Page 170 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

confrontation is risky. To attempt a thr ow, you weaken your struc tur e if onl y
for a flash. I would use that flash. When ever Dan tried to thr ow me, I ent ered

the attack, took space, and tried to simul taneous ly neu tralize his aggr ession
and cinch down the pressure.
Week after week, I got better at thi s. I was creating the anti-Che n Ze-
Cheng game. And Dan got better at attacki ng me. Some night s I woul d

dominate him, repress his every attack, and then expl ode in my own thr ows
when he got desperate. Other nights he would be electric and des troy me. I
remember one night in particular when he felt like a jaguar. He was all over
me, above me, behind me, on fire with an ani mal ins pi ration. I limpe d ho me

feeling absolutely bereft, b ut the next ni ght I came in and l ocked hi m do wn.
For the final three months before Taiwan, I recorded all of Dan’s and my
training sessions. Then, every night I woul d go ho me and study the tape s. Thi s
was valuable on a number of mundan e levels. Watching your self on vide o, you

can spot tells or bad habits. You can refine your techni ques by breaki ng do wn
what works and what doesn’t. But the primary funct ion the tapes ha d for me
was very different.
Dan and I had both reached such a high level of pr esence to inc oming

aggression that our sessions were marked by fewer and fewer point s. We kne w
each other’s games, we knew what attacks were coming, we knew ho w to pr obe
without overextending. Dan had figur ed out how to play agai nst my right
shoulder in a manner that neutralized most of my aggr essive impul ses, and I

could usually take advantage of his attacks to edge hi m out of the ring. If you
took our physical and mental abilities, put them toget her, and collide d the m
on the mats, we were dead even. We were also performing at peak levels, so few
mistakes were being made. We were in a state of dynam ic equi libr ium . The

only times points were scored were in moments of creative ins pi ration, whe n
one of us did something that trans cended our cur rent level of abi lity. The se
were the moments I focused on in the v ideo s.
Two or three times in an evening, Dan and I woul d be in the middl e of a

wild flurry and suddenly my body woul d put his body on the gr ound. Jus t like
that. And two or three times, he woul d do the same to me. We were pl aying
with such a tight margin, that I couldn’t thi nk about a techni que and the n do
it to him. No way it would catch him off-guar d. But a few times my ins tinc ts

would nd something that my cons cious mind di dn’t pi ck up o n.