Cobra Kai, the hit sequel series to the 1980s Karate Kid franchise, moved from YouTube Premium to Netflix recently, and now all of the people who were previously too cheap and/or lazy to sign up for a YouTube Premium account (respect, btw) are talking about it. I’ve decided to share how this intrepid karate show got me into Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

The Beginning: Mormons and Taekwondo

My childhood was disturbing, abusive, and full of bullies, both juvenile and adult—Johnny Lawrence and I have that much in common. I took off for the Rocky Mountains to be with the Mormons when I was 18 (long story!) where, in the sunny-wintry valley world of Provo under the watchful eye of the Wasatch mountain front, I discovered musicals and baking and, for the first time in my life, a world without abuse. I was no longer walking on eggshells; I could breathe.

The campus was my world

I also discovered a lot of really neat people who showed me really neat things, and one of those neat things was Taekwondo.

It started with my Brigham Young University women’s self-defense class. I liked the instructor enough that I followed up with his introductory karate class. Alas, there wasn’t an intermediate karate class offered on campus, or a student karate club, and the instructor’s affiliated gym (Bobby Lawrence Karate) wasn’t close enough to campus for me to train regularly.

I pulled these from a Web site I coded in 2002-2003 and I don’t have bigger/better pictures, okay?

There was a Taekwondo club on campus offering free lessons to students though, so I made the switch. And those 2 years I spent doing self-defense and karate and Taekwondo were some of the best of my life, not because of the martial arts themselves, but because training brought a level of balance and physical fitness to my life that I’d never experienced before. We in the jiu-jitsu community sometimes poke fun at traditional martial arts for being impractical in a real fight, but for me, karate and Taekwondo were an excellent source of exercise, flexibility, and self-esteem. I badly wanted to keep at it and get to black belt before graduation.

The writing on the back says this was taken on the last day of karate, April 2002

I fell into a bad marriage a few months before my 22nd birthday. I’ve talked at length about how my first husband was abusive elsewhere so I won’t retread here. And I’m not saying that ExHusband single-handedly stopped me from doing Taekwondo. But I was walking on eggshells again and spending a lot more time and energy on him than he was spending on me, and little by little, almost everything I loved doing seemed to quietly die as I refocused that energy into my marriage. My Taekwondo was just one casualty among many.

Enter the Cobra

Fast forward 15 years to August 2019. I’m divorced and remarried to a guy who doesn’t constantly make me feel like I’m walking on eggshells, a guy who’s made me realize that relationships don’t have to be perpetually harrying and abusive. I can breathe again. And the two of us are always looking for new shows to watch together. I’d heard marvelous things about Cobra Kai, so we signed up for YouTube Red / YouTube Premium and tuned in.

And wow. Just wow. Not only is Cobra Kai a phenomenal show, but it’s one that plays artfully with complex relationships and nostalgia and the idea that the heroes and villains aren’t always who they seem to be, something it does with a perfect mixture of humor and action. It made me long for that slice of life sandwiched between the abuse of my childhood and the abuse of my first marriage where I was doing karate and Taekwondo and breathing freely and feeling great about my body and my life.

Plus seeing a couple of fellow geriatrics like William Zabka and Ralph Macchio dawn their gis again made me realize it’s never too late to go back to your roots. I wasn’t halfway through the first season of Cobra Kai before I decided it was high time I got back to work on that black belt.

The problem was, I was no longer a svelte 6’0” 135-lb coed who could hike a 12,000-foot mountain without a care in the world. I was now borderline overweight at 183 lbs and had a full-time job with a long commute plus two disabled children to take care of. If I was going to go back to martial arts, my training needed to be close and convenient; I wouldn’t have the time or energy for anything else.

I decided I didn’t much care what martial art I went back to, all I cared about was going somewhere close.

I Google’d. The closest thing to my house was Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Then, Jiu-Jitsu

“That’s, like, the wrestling one, right?”

My BYU Taekwondo instructors had actually brought a jiu-jitsu guy in to teach us a lesson at some point. Virginal 20-year-old me was horrified at the suggestion that I should willingly open my legs to men and then try to choke them with my thighs. I mean, they teach a version of “climb between a woman’s legs and MEET YOUR DOOM” at Brigham Young University, but not the jiu-jitsu version.

That 2002 jiu-jitsu lesson went poorly for me.

But I was also a tomboy growing up, with a lot of male friends. And until the dawn of adolescence, my male friends and I wrestled all the time. And it was a lot of fun.

Then adolescence happened, and everything got super awkward, and I stopped having male friends. (Look, there weren’t a lot of teenage girls who wanted to discuss the Star Wars Expanded Universe with me, okay??)

Back to the present. I thought, “I’m in my 30s and married, this stuff isn’t awkward anymore, I can do jiu-jitsu.”

I visited the gym. I loved it. I’ve been doing it for just over a year now and I still love it.

I’m going to do a separate post on why I love Brazilian jiu-jitsu. For now, I’m grateful to my BYU karate and Taekwondo instructors for introducing me to martial arts, and also grateful to the makers of Cobra Kai for reigniting a passion in me that I hadn’t realized was lost.