A Rocky road to victory | Ep 7

Arjun: 00:00:00

Now, if you are a basketball fan, you probably remember this very moment because Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles and was fouled during the play.

Now, no one would have disrespected him or thought anything less of him if he had just gone off to the locker room to start his X rays and maybe even get to the hospital to do the emergency surgery to repair that torn Achilles so that he could start his rehab right away, which is very common in the NBA. They don't waste any time, or any professional sport for that matter. But no, that's not what he did.

The man himself, who embodies the exact essence and spirit of relentlessness, said, I'm going to shoot my free throws with the torn Achilles. He went out there, he made both free throws and actually started his comeback in that moment. He didn't wait. He didn't even think about it.

The comeback actually started right then. And for those of us that lose, for those of us that experience massive setbacks, you've got a moment to grieve it.

And depending on how evolved you are in your thinking or your thought process, with these types of setbacks and losses, you can do this very quickly, or you can spend a lot of time, but grieve it and grieve it quickly and immediately answer the question, what is next? Is this going to define me or is there more? Am I not done? Is there unfinished business going back to my loss?

And I remember this exact moment when my hand was raised, my head dropped, and I looked down and realized in that single moment, so abruptly, that the rug had been pulled out from underneath me, just like in Rocky 3 or the Rocky 3 moment that you may have experienced. And it was all over.

The hours of preparation, all the dedication, all the money I spent to get to that point, the long flight and everything undone in two minutes so quickly. And it's over with. It's that fast. And you have to move on because somebody else is coming into the ring.

There's not even time to talk about it or grieve it.

But the first person that embraced me after I walked off the stage in the center ring was my mother, who has been beside me and took me to my very first taekwondo lesson.

When I was bullied as a kid and I was eight years old, she dropped me off in that class, and she had been with me for every single tournament of my professional and even young career. But the look of disappointment I saw in my mother's eyes was the worst thing I had ever seen. She took my losses worse than I ever did.

And this particular loss was. Was no exception to that. But I gave her a hug and I consoled her and told her, mom, it's okay. I'll be all right. And she was crying.

She says, no, this is not okay. You were cheated.

And whether or not she meant that she might have just been my mom trying to make me feel better, the one thing I remembered and took away in that moment was that I never wanted to see that kind of disappointment in my mother ever again. That I never wanted to feel like that myself ever again, to not have my hand raised.

And from that moment on, I was going to be consumed every day for the next two years by those feelings and making it right. So I left Ottawa, Canada, and went home.

I wanted to take some time and break away from Taekwondo and resume some kind of a social life, because when you're training for these things, you pretty much go underground. You are off the radar. There's no dating. You barely get to see your friends. You hardly get to see any family if you have a spouse, which I didn't.

And I was fortunate at that time. You're pretty much the worst husband on the planet.

And so I wanted to actually get back to things that felt a little bit more natural and almost took my mind off Taekwondo. But it wasn't very long before some of those questions started to enter my head.

And every night I was going to bed, remembering that feeling of the other guy's hand being raised and my head dropping, that look in my mother's eyes, how I felt afterwards, how I just wanted to go home, but I had to stay there for another five days until this tournament completed and. And stick around and be happy for others, which I was, because I was there representing my country, and that comes before anything.

got lucky that first time in: 2007

He was never really that good, or he got lucky, or it's because of who he's related to, or maybe it's the school that he trains at. Some of that was crossing through my mind. And it's totally natural that it would.

It would be natural for you in one of these Rocky 3 moments that you have. And in Rocky 3, that actually did happen. Rocky went through this dark moment. He kind of retired from boxing.

He didn't want anything to do with anyone until Somebody came back to him and said, no, you have unfinished business. And it was the most unlikely of people. It was his biggest adversary. It was Apollo who came to him and said, I see something different in you.

I know you had it when you beat me, and I think you can do this again, but you can do it better now. It took a little bit more convincing.

There was a lot of upstream swimming or uphill climbing, but eventually he put himself back together again with an even better team. And we all know how that film ended. So I decided a few months in, because there was this very strong calling.

Now, I am a man who believes in God, I believe in the universe, and I believe that the universe sometimes talks to you and other times it shouts at you. And if you don't listen, it's a massive, massive sin. You do yourself a huge disservice. Years before, I had competed in any World championships.

My best friend, who I'd gone to visit in Italy, we took a trip from Turin to Rome. And at that time, the Gladiator had just come out, and the Gladiator won Best Picture. But it was on everyone's minds. Incredible film.

Everyone who knows it loves it. And if you don't love it, there's something wrong with you. So make sure you go see it so I can make yet another film reference.

But we were at the Colosseum in Rome and the two of us were sitting there on a total college budget because we were sleeping on trains and in hostels and eating McDonald's every day. But it was one of the greatest trips of my life. And we both sat there and we were looking at the Coliseum outside while drinking some water.

It was really hot. And we said one day, when we have money and we have families, we're going to come back here, right?

When we're older and we're grown up and we got our wives and our kids, we're going to come back here and we can do Rome, right? We agreed. We made a pact. Two years later, this best friend of mine had sadly committed suicide and I lost him.

I still think about him every single day. But I always knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to keep this promise and go back to Rome for the both of us.

And a few months after I got back from Canada, they announced that the next World Championships were actually being moved. They were supposed to take place in Sardinia, Italy, but they were going to be moved to Rome.

And there was a very, very strong calling that I felt in that moment. In fact, I had a dream that Night. And it was very, very powerful, where I heard the words whispered to me by my friends, meet me at the Coliseum.

And so I decided at that moment, without a shadow of a doubt, I was going to give everything. Because this loss that I just came back from was either going to define me, or I was going to set the record straight.

But there was only one way to find out. I was going to burn the boats.

I was going to meet this new moment, an even bigger moment, quite honestly, because of all the doubts and all the questions that were either going to be answered or confirmed in a negative way. But this opportunity, as big as it was going to be, was my chance to set it all straight, to either prove everyone wrong or prove them right.

But there was only one way to find out. So we're going to have to go all in. We're going to train even harder. We kept the same team, but I added one different person.

And that was a mindset coach, my current coach that I still work with because he was now part of my professional team, and he was paramount in all of this. But outside of that, we didn't change much. So we worked hard. We gave it our all. I didn't leave anything the chance.

And I remember to this day, so it's announced that it's going to be in Rome.

And I decide in that moment, as well as the following day after, I have that vivid dream of my friend Ronnie and his voice telling me to meet him at the Coliseum. And I decided I'm going to go all in on this. I also know that this is going to be the last one.

I'm not going to do another World Championships after this. And the reason I decided is because you give or expend so much energy and output, and it comes at the expense of something else.

And in my case, it was my personal life. Like, you can't have a personal life. Like, you don't see your friends, you certainly can't date.

You're not going to be around other people when you go through this. So I wanted to leave space in my life at that time and at that age to be able to actually have that if it was going to happen, but allow for it.

So I knew this was gonna be the final one, and I would just give it my all. Win, lose, or draw, no matter what happens, this is going to be it for me, the final World Championships.

And I felt that the story, even before it became a story, was already coming into focus so beautifully because it was gonna be in Rome, because I'd get to keep the promise to my friend.

Because I already had the ingrained and etched memory or thought of my mother and her disappointment that was already burned into my heart of how upset she was that I had lost and how upset and disappointed and low I felt in that brief moment of my hand not being raised and looking down. I still can see the mat where my eyes dropped to as my head dropped in disappointment in myself.

And at that moment that I never, ever wanted to feel like that again. And meeting this moment was pure LFG energy.

I knew that going into this, I'm going to have to meet this thing head on, that it's going to be the biggest moment that I would ever face athletically and personally. There was so much more to this than just competing.

This was going to forever tell me that I can erase or squash doubts or that I can disprove people or change the narrative. I could rewrite my own story and that I could finish my own story on my terms, which is a dream ending for an athlete.

To be able to call out your own final event and not be forced out because of an injury or other circumstances or resources, whatever it might be, to be able to say that this is it, I'm going to go all in on it, win, lose or draw, and I have the opportunity for it to end beautifully. I couldn't have scripted a better run up. So this was how I was putting myself back together again.

My Rocky 3 moment, right, of experiencing the disappointment, going through the doubts, then making a decision and then committing. And I want to hear from you guys, when did you have that moment after your disappointment? How did you commit? How did you refocus?

How did you move forward? So the training was an absolute adventure and I'm going to share all of that, including how this incredible story ends in Rome in Part three.