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[title]Eric Schofield and his student each grip one of their feet and hop on the other foot, chasing each other around a kickboxing ring and slamming together shin first. The student topples backward and somersaults back to his feet, sweat soaked and panting. Schofield, clean-cut and brightly upbeat, his shorts revealing massive leg muscles, tells his vanquished pupil to take a break. The student is an experienced mixed martial arts fighter, but this workout is pushing him to his limits.
They’re at Keller’s Martial Arts in Irving Park, one of two schools where Schofield, 30, offers the first stateside classes in the Chinese sport judose. (The other is Muay Thai Self Defense in Robbins.) In August, Schofield opened the American Judose Association office at the Zhou B Art Center in Bridgeport. He’s putting together the first U.S. judose team, four men and four women, to compete in a ten-city tournament in China next January.
The objective of the ancient Chinese game: to knock your opponent down or out of the ring or to force him to drop his foot; five years ago, it became a competitive sport. Schofield says it “fills the gap between mixed martial arts blood-and-gore fighting and something with a little less contact, something more family friendly.
“My mind is consumed with how to popularize this new foreign sport that a lot of Americans would, if they ever see it, say, ‘This is kind of ridiculous!’”
Growing up in the suburbs, Schofield studied tae kwon do and other martial arts. In 2003, while enlisted in the Army Reserves, he was deployed to Camp Anaconda, 40 miles north of Baghdad, where he operated heavy machinery, laying concrete and asphalt to reconstruct roads. His unit underwent daily mortar shelling. “Eight MPs were getting ready to mobilize home. A mortar dropped right on them,” Schofield recalls. “I realized it could be your time at any moment.”
Schofield completed his enlistment in 2005, bought a house in west suburban Warrenville and became an electrician. “It took two and half years before I could have a conversation about [my war service],” he says. After watching the Jet Li–Jackie Chan film Forbidden Kingdom in 2008, Schofield started studying kung fu and tai chi with Xiao-fei Dong at Bei Dou Kung Fu in Naperville, quickly becoming an instructor. The practice became postwar therapy. “My views of wanting to be able to take on the world,” he says, “melted away to a real sense of peace.” He married in June; his wife is expecting their first child.
In July, the publisher of the Chinatown-based China Star newspaper, Daway Zhou, whose son, Yudi Zhang, is the VP of the International Judose Association (IJA), contacted Xiao-fei about building a judose presence in the U.S. Xiao-fei brought Schofield to China to meet with IJA founder Yanda Wu. In the past five years, Yanda has grown judose from a playground game to a sport whose matches draw thousands of spectators and are broadcast on national TV, with teams in several Asian and European countries. Schofield trained with the Chinese judose team and, eventually, pitched Yanda a strategy to build an American squad.
By September, Schofield was teaching a handful of students. He’ll hold a tournament with Yanda this month to select a U.S. team to train six days a week in the fall before a winter tour of China. By this time next year, Schofield hopes to have judose classes around the country and recruit nationally for the 2012 team.
Join or watch a judose demo at the Land of Lincoln Classic Martial Arts Championships Sunday 10 at 11am at Kankakee Community Resource Center (150 N Indiana Ave, Kankakee, 815-933-3352). Schofield can be reached at 773-376-3118 or ericpschofield@gmail.com.