Judo school finds natural home in education venue

Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon

It is fitting Galway’s newest martial arts club should have been founded in a national school, given the underlining ethos of Judo, and the principles of its founding father Kano Jigoro, revolve around the importance of education in one’s life.

This is something not lost on Judo instructor Pete Wells, who has set up Lion Judo Club in Craughwell National School, where he runs classes on a Friday evening and a Saturday morning.

During our chat, Wells, a former British Colleges champion whose Olympic dream was cruelly dashed by injury, notes you could live your life by Jigoro’s teachings. He’s not wrong.

Some of the mantras of Judo – ‘maximum efficiency, minimum effort’; ‘mutual welfare and benefit’; and ‘softness controls hardness’ – will have specific meaning to a practitioner of the art, a judoka, but for those of a more philosophical disposition, Kano Jigoro’s teachings run a lot deeper.

The Japanese educator, who also served as director of primary education for the Ministry of Education in his homeland between 1898 to 1901, once remarked: ‘Nothing under the sun is greater than education. By educating one person and sending him into the society of his generation, we make a contribution extending a hundred generations to come.’

For Wells, Judo and its philosophies have been fundamental to his life. Injury deprived him of pursuing his sporting dream; illness deprived him of a child; and grief cost him his marriage; but in Judo he has found solace, strength and purpose.

“From a Judo perspective, I have been on a mat since I was nine,” begins Wells. “So, that is 40 years now. For me, it was a case of my mother and father getting a couple of hours of peace and quiet on a Sunday morning. So, that is how I grew up on the Judo mat.

“Then later, I became British Colleges champion when I was 18. I was at Lancashire Polytechnic way back in the mid ’80s. I actually tried to go back and find records of the win but that was back in the day when it was all paper. There doesn’t seem be any online record.”

Although he says the Judo scene in the UK back then “was an awful lot more amateurish than it is now”, by his late teens he was training with the Olympic squad and was closing in on his black belt.

“Then I broke my collarbone and that put me out of contention,” he recalls.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.