Joe Condello began training judo in Philadelphia with Takahiko Ishikawa. During his summer break from college, he and his then-girlfriend Becky visited Ishikawa and Helen Foos in Virginia Beach. The latter asked the couple to relocate to the southern state to assist Ishikawa and Foos. The couple accepted and spent the 1970s in Virginia Beach around judo. Later, Joe would relocate to Pennsylvania and founded the Liberty Bell Judo classic with Lou Moyerman. This interview was used in the writing of the book Takahiko Ishikawa: Judo’s Quiet Master, available now!
MAYTT: It does sound that Virginia Beach was very different from Philadelphia.
BC: Yep.
JC: It’s the best time of my life. [Laughs]
BC: It was pretty cool.
JC: Just needed more students.
MAYTT: It also sounds like a good portion of your lives down there.
JC: Yeah, we were pretty much at Virgina Beach until almost when he left. I think he left the year after we left, or whenever they closed the dojo.
MAYTT: One thing to clarify with Virginia Beach: you mentioned before that Ishikawa asked you to come down to Virginia Beach, and Mrs. Foos gave you an earful also. But what was the whole logistics behind moving down to Virginia Beach since you were in college at the time? I guess, how’d that all work out?
JC: I essentially lost three years of school.
BC: Tell you, “We’ll accept all your credits.” They accept them, but they don’t do anything with them.
JC: It was kind of a weird period for school. I started as a bio major, then I became a PE major.
BC: Because of judo practice.
JC: I like to say that judo made my life and ruined my life. [Laughs] But it was funny either way. I attended Slippery Rock University for three years. Becky had been too. We enrolled in Old Dominion University in Virginia. We checked it out originally and they said, “Yeah, we’ll take all your credits. We can take all your credits.” But their PE program was totally different. I’m going to say it’s kind of old school, and I was going to have to put in pretty much another two and a half years in their credits. It sucked. In actuality, I even tried to go to a different school down there while I was at Old Dominion. I went to Norfolk State for a semester. They would be able to get me out sooner, but their program didn’t live up to my expectations. I went back to Old Dominion. It was a major shift in college life. But we were in college, and we were young.
BC: Mrs. Foos owned a lot of properties down there, so we were able to live on one of her properties. It was a very small beach house, but for us, it was awesome.
JC: It was this old cottage property.
BC: It was four blocks from the beach. We paid a very minimal rent. On the weekends, a lot of times we’d go and do work for Mrs. Foos. I’m sure she made the work for us.
JC: She always had something for us to do.
BC: We’d go and clean out closets.
JC: Wash her dogs, wash her car.
BC: She’d take us out to dinner and give us a little bit of cash. That’s kind of how we survived.
JC: In some ways, it was great because I didn’t have to worry about it too much. We could survive on what we had and go to school and do judo.
BC: Then she offered me a full-time job, which I took and did for two years.
MAYTT: It sounds like an adventure, on top of the judo.
BC: Mr. Ishikawa used to drive me. I’d take him to the fish market once a week because he’d come over to Mrs. Foos’ and say to her, “Oh, I want to go to the fish market today.” She’d send me on the way with him, and he was not a very good driver. [Laughs]
JC: She’d be white knuckling it the whole time.
BC: He’d be driving away talk and talk and talk. [Laughs] I’d be like, “Oh, please let us get there.”
MAYTT: How involved was Ishikawa in the greater Judo community and political arena with the organizations?
JC: Like I said, when I started was in 1972, so it was just about that time he had a big fallout with the US Judo Federation due to a refereeing issue where they wanted him to test for a national certification. The organization was trying to implement some kind of national standard for refereeing and develop some testing to become referee. I know they basically wanted him to test in a sense and he taught all these guys. It’s kind of a slap in the face. At that point, he pretty much disassociated himself with the United States Judo Federation, which was pretty much the sole administrator or a body for judo in United States. The USJA was just forming at that point.
BC: And I think that came, USJA came out of the military.
JC: It was actually a part of USJF. They had a military piece of it. They broke away because of the ranks and promotions and developed their own organization. That’s my understanding. These guys, who were in the military, would get their black belts from overseas and because they weren’t USJF promoted, they didn’t want them to wear their black belt to tournaments. It was stupid stuff, but that’s how politics is. He pretty much became apolitical.
He promoted some people under USJA because he had the power to promote them and to get some kind of certificate or registration as that rank. He didn’t have direct authority under USJF. I think, for the most part though, he just disassociated himself. He just wasn’t involved. Occasionally, he was invited to come to certain events like the nationals. I think it depended on who was the tournament director, and he would go as a guest. But other than that, he pretty much was not involved at all anymore.
He didn’t push things one way or another. For the most part, both of us pretty much came up under USJF under Shufu, although we were members of both USJF and USJA. But he didn’t really want to be involved in any of that. We didn’t care where you came from at that point.
It was interesting, but over time, all of our attitudes changed towards things in judo or in life. You do mellow with age. But I mentioned the idea of women’s judo; he really didn’t have competitive women until Becky came down.
And I think that really changed his mind a lot, or his attitude towards women, that women can do this too. And she was about 110 pounds. She’d worked out with everybody and be competitive that way. That was, I think, a lot different than he was used to. He really embraced it in a way that when other women would come train with him. He even made mention about times when he was more involved politically and even involved in promotions. I remember him bringing up this particular woman that he denied her promotion, and he goes, “I was so stupid.” It was just because of his attitude or what he was used to. That’s the environment he came from where men were doing judo for the most part, but competitively. Politically, I think, it wasn’t a big deal just to drop out of that stuff. I don’t think he felt like he needed to be involved in this – it didn’t matter anymore.
MAYTT: You bring up women not being allowed to randori or even compete until later. Why do you think that was even here in the United States at that time, why women weren’t allowed to randori or even compete?
JC: It was probably in the early 1970s that women started to be more competitive or started to doing more. It was just the way things were in terms of the age. I’m not saying that women didn’t randori men. I mean, Mrs. Foos talked about having to fight men during her training.
BC: I think there were some women that did enjoy randori and competing. I just think at Ishikawa’s club, that was not a focus for his students at the time that Joe was there.
JC: It comes back to how things were in Japan. I mean, judo was a man’s competitive sport. There were women in judo, but they pretty much did women’s judo. They did a lot of kata. They did randori with each other. I think it was more a lot lighter and wasn’t competitive as the men.
BC: I think 1972 was the first year that women competed in shiai at the US Nationals. If you think about how long men had been doing it, women’s competitive randori was few and far between. For me, when I’d go to tournaments, there wouldn’t be anyone in my weight division. There might be some players maybe two divisions up from me, but at Nationals, I might have sixteen total competitive players. It was still pretty small. But obviously, that’s grown tremendously.
JC: But it wasn’t the way it is or was when we went to Virginia Beach or the way it is now.
MAYTT: Thank you for clarifying. What do you think Ishikawa’s legacy is in Philadelphia? What is something that can be traced back to Ishikawa?
JC: I can’t think of a specific thing that I can recall, probably because he had been in Philadelphia for some time since the 1960s. I think that I would have to say again, there were pockets of judo in the area. I think there was a fairly strong contingent was around the Washington, DC area. I think that was related to the military and traveling people in that area.
Just to get some idea, when we started, we had the USJF. They pretty much controlled judo from Florida to Maine, the whole East Coast. There may have been one or two other judo guys that have broken off, but it was USJF, definitely, from North Jersey, part of New York and way down South to Florida. If you wanted to get promoted, you had to go to their promotions, which was in DC or Wilmington, Delaware, twice a year for a high rank for brown belts – ikkyus and above. That just goes to show you that there were just little groups of black belts in the DC area, which was probably the biggest group. I think Ishikawa coming into Philadelphia definitely grew a lot of it. A lot of the students went off to continue to teach judo here and there.
BC: No, I think that Mr. Ishikawa was so masterful in his teaching ability and his ability for you to understand applications and hard work that most of the people that trained with him, you can pretty much tell if that person was an Ishikawa student.
JC: Plus, he had quite a diversity of techniques. He just didn’t do one technique. He could probably do ten that he could actually do.
BC: It was fabulous. And the fact that he was only an eighth-degree black belt, two times world champion.
JC: All Japan
BC: Well, All Japan, which was essentially the world. No one was close to that rank at that time.
JC: To my point, what I was trying to say is that he came much earlier than we were here. What he brought to the organization, he had to definitely raise the bar in terms of what judo was here and may not just be in Philadelphia. I think across, at least, the eastern part of the United States – Shufu covered a lot of areas. I’m sure he influenced a lot of people early on in terms of judo skill. But not being around for that, it’s hard to say what was actually what it was big as achievement would’ve been or whatever.
I think that, at least in the Philadelphia area, he developed a lot of good and instilled strong feelings that led to an appreciation for judo. A lot of those people went out and taught like Tommy Blair for instance. I know he started under Helen Foos. When he was a little older, I met Tommy. I was probably sixteen, I think Tommy was maybe a year and a half, maybe two years older than me – he was only seventeen or eighteen when he was training. He was going down a little prior to me. But Ishikawa had that influence on Tommy. There was Lou, Howard Wray, and many other guys went out and continued to teach you.
MAYTT: As you said previously, there were a good many people affiliated with Ishikawa. If you were talking to a younger judoka and you wanted to tell them about Ishikawa, what three things would you impart about him to this younger player?
JC: I’ve come across many judo instructors, very strong, high-ranking guys. Instructors like Mr. Chang and Mr. Park. I mean, Kiel-Soon Park trained us in Slippery Rock. Guy was awesome. He was a bronze medalist in the 1965 World Championships, and he just kicked all our butts and threw us all over the place. He was a tough guy and I have total respect for Kiel-Soon Park, but Ishikawa was a different creature. Just the variety of his skill and I can’t compare him to anybody. I’ll say to this day, I’ve never seen anyone else do this in my life, but he used to be able to throw people with an uki otoshi without going down to his knee. He did that by stepping to the side and just flinging and sailing you across the mat.
I’ve never seen anyone else do that. Just the ability to do that, without uke feeling their balance being taken and flinging them across the mat like that – it was just incredible. And he’d foot sweep you and you’d be perpendicular with his chest. There are a lot of really good guys that are amazing, but they didn’t seem to compare with the variety of skill. Incredible. That in itself is an amazing thing to me.
BC: He was very humble about it.
JC: Here’s something else that I would say. It is an important thing to impart to people because he understood this because he literally went to school to a judo college, and part of that was learning a variety of things and being able to teach different things. One thing he used to say, “Joe, I can only teach you my way. And then you practice it and then you’ll make your own way.” He understood that we’re not all the same and that everything that he could do his way, I might not be able to do his way. There were certain principles involved that you needed to understand and a good foundation you needed to have then you are free to modify it and make it work for you.
I think also the idea that what he instilled, at least to me, was just trying to be persistent – just keep working. Also, just how humble he was. I’ll tell you one more thing. He told me one time about sen no sen. The idea of being able to take advantage of the person’s balance before they knew they were off-balance. It’s different from go no sen – countering it or when someone moves a certain way, then you feel it and you counter it. Well, sen no sen is anticipating that. You anticipate their movement and take advantage of that. He said to me that we do go no sen, and the people used to practice with and could read his mind did sen no sen. The idea of him even saying, “Guys like us,” what do you mean? [Laughs] I’m thinking my mind, “What do you mean us? I’m way down here; you’re up here.” [Laughs]
But the point is that he could make himself that relative to us. There are little things, anecdotal things, that happened in my time with him that just blew my mind saying something like that. You got to think about that in terms of even working with a new student or working with regular students today.
MAYTT: Him including you, saying, “We can’t do this.” Are you sure? Because you’re leaps and bounds better than me.
JC: Exactly, it’s like, I don’t know, we’re not in the same box here. Yeah, it was funny. But those kinds of things.
MAYTT: Were there things that Ishikawa wanted to do for judo or what he wanted to achieve in judo, but he wasn’t able to achieve that you could see from your perspective during that time?
JC: I don’t think so. He didn’t talk about those kinds of things much. Again, he was older at this point, and I think that judo was important. Judo was his life, so it was important to him. I think he pretty much came to terms with where he was in judo. Probably, at a certain point in time, there was an expectation to where he should have been – that he should have been much more revered here and brought judo to a higher level or had more influence in American Judo. It’s a shame because I think American Judo would be much better off or would’ve been much higher level today if judoka had been able to take advantage of his ability. I think at a certain point in time, I don’t think it mattered to him anymore.
BC: Yeah, I think probably once he left Japan and his position, I think everything was probably downhill from there.
JC: I don’t know if you know about his circumstances of leaving Japan, but when he left, he pretty much had the highest level teaching position. He was the head instructor of Tokyo Police Judo, and to leave that position, he could never take a lower level job because that would be losing face in Japan. He left because of personal family reasons.
BC: But he had to leave.
JC: He left because he had to pay some financial sum to help someone and took his retirement early. But he just couldn’t take another job there. He wound up going to Cuba and then things didn’t work out there, obviously. I believe he was actually in jail. Mrs. Foos was actually instrumental in bringing him to Philadelphia. There was a lawyer, I can’t remember where he’s from, but I believe she basically made it financially feasible to bring him up, to take care of the fees. I don’t know that as a fact. That’s my impression, not my understanding.
Then when he came to America, he was in Philadelphia. There wasn’t a huge judo contingency contingent in Philadelphia itself. It wasn’t a mecca of judo. He pretty much had to build it from what was there. As I understand it, just prior to me going, through the late 1960s, there’d be just a line of black belts. They all came up under Ishikawa. He developed a lot of judo in the area. But in terms of him having big aspirations, after a certain point in time here, it was, “This is what I do. I teach class.” It wasn’t a major thing for him anymore. He was more interested in playing go and developing his abilities because that was something he could continue and make progress. It’s kind of a shame. Not for us, but it was a shame for him.
MAYTT: Researching his life, it does seem like there were a few negative things that defined his life and he just tried to make the best of it. It’s really unfortunate because like you said, and even from the stuff I’ve read too and people I talked to, he was literally the highest judoka in America, let alone the hemisphere.
JC: We would get visitors in Virginia Beach; he would get visitors regularly. I’m trying to remember the Japanese guys. There was this guy was instrumental in French Judo. He was treated like he should have been, and he came to go to visit Ishikawa. When you see that, it’s like if he would’ve been brought somewhere else, he wouldn’t have wound up like he did. Like I said, his situations were tragic. In Cuba, if Castro didn’t happen, maybe he would’ve done something great there and developed great judo in Cuba. But who knows? But then to come to Philadelphia and then the incident with his son – all those things. I think at a certain point, judo is what he knew and what he would do. But it wasn’t the same anymore, I think. He was always, at least from when we knew him, levelheaded and pretty happy. He would laugh a lot. I’m not going to say jolly.
MAYTT: Thank you for this great conversation about Ishikawa!
Find out more about the Condellos, Ishikawa, and more in Takahiko Ishikawa: Judo’s Quiet Master!
