Photograph by Paul Myers

Torch Bearer

Saratogan's leg of run will take the Olympic flame through Sausalito on the way to Salt Lake City

By Oakley Brooks
Photographs by Paul Myers

In her antique shop in Saratoga's Village, the place where Ann Fitzsimmons has spent most of the last 13 years, a group of grandfather clocks stood patiently near her cashier's counter as she scrolled backward through the last half-century of her husband's life. She recounted what had held the years together, as the clock's steady rhythm kept time in the background.

There was family, and there was judo.

She and Joe raised five athletic children, sending them to Sacred Heart Elementary School, driving them to swim meets all over the Bay Area, and hosting pool parties at their sprawling house on a lemon ranch on Saratoga Avenue. The two ran a private orthopedic practice in San Jose until 1985, Ann reading the X-rays and Joe tweaking the bones and performing surgery.

When there was a judo tournament, a local youth competition in Santa Clara, or a world class tournament in Mexico City, regardless of whether or not the Fitzsimmons kids were in it, Joe went. He sat at the mat's edge and when noses bled he pinched them, and when shoulders separated, he carted off competitors to a hospital. He made himself an institution as judo's most ubiquitous mat-side medical aide. "Nothing can ever happen to your husband--he's too important," Helen Kimura, the wife of the late northern California judo legend Mits Kamura, once told Ann Fitzsimmons.

Not much has come between Joe, 77, and judo, except what time has done to his knees and hip. He's a sixth degree black belt, but he doesn't bend quite as well as he used to. (Though it didn't stop him from traveling to Las Vegas last April to assist at a major national tournament.)


Photograph by Paul Myers

Joe Fitzsimmons dons the gloves he'll wear when he carries the Olympic torch. The gloves are part of the uniform for torchbearers, which includes a hat, windbreaker, T-shirt and pants.




But something has happened to Joe recently. Several weeks ago, officials with the Salt Lake City Olympic Organizing Committee told him they wanted him to run with the Olympic flame during its circuitous route from Athens, Greece, to Salt Lake City for this winter's games. He balked at first, telling his children--who'd suggested him for torchbearing duties without his knowing--that he didn't deserve the honor. They twisted his arm, and he agreed to do it: "Mostly for the kids," he says.

He'll rise before dawn on Jan. 19, don a white sweatsuit and hat and quietly carry the flame two-tenths of a mile through the streets of Sausalito. A rare, indulgent moment of glory for a man who, dutifully and voluntarily cared for 40 years worth of athletes and still bows to greet a visitor of any age.

"I would have been surprised if they hadn't picked him," Ann says, matter-of-factly.

Maureen Fitzsimmons, Joe's youngest child, put him on the SLOOC's radar as a potential torchbearer. That was after a man carrying the flame ran across her television screen during a Chevrolet commercial this fall. She entered Joe in Chevy's lottery contest, Coca-Cola's similar competition and the SLOOC's merit-based selection process. Maureen's short essay about Joe led to his selection from more than 210,000 entries. He'll be one of about 200 runners as the torch makes its way through the Bay Area on Jan. 19.

It fit that one of his kids secured a spot for Joe in the torch run; they led him to discover judo in the first place in the early 1960s.


Photograph by Paul Myers

Although Joe Fitzsimmons was usually mat-side at judo competitions, he did participate in the judo masters tournament in Minneapolis in 1981. Here, he's photographed with Jess Terazan (left) and Jim Jacobs (center). Fitzsimmons placed third.




Santa Clara Judo Club

He wanted them to be able to defend themselves. And so when the Fitzsimmonses' oldest child, Pat, was 7 years old, Joe began taking him to the Santa Clara Judo Club, near the university.

As Pat, and later, other Fitzsimmons kids, practiced in the dojo, Joe watched some and slipped outside for cigarettes. He was never much of an athlete growing up in Ohio. But Ann told him he should get more involved at the gym.

He started doing a few pushups on the side. And one day, he asked an instructor if he could go a round with one of the club's brown belts. Joe remembers being thrown four times onto his back that day by the accomplished judoka.

"It was beautiful," he says. "I'm thinking 'How did he do that?'"

As Joe began working out a couple of times a week, leaders of the growing Northern California judo community, called the Hokka, asked him if he might assist at competitions as a doctor.

He avoided competing himself--a third-place finish at an Indianapolis Master's event in 1981 would be his only tournament--but without much hesitation he answered the Hokka's call and was soon pulling his five kids with him to local weekend tourneys.

"We didn't have a doctor on board and we took advantage of his good nature," says Saratogan Yosh Uchida, the granddaddy of local judo, whose bust sits outside San Jose's Compaq Center.

Fitzsimmons' continued presence gave some security to athletes, and he coached the judo community on how to avoid injury. Over the years, he recommended that junior athletes be prohibited from using an arm wrenching technique to win a bout, and he pushed for the outlaw of a certain throwing style among juniors and less-experienced judokas that exposed opponents' necks to an unusual risk of injury.

Fitzsimmons also led an extensive injury study of 90 tournaments in California and across the U.S. from 1969 through 1973 that gave judo instructors insight into why certain injuries were occurring.

Fitzsimmons' dozen or so papers also lent some legitimacy to a sport that often had to defend itself in the world of mainstream athletics.

He says he drew some frowns from his South Bay medical colleagues about aligning with judo. But his studies and experience showed the sport wasn't as violent as football and judokas were less injury prone than basketball or soccer players.

"[Fitzsimmons and other doctors] came up with an answer when people questioned it," Uchida says. "People who considered it very dangerous, they could say, 'Well, it's not.'"

Fitzsimmons never received a penny for his work with judo, though he says several of his black belt degrees honored him for his time.

Meanwhile, his sphere of travel grew bigger. He went both as the official doctor for larger and larger tournaments and as the U.S. Judo Team's medical supervisor on overseas trips.

He remembers the places but not the years.

Settling into the back room of the Fitzsimmonses' antique shop not long ago, wearing his beloved U.S. Judo sweat jacket, Joe's eyes bounced around an invisible map.

He flew to Germany, Paris for the European Championships, Beijing for the Pacific Rim tourney, Moscow for two Goodwill Games, and made a recent trip to the Republic of Georgia. Then there was one to the state of Georgia for the Olympics in 1996, after he nearly gave up on participating in the games because of all the politics involved in an appointment.

At each stop, Fitzsimmons ran a simple question through his head when a crowd hushed and he looked over a competitor: Can you defend yourself? Judo's tight rules--recently doctors have been given just a minute to determine an injured judoka's future--and hardened competitors challenged his judgement.

"There's a lot to know out there," says Jim Pennington, a local referee. "What would take a little guy out isn't necessarily something that would take an adult out. Sometimes you check a dislocated finger, and you pull on it and see that the blood's flowing and carry on.

"Joe has a pretty good sense on how to advise."

An athlete can win a three- to five-minute judo bout four different ways: by throwing their opponent on their backs, by pinning them for 25 seconds, by snapping a ligament in the opponent's extended arm with a wrench of the elbow, and by putting them to sleep with a neck hold that slows the heartbeat.

Occasionally, on a throw, the thrown judoka will graze a temple or sustain a concussion. That leaves Fitzsimmons with the toughest decision--is the injured person thinking straight?

Dazed athletes have at times talked Fitzsimmons out of pulling them from a bout, though it always leaves him with a sinking feeling. At one tourney in St. Louis, a top-shelf South Bay competitor named Paul Maryuma convinced Fitzsimmons to let him continue, although Maryuma couldn't readily recall the doctor's name. Maryuma went on to win the tournament.

At another tourney in Los Angeles, Fitzsimmons went onto the mat to help a dazed judoka just 30 seconds from the end of his bout. The young man told the doctor he had ridden a bus out from Ohio for the competition and asked Fitzsimmons to let him finish what he had started. The doctor hadn't yet returned to his seat when the Midwesterner was hoisted, thrown and had his shoulder torn.

"You never know completely," he says.


Photograph by Paul Myers

Fitzsimmons works in the family business, the Corinthian Corners Antique Shop.




Judo and Family Life

In her flower shop recently, along Big Basin Way, Kookie Fitzsimmons easily called up the well-worn memory of her father striding out to an injured athlete on the judo mat, the way children of firefighters might recall a parent jumping on a blaring rig.

"It was just, There goes Dad,'" says Kookie, 43, the middle child.

But Maureen Fitzsimmons says she and her siblings often tuned out the competitions going on around them as they roughhoused their way through a Saturday.

"The moment of a judo match, it's sober," she says. "As a kid, you don't want to be serious. And they want you to be."

Most had only a passing interest in the sport; the daughters, Kookie, Kathy and Maureen, moved on to other activities early on, and Michael, Kookie's older brother, practiced judo for a while before heading to water polo. Only Pat, now 46, remained serious with his training, eventually starring for UC-Berkeley's team and earning himself a spot in the World University Games.

But all of the Fitzsimmonses, competitive or not, remained a part of the judo community in the Bay Area. They spent countless afternoons at the Santa Clara judo club. And the family would host judo social events at the Saratoga Avenue house.

"We grew up with other children connected with judo," Maureen Fitzsimmons says. "The dojo was where you did your homework."

One of the family's summer journeys grew out of Pat and Joe's participation at the 1969 junior national tournament in Detroit.

The Fitzsimmonses decided to order a car from Chrysler and then flew to Detroit en masse. When Pat finished the competition, the seven Fitzsimmonses packed into the wagon--fresh off the Auburn Hills assembly line--and headed north into Canada. They made their way through Quebec, down into New England and stopped off in New York City and Washington, D.C.

They would eventually head, without Joe, down the Eastern seaboard and through the South to northern Mexico ("I remember hand-blown glass," Kookie says), New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns and to a final night at a roach-infested motel in Arizona. "I drove 15 hours to get home the next day," Ann recalls.

But on the day Joe flew out of the capitol to get back to the orthopedic practice in San Jose, Neil Armstrong climbed out of the lunar lander and walked on the moon. Joe wasn't with the family when Armstrong took his stroll on national television. But Kookie remembers her father telling them, "Find a TV and watch it. This is important." And they did find a TV in a plaza somewhere, Kookie says, and they watched Armstrong.

This Saturday morning, all five of the Fitzsimmons children will gather again, in Sausalito, to watch their father. Each has acquired a blue parka with a "Salt Lake City 2002" logo on it, and they plan to keep the VCRs rolling through the day in case any local television stations happen to pick up the run. Joe says he'll take his time, and cover the distance in a fast walk.

In the brief moment when he has the torch, the Fitzsimmonses will be able to look out again and say, "There goes Dad." And all of them, Joe included, will understand a little more deeply what all those walks onto the judo mat meant.

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