Bouncer Chonicles- Tony Robbins

Yes that Tony Robbins.

In the 90's I was struck by Tony Robbins positiveness and success oriented psychology.  I read a few of his books and wanted more.  He did a one day seminar in Lowell, Mass. and I had a really great experience there.  During a break, one of the staff recognized me and came up say hello.  He was the student of a Black Belt in the Boston area and had regularly been on Tony's staff when he was in New England.  He asked if I might be interested in working future seminars, knowing my martial arts background and I put the idea in the back of mind.

A year later I did a 4 day seminar with Tony in Worcester.  He is the master motivator.  I believe some of his techniques has rubbed off on me (I hope).  One of my greatest high's was doing the barefoot walk on hot coals!

A year after that I saw he was going to be in NYC for a few days so I packed up my bag and drove down.  I went to the staff meeting and was assigned as Tony Robbins bodyguard (me and one other guy) for the weekend.  A year after that I did personal security for him again at the Hartford civic center where I rubbed elbows with other celebs like Donald Trump, Robin Roberts and Barbara Walters.  I was Barbara Walters escort from green room to stage and back.  It was facinating to see the behind the scene action at the 10,000 person event.
At this point I was trying to kick off my own speaking business and eventually toured the country for a few years doing anti bully presentations and of course teaching karate.

I will cover more of my experiences with Tony in the next blog.

 

Conquering Inner Fears To Achieve Your Dreams

 by Mental Toughness Partners 

We all have inner fears and mental obstacles that limit our own ability to perform at our best. Conquering inner fears is a challenge we all face at one point or another. We all have experienced that inner voice doubting whether we have got what it takes to succeed at the highest level, or it is paying undue attention to the negative opinions of others. We are often our own greatest enemy when it comes to derailing our dreams and preventing them from becoming reality.

However, everyday, people smash those inner fears and achieve their dreams through resolve, determination and a sound plan.  Reproduced below is some useful practical advice on conquering inner fears and controlling your inner voice, first published on the Adidas Plan A project and authoured by contributor Marcus Leach.

Just as there can be no night without day, and no light without darkness, there can be no winning without losing and no success without failure. The two are intrinsically linked, every success we achieve we do so having played a game of calculated risk, knowing that the final outcome could be less than satisfactory.

Take any successful person, be it in sport, business, the entertainment industry or any field for that matter, and what comes to mind? The trophies they have won, the accolades they have collected, the smiles, the laughter, the moments of joy and happiness, the great successes they have achieved? Yet for all of that there are numerous, and often untold, tales of defeat, of lessons learned the hard way. But each and every one of them has achieved success knowing that the failures were a necessary part of the journey.

While failure is at once soul-destroying and demoralising, it is also instructive, empowering and entirely necessary for growth.

We all have desired outcomes, goals that we want to achieve in life, yet when it comes down to the nitty gritty, many of us are not prepared to endure the inevitable setbacks and disappointments that are an integral part of any success story. Nobody has ever reached the top, or near the top, of their game, their profession, their company without first having tasted defeat, often multiple times.

Yet we choose to focus on the end success, forgetting the months, weeks and years of dedication that goes in to moulding life’s champions.

Our fascination with other people’s success stories means that we are quick to forget there is no straight line to the top. When it comes to our own goals we find it all too easy to throw in the towel at the first sign of hardship. However, when we know that there will be failures along the way we can learn to adapt, and indeed the most successful people I have met over the years are all masters at adjusting in the face of defeat. For they know that it is not fatal, and instead they embrace the challenge and work out a way to keep moving towards their goals, they are masters at failing because they learn, develop and grow from every one of life’s experiences, good or bad.

Get back on your bike! Never let a fall or a failure keep you from your dreams.

Too many of us have become scared of failing; as children we cared not what others thought, had no concern for falling at the first hurdle, minds free from ‘what ifs’, just a pure, unadulterated desire to try, learn and ultimately strive to be the best we could at anything we turned our hands to. Slowly that desire has been diluted by other people’s opinions and limiting beliefs in our ability, to the extent where ‘dancing under the lights’ has become a distant dream that exists somewhere in the empty void on the edge of our comfort zone. Instead we choose not to even try in the first place, allowing our dreams and life to pass us by, paralysed by the fear of the outcome instead of learning to focus on the process.

It’s time to get comfortable facing negative results, the disappointments and defeats and take them for what they are, lessons in life that, if learned, can lead us to great success. We will fail, but we will rise once more, stronger, wiser and one step closer to achieving success. After all “he who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” Therefore it’s not so much a question of what do you want to accomplish in life, but are you prepared to take the necessary risks, and their inevitable consequences, required to get there?

Teamwork Makes The Dream Work!

Overcoming Obstacles- Big and Small

You think I only watch martial arts movies on netflix.

You know I exercise nearly every day and love martial arts, all kinds.

But there have been times when I stopped training

 

As a ten-year-old I had heard a little about martial arts from television.               

I went down to the local YMCA, watched a Judo class and became absolutely mesmerized.  The breakfalls, the throwing the incredible technique, magic to a ten year old.

 

I went home and showed my mother how to do breakfalls on the carpet.

 

Somehow I was never able to attend a class but always pictured my self in a uniform in the deadly oriental art.  Fortunately my first hands on experience came from my fifth grade teacher Mr. Pier.  He was a professional boxer who loved all sports and especially loved bringing the best out in our class.  Every season we played a different sport football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring with the exception on rainy days, when we boxed.  In the back of our classroom we had a speed bag, focus mitts and boxing gear.  All of us sparred often, sometimes boys versus girls and often together.  I learned that I had some boxing skills when one day I dropped a fellow student in a sparring match. The next day when he came to school he said his mother forbade him to box.  Wow, I thought, I must be something.  That was until I went with Mr. Pier to the community center and boxed some kids a year or two older than me and learned a lesson in humility.

     At age twelve, moving to a new town changed things.  New friends and schools put boxing aside and unfortunately without my mentor I soon lost sight of anything athletic. 

When I was sixteen years old I got into an argument and a fight with a buddy in my neighborhood.  The fight involved a girl and one of my neighborhood friends.  We yelled, screamed and pointed our fingers at each other and then out of the blue he whomped me good, giving me a big black eye, lots of remorse and a very broken spirit.  After he felt he had sufficiently shown me his point of view I limped home only to have to face my parents with my big black eye and lots of humiliation. 

 

They were supportive and loving although I knew I had failed to give much of a fight to defend myself (actually I put up no fight).  This low feeling stuck with me for months and months.  It wasn’t until a few months later I realized that this situation and experience gave me desire to change and put me on track for learning self-defense.

That fall after my incident I saw an ad for a martial arts demonstration and beginner classes.  I nervously went to the demonstration, saw these experts of the martial arts and was emotionally hooked.  This time I was involved for real, not just an excited observer.

 Here I was thrilled to be a student but I couldn’t do even two pushups but I had a desire that wouldn’t let me quit.  Now that I was officially a martial arts student I wanted a uniform so bad I couldn’t stand it.  The challenge, no one knew where to get one. I went to a newsstand and couldn’t believe my eyes.  Here was not only one karate magazine, but  two.  I scooped them both up and devoured them from cover to cover. I read those magazines so much I had almost memorized them word for word.   In the ads I found a uniform company.  I did my best to figure out the size chart and took a shot.  I ordered a size three and sent a money order.  When it came I realized I needed a size five. I had mistakedly ordered by height and not by weight.   It was a little tight but I beamed in my new karate suit.

We worked out in a social club hall where functions were held on weekends.  During class breaks we drank water out of a hose attached to the faucet in the sink and trained with very little heat.  Sometimes my instructor would even open the windows in winter just to make us work harder generating body heat.

  After being a student for three months I was put in charge of attendance and collecting dues.  I think my instructor just wanted to focus on teaching and did not care for the financial aspects and bill collecting.

The following summer, while fixing my car I pinched a nerve in my back and decided to take a break from classes.  The summer was flying by.  I was a senior in love with my high school sweetheart and hadn’t given a thought to martial arts.  One afternoon while shopping my, girlfriend and I bumped into my instructor in the local department store.  He was glad to see me and mentioned,  “When will you be back to class?”  A little guilty I replied “Tuesday” and there I was right back in the swing of things.

 

This was to be the first of a few times my martial arts was interrupted.

My First Boxing Coach

ROLLIE An Old Palooka Who Can Teach You A Thing Or Two

Published May 03. 2009

By Kenton Robinson Day Staff Writer 

New London
At 79, HE'S GOT A BAD RIGHT HIP, A BUM LEFT shoulder, and broken fingers on each hand have healed to point in a different direction.
"I had five nose operations," he says. "See this here?" He flattens his nose on his face. "I got no bone."

Still, on any given weekday afternoon, Rollie Pier, dressed in gray sweats, a white towel flung over his shoulder, can be found in the Bank Street gym of Team Strike Zone and Whaling City Boxing, teaching young fighters all that he knows about the sweet science.
"Rollie?" says Raymond "Coach Ray" Hodges Jr., who works with kids at the gym. "He's forgotten more than most people ever know: Life, boxing, you name it, man, the guy's a walking dictionary."
"I'm active in the gym," Pier says. "If I didn't have this bad hip, I'd still spar with guys, but I don't because I get vertigo now ... dizziness. Everybody says it's boxing related. Who knows?"
And so the world finds Rollie Pier: five foot six ("I shrunk an inch and a half"), faded blue eyes, dull copper hair cropped like a monk's, a man in the twilight years of a fighting life.

In his day, he fought 102 times, including amateur, semi-pro and pro. He was a welterweight, weighing 150 pounds, and when asked about his record, he says, "I lost 62 fights. I'm not braggin'. I'm tellin' you the truth. And I won - this is not totally accurate - 38 or 39, but I would generally go the three or four rounds, just about make it, you know?"
He sums up his boxing career this way: "I was a phenom that never phenomenated. I was a late bloomer that never bloomed. But I could get in the ring and fake it, and I looked pretty good. People would say, 'That guy knows how to fight.' But I was never great. I was a tomato can or a palooka.
"See, in the vernacular of boxing," he explains, "you've got your champions, you've got your contenders and then, after that, you've got your good opponents, and then you've got opponents, and then you go down to ... palooka. A palooka's a little ahead of a tomato can. I'd say I was a palooka."
Stuff to chew on

It's a Saturday night in the New London High School gym. There's a red, white and blue boxing ring set up in the middle of the floor, surrounded by some 300 people in the bleachers and on folding chairs. It's "The Whaling City Classic," a fundraiser for Heavy Hitters USA, a nonprofit group that teaches kids how to box.

Pier arrives, one of his students, Bethany Geary, in tow. That's right, Pier has been teaching a girl - several young women, actually - to box.
He admits he didn't want to at first.
"I guess it was machismo in boxing. I don't know," he says. "But then we had several girls ... that I taught and they were very good, I mean, they listened."
And that, he says, is what made him change his mind.

"I said, 'All right, c'mon,' gripin' to myself. But the attention span was there. And they'd come back and do me favors. Like now ... I've got type two diabetes and I get a weak spell occasionally, and they bring me stuff to chew on."

Most recently, he's coached three women: Geary, of Westerly, Marsha Agripino, of Groton, and Kelsey Kaiser, of Waterford.
Unfortunately, no women are fighting tonight, he says. It's hard for them to get a fight.
"Bethany's had one fight," Pier says. "She lost. And the other girl already had 10 fights. There's no one else to fight. You can't find 'em. If you go to New York, you can."
But Pier can't talk for long; here, he's a celebrity. Everyone in the gym seems to know him, and there's a constant stream of people coming up to him, shaking his hand, throwing their arms around his shoulders.

Most of those fighting tonight are 17 and 18 or young men in their early 20s. They each fight three rounds of three minutes each, if they can go that long.
Three minutes can seem like forever. In most of the fights, both boxers start out strong, but by the middle of the second round, they clutch and lean into each other.
"I told you, that's how it is," Pier says. "It's a different kind of tiredness, you understand? You've got to be in real good shape to go three rounds. People say, 'Ah, I could do it.' You're waiting in the dressing room. The dressing room's crowded. You learn the guy you're gonna fight's over there. He's lookin' at you. Your hands are being taped. OK, you're next. And that takes a lot out of you. It's enough to destroy guys."
And then, he says, "you've got to fight somebody, and you're not mad at him."
Roberto Vega, another one of Pier's students, gets into the ring, and the crowd lights up. Geary yells, "Don't wait! Don't wait, Roberto," and "Flurries! Flurries!"
Vega and his opponent fight fiercely, with Vega throwing flurries of punches to his opponent's head. Vega wins.
"That was good," Pier says. "They box nice. You won't see a better fight than that tonight."

Kicked in the head
Born Oct. 16, 1929, Roland Pier-Federici grew up on the streets of New London. But he went out into the world and had some adventures before he came home to stay.
You might say his boxing career began the night he got pistol whipped in Mississippi. Not that he hadn't dabbled in boxing before. But that drubbing, he admits today, inspired him to do more than dabble.
"I thought I was going to die," he says. "They kicked me in the head."
Now, as he sits in his basement, surrounded by hundreds of videotapes of boxing matches, he explains, "this is way back in the '50s now, when Yankees weren't too well appreciated."
He and a bunch of other college kids from New London were drinking in a dive in Meridian, Miss., when, "unfortunately, my friends went and asked some girls to dance."
Their boyfriends were not amused.
"They came out and all of a sudden a fight ensued. Guy come out with a gun, started shootin', shot my friend, Louie Casimono, and we all ran different directions. And to make a long story short, the sheriff was the guy that shot my friend, but he survived - leg wounds, back wounds - and I got pistol whipped and the other guys got beat up."

It took Pier a while to get through college.
"I went to six colleges," he says. "I traveled all over. It wasn't uncommon then for guys to go from college to college ... I ended up going for 10 years."
He played football, basketball (even though he admits he was a terrible basketball player), baseball and he boxed. He got a degree in education.

And came home to New England and got a job in Ledyard, where - for 28 years - he taught fifth grade. And that's when he legally shortened his name.
"I did it for convenience purposes," he says. "It was misspelled too much."

Days he would spend in a classroom, teaching the three Rs; night's he'd spend in a gym in Hartford, honing his left hook.
Sometimes, though, his nights in the ring were all too obvious the day after.
"I'd come back to class with black eyes," he says. "The kids, 'What happened?' The principal would go, 'Ah, jeez, this is not what we want in a teacher.'"

A dream denied
Folks with long memories will remember that Pier was also the guy behind the Vagabonds, better known as the Vags, New London's own semi-pro baseball team.
The team played from the '60s all the way through 1986, he says. "And we had a lot of players that could have played pro ball."

But it is boxing that is Rollie Pier's greatest love.
He says he loves the loneliness, the inescapable fact that you're on your own.
"Football is vicious, I know," he says. "Those big guys could kill ya. But you've got teammates. You go out, defense, offense. Boxing, there's no timeouts, nothing. A guy's startin' to get to you, you've got to cover up, and you're getting hurt, and you can't quit."
And he misses the old gyms.
"There used to be old-time fight arenas, with sawdust on the floor, drunks laying there, and you're steppin' over them to go to the ring," he says. "Honest to God."
Pier rubbed shoulders with everyone from Willie Pep to Rocky Graziano, and his dream was to fight just once in Madison Square Garden.

"That would have been it for me," he says. "I would have been the happiest guy in the world. Win, lose or draw, I didn't care. As long as I could come up the ramp."
It was a dream that, at the age of 38, he came within a death of achieving.
"I used to go to the gym in New York called New Garden Gym right by Penn Station, and I got to know this guy Joe Garfield good," Pier begins. "I said, 'Joe, I've been coming here now, and you could do me a great favor: Just get me one four-round fight at the Garden. That's my ambition: one four-round fight.'
"And he says, 'Ah, you don't want it. You're old; you're gonna get killed.' I said, 'Nah, I'll be all right.'"
Garfield said if he could hold his own sparring with a pro, he might get him a fight. And Pier sparred, barely getting through the four rounds.
Finally, Garfield called and said, "OK, you got the fight."
Pier was ecstatic. He had two months to train, and he worked himself hard to get in shape, never telling anyone but his wife, Yvette, that he had a fight coming up in the Garden.
He was training in his basement, jumping rope, when the phone rang.
"And I picked it up, and they said, 'Rollie? Rollie Pier?' And I said, 'Yeah?' 'Joe Garfield died.' 'What?' And I said, 'What about the fight?' And the guy said, 'I don't know about the fight.'"
Nobody, it turned out, would honor the promise of a dead man.

Yankee doodle
As it happened, Pier's biggest fight came a couple of years later, before a crowd of 10,000 at a ring in London. It may be the only time Yvette saw him fight.
"She went with me to the fights," he says. "But if I was fighting, she only went to one out of 102. She didn't like it."
"Yeah, I don't deal well with that," says Yvette Pier. "It's not my cup of tea. I go with him to some of the fights, like I go to the football games with him, but if he's fighting, I don't want to be there.
"I don't hate boxing," she insists. "I just don't like it, just like he wouldn't like knitting."
He and Yvette were on vacation in London, and while she went shopping he would train at the Thomas à Beckett gym. It was there someone approached him and asked him if he could fill in on a fight.
"Now I was like 40 something, but in good shape, looked 30," Pier says. "I said, 'OK, I'll do it.' I wanted to just do it. Like I didn't fight at the Garden, I wanted this ... I remember taping my hands. You sit in a chair. You know how they do. Tape your hands. And they go, 'OK, Yank, you're on,' and I come out of the runway there, I'm telling ya. And they played 'Yankee Doodle Dandy,' you know that song?"
Pier breaks into song, "I'm a Yankee doodle dandy... Wow, I can't tell ya how I felt. It didn't wear off for weeks."
The guy he fought was P.J. Clarke. Pier went the whole four rounds with him and lost.
"He was an English fighter," Pier recalls. "They jab, jab, move, jab, throw rights. He could box real nice."
Surrounded by his stacks of videotapes, Rollie Pier will be the first to tell you that he'd rather watch one of his hundreds of fight tapes than anything that's on the tube today.
"I live in the past mostly," he says. "It's a bad thing. But I come from another era. Up in the gym they play all hip-hop and music where they swear. I can't take it. Turn that off! I turn it down. I can't get used to that. I can't."
And he doesn't like the way some dress.
"Guys coming in, they come in with their pants down, way down, and their hats sideways. No. You've got to adhere to the rules of the gym. To me, it's a shrine."

K.ROBINSON@THEDAY.COM
               

The ANTI Bully

Many people know my story.  Bullied and beat up as a teen turned me to martial arts.  Often times over the years I have been invited to many classrooms to talk about our martial arts program.

I always brought my “story” about being bullied and beat up and how that experience motivated me to learn martial arts and then help others avoid this terrible experience if at all possible.  The trauma I suffered from being beaten up still lingers in my soul and the anguish comes right back when I tell the story of being beaten up.

Then one day my life changed again when the news flashed the absolutely horrible story of the Columbine shooting in Colorado.  It hit me right in the heart.  Not only for the victims that were shot, their friends and families,  but to the young men that had been harassed for years and thought they had no outlet for their frustration, except for getting some guns and shooting up a school.

I made a decision.  I was going to reach more kids, more classrooms, and more schools and let then turn their hate to hope.  It was time.

See more on my anti bully website

mikebogdanski.com