Russian premier Vladimir Putin, who looks so wimpy in a suit, is a sixth dan black belt at judo and a former senior champion of Leningrad. This is one of the countless surprising facts in The Pyjama Game, Mark Law’s excellent history of judo. The book combines theory, story-telling and first-hand practice – including the author’s own humiliation at the hands of the judo greats. Remember Brian Jacks of Superstars fame? Law has been thrown by him. I was impressed, doubly so on learning that Law took up judo aged 50.

He gets our respect from the outset, holding it with his tale of this strange Japanese version of wrestling devised by one Count Kano, the man who systematised and simplified jujitsu in the 19th century.

Kano’s sport combines balletic grace with extreme violence: two opponents try to wrestle or strangle each other into submission, signalled by “tapping out”. The highest points are earned by dumping your opponent flat on his back. If you can’t do that, you can get points through leg and arm locks or a stranglehold. Law reports a boxer’s perplexed comments on a judo bout: “It’s like laundry!” But people die doing judo – of concussion and heart attacks – as the instant need for full power sends the heart rate rocketing. “There is a terrible sound like a boulder smashing through a sack of kindling,” writes Law, gleefully. “The pain is indescribable.” That’s his knee, beneath his opponent’s body.

Law laments his own lack of technical finesse as he grapples through his orange and green belts towards the elusive black. He hovers at brown, accidentally bites someone during training and cries after the exertions of a grading. He has a good grip on the interesting stuff: Cuban girls are taught a special ultra-bored look to freak out their opponents, East Germans built the world’s first mechanical judo robot. I also liked his account of the career of Brian Jacks, record holder of arm dips on the parallel bars. Jacks was almost Britain’s greatest judo champion (Olympic bronze), but Superstars was his real arena. In the 1979 final, he beat the superfit 22-year-old decathlete Daley Thompson. Judo, with its sharpening of the fighter’s instinct, had made Jacks, 14 years Thompson’s senior, the better man.

Law, despite his age (he’s now in his sixties), is plainly addicted. He asks anyone for a bout – even the smiling former world champion, Hirotaka Okada, who leaves Law “clutching at the window ledge like a drowning man on the gunwales of a lifeboat”.

This is what makes this book so unusual – most sports are elitist, judo isn’t. In judo, the top men take on all-comers at their local club, in Law’s case the Budokwai dojo in Chelsea. Later, he might buy them a pint. After reading Law’s account, a classic in its genre (hoplology, the study of fighting – another new fact), I felt a strong urge to pop down to his dojo myself.

The Pyjama Game: A Journey into Judo by Mark Law
Aurum £16.99 pp324
Buy the book here at the offer price of of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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