guru Jocko Willinick stalks his dreams. How did he fit devotion to BJJ around his wife of seventeen years and two daughters?

“Truthfully, the only impediment to training is my own weak mind,” Wilson says, “it’s too easy to think ‘I am feeling a bit tired, and could do with a Pret A Manger for lunch, so…’ You get out what you put in. Also there’s a saying by boxing trainer Teddy Atlas. He said it to one of his fighters in the corner when they were flagging: ‘What, you can’t be a tough guy for 9 more minutes..?’ That’s how I feel about going to the gym. Just go! I also don’t honour this sentiment, and then hate myself for not going. But I always feel happier after I’ve been. Everyone does.”

Ben has since been promoted to blue belt. Enjoy this extract featuring the opening bout from his first ever tournament in a gi, and buy the book in paperback (£6.99) or Kindle format from Amazon. White Belt is out now.

Wilson finds himself in the final of his category at The English BJJ Open…

We’re both called to the centre of the mat.

I stand opposite this Goliath, and I’m instantly giving him the psychological advantage. Even though we weigh the same give or take a few kilos, in my mind he’s a giant. He’s taller, certainly. He’s a human Godzilla.

The ref chops the air and we charge at each other. Ok, react, react...

He grabs my right leg and we fall to the ground. I ball up while facing him, legs and arms upwards like a dog that’s just died and now got rigour mortis. I don’t know what I’m thinking. I’m panicking.

But he’s all over me: putting his full bodyweight on me. He’s now kneeling on my face and I’m thinking, “Hold on, is this even legal? Maybe it is. Well, it doesn’t really hurt that much, so it must be...”

“No kneeling like that,” says the ref to my opponent

*Wilson competing at an earlier, nogi tournament*

I try to do something, trying to take the bull by the horns, but I’m being so roughed up that I can’t get my head straight. What am I supposed to do here? I don’t know. What would I do in a sparring session at my club?

I manage to get his bodyweight off me slightly but I’ve got no tangible counterattack. I’m not really doing anything anymore, though I’m not sure why. I’m just lying there getting pummelled.

“What the hell am I doing?” I’m thinking, unable to relax. “Do something!”

He gets both of his knees over my body so I’m pinned down, so I bounce him off me slightly by thrusting my hips up, then I shift to my side. He’s then on top of me again, digging his right knee into my stomach. Well, that sort of hurts. But again, it’s not that bad.

I ball up once more but I’m still facing him, on my back, looking up at him, like a man examining with fascination the perfect symmetry of lines in a brick wall while it simultaneously collapses on him.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

I need to get into this fight. I need to attack!

But do I attack outright or do I counter-attack?

I’m so confused.

I decide to counter attack.

Which is at least better than lying there, like I’ve fallen asleep under the Sunday papers, and getting crushed.

He grabs my collar and lifts me up by the back of my kimono trousers and I feel a brush of cold.

It now dawns on me that by trying to pick me up by the back of my trousers in order to crush my face with my own knees, my opponent has just ripped my bum cheeks out. My full arse is now naked and staring at the crowd. Around 150 people watching can now see not just my pasty white buttocks but also my full bum crack. If my trousers and accompanying sports underwear were to be pulled up any further towards my head, I realise, it’s quite possible that my willy and full giblets would be on show.

Weirdly, unlike in sparring where this has almost happened to me before and I got a bit cagey about getting my bum out in public, in this instance I feel totally at ease about it.

Sure my bum may be on display, but c’est la vie, I realise.

Maybe my opponent will see my bum crack and he’ll stop stacking me and tap himself out, I think. Maybe he’ll see my bum and retch, providing me with a few valuable moments to counter-attack. I hope I’ve wiped properly. Is it possible to smell of Hell when you’re sweating this heavily? I’ve noticed that people’s individual body odour disappears once they start sweating heavily in sparring. Maybe, like dreadlocks apparently, a sweaty bum cleans itself?

“WILL YOU FUCKING SHUT UP AND START FIGHTING!” I scream at myself, in my head.

But it’s wishful thinking. My opponent has got the gold medal on his mind and his wife and toddler in the audience are watching, seeking confirmation that he really is their shield.

No, genuinely, I really must start attacking now, I think.

And so, with both buttocks hanging out, and with me being pummelled underneath his weight, I try to put myself back together again.

This man, like all the other big men I’ve come up against in life so far, has stolen a part of my soul, not because he planned to necessarily, but because my mind went into panic mode. I saw a big guy before me, and shat myself like I’ve done since I attained human consciousness and became self-aware.

After all I’d trained, and after coming this far, it seemed, I was still dealing with the demons from my past.

And still, to my incredible disbelief, my mind was saying to me: “Look, maybe you should just give this fight to him,” (like I had a choice!). “He’s got his wife and daughter here. They’re a happy family. Forget all that Jocko crap about bettering yourself. Romance is an enduring idea. Jocko is just one man. But the symmetry of life, a family man winning a gold medal in front of his loving wife and young child, is such a lovely notion. It’s pure Hollywood. Maybe I should just ride this fight out....”

And yet against this self-poisoning of my mind, the human voice of me that isn’t a coward, that knows he has a dark side like every other human, screamed, “NO! Get in there and be a man.”

“But, I’m scared...”

“PRIVATE PILE,” I think go myself, channeling the red-faced drill sergeant from the movie, Full Metal Jacket. “YOU ARE A FAT BARREL OF HUMAN TURD, GET IN THERE — AND START SWINGING!”

Amidst the screaming faces in the crowd I imagine Jocko being stood there, silently, expressionlessly, but also like the spirit of Braveheart’s dead wife at the end of the movie, when Mel Gibson’s tied to the rack, being stretched, and getting his ball-bag sawed in half by that medieval nutter.

I imagine Jocko looking at me, all quiet, indignant fury underneath a face devoid of emotion, but now slowly pulling a used, bloody axe out from behind his back.

“MURDER HIM!”

The message is clear from the depths of my psyche. Give no inch. Give no quarter. In the words of Jocko, “Go down swinging like a man possessed.”

I grab the big hairy man’s ankle, push up against his body as it’s pushing down on me, and the big hairy dude falls backwards, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa as if its underpinning has perished, no longer able to support its weight.

Sod this, I tell myself. Why should we work together, me and this big guy, to make sure he gets the outcome he wants? We came to fight.

I make a choice. Go home knowing that I just lay there and took a pummelling as this guy gave it all he had and had no mercy on me — or actually stand up for myself.

I’m me at my friend’s house getting bullied. I’m me getting knocked and shoulder-barged as an adult on the way to work. I’m the boy at school getting charged into from across the school playground. I’m me as an adult, getting eyeballed up close by a commuting human giant, intimidated by him until I’d yelped, desperately, “I’m calling the police...”

I am every pathetic bloke who’s been too scared to stand up for himself, who was too afraid to act in the moment to defend himself, preferring to defer an altercation and instead confront the fear of self-disappointment in his own private time, behind closed doors. I am The Man Who Always Says Sorry.

And this guy I’m fighting literally has his knee back on my face right now, again!

Do I love avoiding confrontation, only to feel terrible about myself later? Or am I the guy who’ll confront the trouble right now, the consequences be damned? Because in this very moment I’m under attack.

Just exactly what kind of man have I become? Who the hell am I? I’m nearly halfway through my life, and really when have I ever stood up and said, Enough!

Instead I carry my individual frustrations around with me like a rucksack stuffed with slices of bitter lemons, my sorrowful recollections of my own moments of weakness strapped to my person.

Well, fuck that and fuck this.

And fuck this otherwise probably very lovely guy trying to do as much damage to me as possible right now within the confines of this competition’s rules. (Although I’m pretty sure that pinning my head to the floor by kneeling through my nose isn’t in the rule book).

Also who cares if 200 people watching have just seen my ring piece, as well as probably my codpiece? Who cares?

With my back on the floor, I thrust him up even further into the sky. I’ve made my choice. I need to attack.

I want the weak me to die, to fritter away, to disintegrate. I came to this sport to learn how to become someone else, so that the old me would distance himself from the new me, like the multitudinous reflections you get when you look in a mirror with another mirror behind you. I came to Jiu-Jitsu to cut out all the traits of my personality that I was ashamed by.

The big man I’m now levering has gone crashing over sideways, rigidly, perplexed that he’s been ripped out of his one-way path of pummelling the crap out of me.

Now, I have a choice. With him on his back, do I launch myself at him and try to crush him?

Or do I do something with his right leg that’s now just in front of me, waiting to be grabbed?

I have milliseconds to work out what to do before he recomposes himself and comes back at me, re-attacking.

Do I act now, or do I continue to be reactive, to work out what the most technical thing to do in this moment could be?

No, I realise. I need to grab his ankle and put him in a leg lock. It’s there for the taking.

The only problem is that since I got into trouble quite rightly at my gym all those months ago for trying to do knee bars thinking they were leg locks, I can’t really remember how to attack the legs.

I haven’t done a leg lock on someone for six months. Whereas before, where I could get someone to tap from a leg lock almost immediately, now I can’t even remember the steps to pulling it off. I know you scoop your arm over and around their lower leg. But what do you do to finish the move?

Yet my opponent has composed himself now. His furious body language means I need to refocus on his next attack. The problem is, I’m still trying to remember how to do a leg lock. And my brain can’t handle thinking about two variables at once, under pressure and at speed.

So I grab his leg and I hope for the best. I’m just one move away from getting the gold medal and being able to legitimately call myself the English Champion. So maybe this will be the clincher for me, the moment I seal the gold.

I grip hold of his leg and shove it under my armpit then lean back. He frets and scrambles about, but he’s got too much wiggle room. I’m doing something wrong clearly. I don’t have any control over him. Normally the leg lock just comes straight on. I’m confused.

I shift my backside further up his leg so that my wrist is wrapped tighter around his ankle. Nothing still.

Oh, crikey. Come on! Tap! Please!

So I remember something vaguely about turning my body harshly to my left while still grabbing his leg. I do that. No, nothing. And now he’s leaning forward towards me.

Quick! I turn my body almost all the way round so that surely he’ll feel the leg-lock. In fact, I’ve turned around so much that I can barely see him.

And then he bounds up like an attacking lion and clambers all over my back, wraps his right arm around my neck and strangles me with both arms, squeezing as hard as he can. It’s a rear-naked choke he’s got on me. I’ve shown him too much of my back, and in doing so I’d loosened any pressure I’d had on his ankle and leg.

He squeezes my neck harder and harder until after about six seconds, the pressure is unbearable. I’m now sat back into him, my back pressed against his chest, and he’s squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. I look up at the lights of the hall, and can see the blur of the crowd in front of me.

I don’t want to tap. I don’t want to tap. I don’t want to. But there’s no bloody way out.

I tap.

In disbelief and relief, the hairy monster dude who just tapped me out whisper-screams to himself, “Yes!”

He’s won the gold.

He leaps to his feet and holds his arm aloft.

Defeated, and no longer able to maintain ‘Normal Face’ now that the event is over for me, and I lost, I purse my lips together in a meek way. The referee holds our wrists, then raises his hand aloft.

The ref then looks at me, and to lift my spirits, makes a joke:

“Well, at least all the spectators saw your arse.”