Who pretends to hate successful people? (and why I seldom ask Ronda for anything)

Credit where credit is due, I owe this epiphany to two people — comedian Kevin Hart, whose autobiography, I can’t make this up, I highly recommend, and two-time judo Olympian, Pat Burris.

I was a teenager and had just won the U.S. Open. It was the second time I had made it to the finals and my first gold medal at an international event. I’d also won the junior nationals, senior nationals and collegiate nationals that same year. It was a good year.

Pat said to me,

“About now, people you have never met are going to start trying to pick fights with you and you are going to have to learn to ignore them.”

I thought he was nuts. Why would someone I didn’t know want to start trouble with me? That didn’t make sense. Still, I listened to Pat because he was OLD — like, he would be 30 in a few years so he obviously knew stuff.

He told me that random guys would get in his face and try to start shit with him (not wise, if you know Pat). He eventually realized that people were doing it to get attention. He explained it to me like this,

“If you are on the podium, on the Olympic team, the best player in the country, people at tournaments are looking at YOU. So, anyone who is around you gets attention. Random Joe from East Nowhere Dojo starts a fight with you and you kick his ass and people don’t know who that guy is but they think he must be somebody because the…