Fighter's Corner
by Helen Von Mott
Helen Von Mott Editorial 


(Editor’s Note: Helen is a leader in the wrestling video business and one of
the best fighters around. Some of her recent accomplishments include a gold
medal in the Capitol City Grappling Open, a gold medal in the US Brazilian
jiu-jitsu Open and some impressive wins in submission wrestling at Women’s
Wrestling Convention 99. She also knows the entertainment side of the
business, having been a member of the G.L.O.W. professional wrestling troupe.)

Since this is my first column for Athletic Women Magazine, let me introduce
myself: my name is Jessica "Helen" Mott. I am a student of grappling in
general and Brazilian jiu-jitsu ("BJJ") in particular, have competed
successfully in grappling and sport-BJJ tournaments, and mean to compete in
more of them. As part of my grappling life, I try to encourage other people,
women especially, to take up this amazing sport for the physical and mental
growth and strength that it can help them to achieve, as it has done and keeps
doing for me.

Whenever I put on a bikini to hit the mat, I am also a video female wrestler,
part of a surprisingly large underground industry that has existed for
decades, as a modern expression of a male combative-woman fantasy that seems
to have existed for hundreds and even thousands of years, around the world.
I've been doing this for a few years. I am also founder and owner of my own
wrestling-video production company, "Virago," in California ("Virago" is a
word meaning a woman of great stature, strength and courage. Together with our
company motto, "Redefining the Feminine," our company name expresses my vision
for a new understanding of womanhood to include strength, personal power, and
self-confidence.) I started my own company because, having worked making
videos for other people, I wanted control of the creative process so that I
could be sure that the videos I was involved with were videos I could feel
proud of.

I am called "Helen" or "Helen Von Mott" in my videos and in the
women-wrestling subculture because that is how I was known when I began in the
video industry. My first teacher, Scott Carruthers – more about him later –
was very strict about privacy and security for the women, since we work in a
field that is of compelling erotic interest to many, many men, and he insisted
that we all adopt "wrestling names" and hide our real names.

This is the usual practice in the wrestling-video industry, and in fact, still
a practice we use for the other women in Virago videos. I am confident enough
to use my proper name now, but I am already known to fans from around the
world as Helen and I suppose I always will be. I answer to "Helen" with no
problem.

For further information about Virago, our videos and so much more, complete
with pictures that I hope will grab your attention, go here
http://www.viragowrestling.com/ to visit our site.

J.P. Erickson told me that I could write columns that talk about the state of
the sport and the industry, wrestling lore or situations that I have found
myself in, and thoughts on other related topics. I'm going to continue with my
inaugural column on a subject that has been much on my mind lately: the use of
choking and joint-locking holds in the wrestling I teach and the videos that
our company makes. There's a lot to write about this subject, but in this
column, I'm going to talk about some of the mental aspects that become
involved. Just to set the stage, you should know that the videos Virago makes
and that I have always exclusively wrestled in, are what the business calls
"competitive non-topless." The industry includes a breathtaking variety of
styles to suit any man's fantasy, from catfighting to nude oil wrestling to
highly skillful wrestling matches featuring female bodybuilders or trained mat
wrestlers, and everything in between. Since I began studying BJJ and
"catchwrestling" (wrestling with an emphasis on brutal and agonizing
submission holds) at about the same time that I started my own company, the
Virago style has always included chokes, armbars, ankle locks, and other
"hard" submissions. Headlocks (neck cranks) and scissors holds, together with
pinning holds, are what industry videos typically feature, and what we steer
away from.

And so . . . I’m trying to remember the scariest things that ever happened to
me wrestling. I think it happened a couple of years back, when I was still
wrestling for the late Scott Carruthers. For those of you who don’t know about
Scott, he was a pioneer in our sport, an English gentleman whose personal
respectability and wholesomeness were combined with a forceful conviction that
women’s wrestling was inherently a good thing for women to do as well as a
thrilling thing for men to watch. He was a good man in an industry that has
had more than its share of scummy characters. He also taught me what he knew
of submission wrestling, which was very, very basic material as I later
learned, but he taught it to me and many another women with care and concern.
Anyway, Scott was fighting a losing battle with lymphatic cancer at the time I
am writing about and he died only a few months later, but we had a round robin
tournament/show scheduled, and rather than let us women and the fans down,
Scott opted to referee the tournament while running a fever of 104 degrees.

My opponent in one match that night was "Anja," a very aggressive, redheaded,
professional dominatrix, who really, really hated to lose. (Many dominatrixes
are quite good wrestlers, because they have a lot of attitude to begin with,
they are used to bearing and inflicting pain, and wrestling skills give them
another specialty to offer to certain clients.) I knew that I was better at
wrestling than Anja was, but she always gave me a good, hard fight and the
same was true of this bout. I don’t remember much about the match to tell you
the truth – the precise moves and holds I used are lost to my memory – but I
do know I finished the bout by catching Anja in a head scissors. Her head was
facing in the opposite direction from mine, and I couldn’t see her face, lost
as it was between my "straining thighs." As I squeezed and brought the
crushing pressure to bear, I couldn’t figure out why she was not submitting.
What I could not see and did not realize was that Anja's hands were trapped
underneath her body and that she could neither "tap out" nor verbally submit.

Generally speaking, catching situations like this is what the referee is for,
but Scott, who was less than fully alert that night due to his high fever and
general ill health, didn’t see Anja's distress. Later, my mother (who was in
the audience) told me that she sensed that the girl was in serious trouble,
but she doubted her own instincts and did not intervene. Feeling that
something was wrong myself, I released the hold on my own, and sure enough
Anja was in a panic, unable to breathe and feeling as though she had narrowly
escaped serious injury or even death. She was very possibly correct. And that
tough woman went back into the dressing room and cried.

I was shaken to the core. It was at that moment that I realized that no one in
the room that evening knew enough about the sport that we were promoting –
submission wrestling – to safely stage a tournament. Scott, although
well-meaning and sincere, was basically playing everything by ear when it came
to the submission style, and he knew next to nothing, compared to a real
expert, about wrestling and practical first aid for wrestlers. This
frightening event helped lead me to study my sport far more intensively by
seeking out experts to train with after Scott's death, and to be even more
mindful of wrestler safety than I already was.

I’m writing this essay because of a couple of situations that have recently
come about in my life.

The first, and most troubling, is that my company and I have come under fire
from some commentators who have an objection to our use of joint locks and
"chokes" in our wrestling matches; although they have no problem with the use
of standing takedowns (when most grappling injuries actually occur) or the
ever-popular neck scissors hold (a "blood choke" which utilizes the legs
instead of the arms to apply pressure; it has the same effect as a guillotine
choke performed with the arms, but is really more dangerous than the
guillotine because the legs, especially a woman's legs, are much stronger than
the arms . . . facts which are largely overlooked because leg scissors holds
are incredibly sexy to the consumers and go a long way toward the successful
sale of videos).

The other situation, which occurred recently and altered my own perception of
chokes, was my first actual choke-out. That is to say, I applied pressure to
an opponent's carotid artery until he fell unconscious. This was not done in a
private session, mind you, but rather at the BJJ academy where I train, and
was done under the watchful eye of Ralph Gracie (a third-degree black belt in
BJJ and indisputably one of the greatest living martial artists).

We were drilling a ground fighting move called "the clock," where the
aggressor (in this case, me) sprawls on top of her opponent's back and brings
her right hand under the throat, grabbing the opposite collar of her
opponent's gi. Her other hand then goes under her opponent's arm and grabs the
wrist so that the opponent cannot defend with that arm. The aggressor's hips
then come towards the head and her legs walk outward in – you guessed it – a
clockwise direction, and the twisting action on the gi collar completes the
choke. My opponent in this drill was a man who weighs 285 pounds (I weighed
145 pounds), and it was difficult for me to go very deep into his collar and
get a good grip on the heavy fabric, given the size of his neck. I was working
on this problem, with Ralph screaming at me all the while in his broken
English to "Get your f---king hips forward!" when I felt "J.D." (the
unfortunate test dummy) go limp underneath me. I felt his hand move, and
looked down to see if he was submitting by tapping the mat. What I saw instead
were J.D.'s eyes rolled back in his head, and his hand shaking. He wasn't
submitting. He was unconscious and going into convulsions. I immediately
stopped, which elicited a new round of abuse from my coach: "What da hell you
DOING?"

"Ralph, he's OUT," I replied, and let J.D. collapse onto the mat in a small
puddle of his own drool.

"J.D," Ralph said in clipped, impatient tones, "J.D., wake up. Helen has to
learn this."

"J.D., are you okay?" I asked, as the big man's eyes began to flutter open.

J.D. smiled and laughed: "Now I see why guys pay you $300 an hour! You're
awesome, Helen!"

"J.D., you're a wacko!" I answered back, and he laughed and got back into
position so that I could practice the move again. We continued to train as if
nothing had ever happened. That was the second situation that's been on my
mind.

The third thing which has recently . . . not altered, but explained my
convictions in a way that I have previously been unsuccessful in doing, is a
book I've been reading entitled "Protecting the Gift," by Gavin DeBecker, a
follow-up to his best-selling book, "The Gift of Fear."

DeBecker is a security consultant for the CIA, among other clients, and wrote
this fantastic book in an attempt to educate parents in practical ways of
keeping their children safe. (I am also a mother, and that precise subject is
not just theoretical for me.) One of the things he stresses is that we tend to
worry more when we are "uneducated" about reality, and that worry about
unrealistic dangers is itself a detriment to actual safety. He writes: "Worry
is not a precaution, it is the opposite because it delays and discourages
constructive action . . . What we choose to worry about, however bad, is
usually easier to look at than some other less palatable issue. For this
reason, a good exercise when worrying is to ask yourself: What am I choosing
not to see right now?"

When I worried about Anja dying from my head scissors, what I did not want to
admit to myself, what I was choosing not to see, was that my respected teacher
Scott had not been competent in the circumstances to assess her real danger,
and that I myself wasn't knowledgeable enough to know what real danger looked
like: with the result that I saw danger in everything; as did Anja, who to the
best of my knowledge never wrestled again. Unlike Anja, I did not allow my
worry to get the upper hand. Instead I educated myself to what the real, as
opposed to imagined, dangers of my beloved sport were. As a result, I found
myself growing and expanding in ways that I couldn't have even imagined
before.

Women in general often allow "uneducated" worries to stunt their emotional and
psychological growth, and this in turn affects their entire lives. It isn't a
matter of "fault" for this; we may be genetically programmed to envision
worst-case scenarios, in order better to ensure the continued flourishing of
our offspring and our species – but to worry needlessly harms us all. In
another part of "Protecting the Gift," DeBecker writes: "Thomas Lynch's father
was too busy worrying about danger to actually learn about it, and that kept
him from seeing his children as potential casualties. ‘ For my father,' Lynch
wrote, 'what we did and who we became were incidental to the tenuous fact of
our being.'"

It is my belief that growth necessarily implies some risk. For the women I
work with and me, growth is important. Could we make money just doing the same
old "bikini wrestling" videos that we've always done?

Of course we could. It's certainly a lot SAFER to simply roll around on top of
each other, perhaps topless – or even to wrestle competitively, but using only
the basic, limited set of maneuvers that have been standard in
female-wrestling videos up to this time – for twenty minutes (and I believe we
could do that as well and excitingly as anybody else out there!), than it is
to learn, really learn, a combative art. But in my opinion, we can't reach our
full potential that way.

There are those fans to whom the very fact of our existence (Lynch's "the
tenuous fact of our being") is enough – our being is more important than our
becoming. But we women have the desire to learn and grow and excel, and if the
arena happens to be in the field of bikini wrestling videos, so be it. When I
make a video I feel that I'm sharing my growth, and that of the women who work
with me, with men AND women who can appreciate and admire our strength and
skill...and even find that strength and skill (dare I say it...GASP!) sexy. It
is my aim to show women not only using the strength of their bodies, but (by
allowing them opportunities to educate themselves as to what their physical
limits are, and then to expand those limits over time), to show their souls
blossoming as well.

Web: http://www.viragowrestling.com/

Email: vonmott@hotmail.com