Reflections on my students – the birth of the wolverine: Most great deeds have inauspicious beginnings. When Eddie Cummings first entered my morning class I saw him as a squirmy fellow armed with nothing more than a mediocre high elbow guillotine. One morning I came in and my regular Uke (demonstration partner) was absent. I chose Mr Cummings as a replacement and he proved very good. Afterwards he asked intelligent questions and we talked. I learned he was a graduate student in physics – a problem solver. As weeks and months passed I noted how he never missed classes and was rapidly learning. He expressed interest in more leg lock material. I started showing him more details of my approach to lower body submissions. Then he and Ottavia Bourdain decided to take leg lock study to a new level and do private classes every day – almost always in leg locks. An interesting part of this period is that Mr Cummings was initially VERY set against the outside ashi garami position that is one of the signature moves of our leg lock system and for which he would become famous! He thought it was totally wrong headed and would never work! I still tease him about that to this day! In time I managed to convince him of it effectiveness and he made incredible progress in application skills and theoretical understanding. As he began competing he quickly accumulated a vast number of submission wins, usually via leg lock. His defining moment in those early days however, a series of matches never recorded. Mr Cummings was invited by a friend of a friend to compete is an underground open weight grappling event in the basement of a gym somewhere in Brooklyn where he was obviously the smallest competitor. That night he fought around twelve men, winning everything by submission – fighting on a tiny mat on a grimy concrete floor in front of a crowd of maniacs gambling on the outcomes. As the smallest and nerdiest competitor, everyone bet against him. When he won, he was offered the princely sum of twenty rumpled one dollar bills! When people today see Mr Cummings win big events like EBI and take $20,000, they don't realize that it all began with crazy bouts for less than $2 a match
