Diamond in the Rough

          Yoshihrio Uchida has won more titles that Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Yogi Berra, and John Wooden combined; and this is most likely the first time you heard his name.

           Uchida has coached judo at San Jose State University for 66 years. During his tenure Uchida birthed the judo program, raised it from its infancy, and watched it grow into a power house that won 45 national championships in 51 years.

            At the beginning of his career, Uchida had his own Lombardi-esque coaching anecdote.

            When he started coaching judo in 1946, one member of Uchida’s inaugural class picked up and shook his coach in mid-air. Uchida responded by throwing the San Jose State football player in front of his classmates.

            Uchida getting the respect of his students was easy; pioneering the sport of judo in the United States was a bit more difficult.

            In 1953 Uchida and California University coach Henry Stone fought to make judo a sanctioned sport. The two coaches submitted the Amateur Athletic Union, and San Jose State sponsored the first nationwide A.A.U. championships that year.

           Nine years later, Uchida organized the first national collegiate judo championships, which San Jose State won.

            Uchida’s fight to get judo into respectability did not stop there. Stone and Uchida advocated for, and made judo an Olympic event in 1964.

            That year, Uchida went on to coach the United States’ first Olympic judo team. Uchida’s fighters won a bronze medal in the Tokyo Games.

As much as Uchida helped put judo on the sporting map, his life before coaching was filled with racism.

Uchida was drafted into the U.S. Army while his family was ripped apart by Executive Order 9066; that not so little decree that led to the removal of 110,000 Japanese-Americans from the west coast during World War II.

While Uchida was a lab technician for the medical corps, his parents were incarcerated at a camp in Arizona; his sister and her husband were sent to an internment camp in Idaho; and his brothers were relocated to the Tule Lake Relocation Center in northern California.

            Even after Uchida served his country for four years and graduated from San Jose State in 1947, he struggled to find work before finding his niche in coaching judo part time.

            Uchida got his opportunity to coach a sport he loved and returned the favor by carving his face into judo’s Mount Rushmore in the United States.

             San Jose State renamed the building where the school’s dojo is located Yoshihiro Uchida Hall in honor of the man who brought competitive judo to this country.   

            The 92 year old Uchida may not be around much longer for the world to appreciate, yet his legacy can be seen in action this July. Marti Malloy, a senior at San Jose State, will be in London representing the United States at the Olympics this summer.