No holding back
Six years after losing his eyesight to a bullet, William Vandry is a big winner in Brazilian jiu-jitsu
By David Stegon
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
July 17, 2003
Your brain quickly scans every “Karate Kid” movie, professional wrestling match and combat video game you’ve ever seen, but it doesn’t matter, because William Vandry can already see your next move, even though he can’t quite see you. Vandry has already choked, slammed, tossed, pulled and thrown you around his Northwest Austin studio, Vandry Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and you realize it would be easier to walk out of Fort Knox with a backpack full of gold bars than it is to actually hurt him. You’re dripping sweat, your jiu-jitsu uniform, called a gi, is in shambles and you think you are losing feeling in your shoulder. So Vandry shakes your hand once again to start a match and, in an act of desperation, you dive for the 6-foot, 220-pound Pan-American champion’s throat and try to choke him. Your forearm is on his neck and – for a brief second – you think you actually have him right where you want him.
Think again.
“Move your arm a little to the left,” Vandry says. “Good. Now try to get more leverage. That’s it. Now stand up more.” You press all of your weight against his Adam’s apple. “Oh wow. Is that it?” The next few seconds become a blur. All you remember is Vandry grabbing the collar of your gi, yanking your leg and rolling you into a ball. He’s taken total control of your body and as you struggle to stop him, it’s easy to forget that he is blind, or that a bullet once traveled through his brain. But then again, that’s how he wants it. “I’ll decline interviews because people want to portray me as some poor blind guy. I hate that,” Vandry, 36, said. “I’ve never felt sorry for myself, so why should anyone else?” As Vandry releases you from the hold on your leg, it’s you who needs a crutch. Or maybe a wheelchair. Vandry, though, looks relaxed, as if he has been lounging by a pool. “You know,” Vandry says, pulling on his black belt, “they only give these things to people who know what they are doing.”
In the beginning
William Vandry became attracted to Brazilian jiu-jitsu watching Royce Gracie, one of the famous fighting Gracie brothers, compete in the first Ultimate Fighting Championships on pay-per-view television in 1993. "As soon as I saw (Royce), I thought to myself, `I have to learn that,’ " Vandry said. He began studying in 1995 when Carlos Machado, a cousin of the Gracies, taught a seminar in Austin. Machado moved to Dallas that month to open a gym, and Vandry became one of his first students. “From the beginning, William was very intense,” Machado said. “It was becoming his love.” Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a grappling art based on using leverage to overwhelm strength without much kicking or punching, as in karate or tae kwon do. There are some take-downs and self-defense techniques, but the focus is to use submissions or chokes to win a match. The main fighting position is referred to as the guard, where a fighter lays on his or her back with legs spread apart, putting the fighter in the best position to defend or attack.
Vandry grew up in a military family. His father was a command sergeant major in the Army. He lived around the world, including Germany and Panama, before his dad was sent to Fort Hood in Killeen. Vandry enjoyed martial arts growing up and was inspired by old Bruce Lee movies. When he met Machado, he already was a black belt in karate and kung fu. He had also studied Western boxing and muay thai. Vandry trained with Machado once a week and also taught classes at the Killeen Community Center. He had achieved blue belt status in jiu-jitsu before he was almost killed in an argument outside a nightclub. The shooting left Vandry legally blind, but he did not let his disability end his life. Six years after being shot, Vandry won a gold medal at the Pan American games in California. He fights on a world-class level and is one of the leaders in teaching women and children the art of jiu-jitsu, but all of that almost never happened when his life was drastically changed one night.
Life suddenly altered
Vandry owned Dreamstreet, a topless club in Harker Heights, outside of Killeen, about 80 miles north of Austin. Around midnight on April 22, 1997, Vandry was shot after an argument between Melvin Robinson III – a soldier at nearby Fort Hood – and one of Vandry’s employees. According to Vandry and reports at the time in the Killeen Daily Herald, Robinson tried to sneak into a dancer’s changing room, and a bouncer – who also was one of Vandry’s jiu-jitsu students – escorted him from the club. Robinson returned an hour later with a pistol and shot Vandry outside the front door of the club. “He came back looking for the floorman and I went up to talk with him,” Vandry said. “I figured if he wanted to fight, I would do some jiu-jitsu thing to him and it would be over . . . I never saw a flash or the bullet or anything like that. Next thing I know, I’m strapped to a bed.” The .25-caliber bullet entered Vandry’s head near his left temple and damaged the occipital lobes of Vandry’s brain before exiting through the lower right part of his head. He has two small dime-sized indentations at both points. Robinson, 21, was arrested and turned over to military authorities. He pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon and was convicted by general court-martial of attempted unpremeditated murder. He was sentenced to seven years at Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas and was released last December, prison officials said.
“It doesn’t bug me that he got off easy,” Vandry said. “We wanted him to get life, but that didn’t happen. I can’t worry about it. All I know is that he’ll be a young man when he gets out and I have a life sentence.” Vandry wasn’t able to leave his house for eight months after the shooting, and it was more than a year until he could return to the jiu-jitsu mat. Machado drove every day from Dallas to the hospital in Temple to see Vandry and later visited him at his house. “I knew William needed some stability in his life,” Machado said. “I had to be there every day for him. Every day. He felt like he let us down, but I had to let him know that he hadn’t.”
A clearer vision
Vandry’s eyes and his optic nerve were not injured, but the bullet damaged his brain’s occipital lobes, located in the back of the brain, that control visual images collected by the eyes. Vandry said his vision is impaired by several blind spots. The spots are not dark, but simply areas his brain cannot process images. Vandry, though, can sense movement and can see some things. When he looks at a face, he says he can roughly see the top of a person’s head and their chin. “See this napkin?” Vandry said one night during dinner, as he held it up about six inches from his right eye. “Right now I can see parts of it.” He then moved the napkin across his field of vision. “All right, I can still see it . . . still see it . . . and now it’s gone.” The napkin was three inches from his nose. "I know it’s there, but I can’t see it. “(My vision) is like a vacuum that the cord has been cut in half,” Vandry said. “The vacuum still works, but not at full power. Something is misfiring.” Coming out of the hospital, Vandry first had to heal physically and then relearn everything he needed to in order to live a normal life. He received cane training (the cane is now on top of his refrigerator) and later a seeing-eye dog (an 80-pound Stafford Shire Terrier named Lexanna).
“I always loved to cook, and it became very hard to flip omelettes once I lost my vision,” Vandry said. “I ate a lot of meals off my shoe.” The Texas Commission for the Blind, along with his family, helped Vandry back to a regular life. He is unable to drive or read anymore, but has adjusted to life with impaired vision. He retaught himself to cook, and he likes to run with Lexanna and his girlfriend in the park. Vandry has come a long way since his neurosurgeon once told him, “I think you need to think about an early retirement.”
A return to form
“I know what it’s like to be as weak as a kitten,” Vandry said. He spent the first four months after the shooting in bed. The gunshot had given him vertigo, and he could only escape the dizziness by laying on his side. “It was the worst possible feeling, but I never thought about quitting,” he said. “I hate people who feel sorry for themselves. I knew my eyes were messed up, but my body would be fine, so there was no point in giving up.” After eight months, Vandry began to seriously consider returning to jiu-jitsu, and with the help of Machado, he was back on the mat one year after the shooting. “I tried to give him a training picture of things we could do,” Machado said. “I always told him that he could come back, and even though he is limited, he could adapt his game.” And, eventually, that’s what Vandry did. He returned slowly, still with an equilibrium problem, but – with the help of Machado – he developed his own expression of the art that concentrated on the legs of his opponent. He became a master of leg holds and submissions and adapted his game to better suit his abilities. Most jiu-jitsu fighters focus on the arms and neck of their opponent. Vandry developed a fighting position in which he sits like a kindergartner about to sing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” and he attacks his opponent’s legs, using other holds and submissions. “No one else fights like William,” said Vandry’s student, David Thomas, who finished second at last year’s Pan Am Games as a featherweight for purple belts and is starting his own martial arts studio. “When you go against him, you really have no chance.”
In 2000, Vandry, using his unique fighting style, returned to international competition with a fourth-place finish at the Pan American Games in Florida. It was his first competition in four years, and he complained about his finish. “Everyone thought it was great for me to be there, but I was there to win,” Vandry said. “Once the match was over, I could not wait to go back again and do better.” Vandry took second place the next year in the super-heavyweight division (201-214 pounds). This year, he captured gold in the same division and became the Pan American champion for his weight. He also took second place in the open weight division, losing his final match to the defending champion, Jorge Pereira.
His future on the mat
Along with training and competing, Vandry wants to expand his studio, which he opened when he moved to Austin in 1999. He recently added a third class each day, based on demand. He teaches classes for men, women and children. “To have a black belt who reaches out to women is incredibly rare,” said Tracey Graham, who is one of Vandry’s 25 female students. “It’s amazing the time he is able to give to us. There isn’t anyone else who spends the time instructing women like he does.” Vandry also is working on a series of books and videotapes on jiu-jitsu. “Don’t worry,” Vandry jokes, “You won’t see me doing infomercials on late-night TV.” He continues forward with his life and with his business. That night outside his Killeen bar is a distant memory. Vandry would rather think about the people who helped him back. Vandry earned his black belt last June in an emotional ceremony at Machado’s state tournament in Dallas. “I just wanted to get the belt and get out of there,” Vandry said. “Then Carlos starting talking about everything that happened and I broke up. He went through everything that happened to me in detail and it was so overwhelming.”
Vandry wasn’t the only one touched during the ceremony, in which he became one of the first four Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts in Texas. “William is an inspiration to us all,” Machado said. “He really is a walking miracle.” Actually, more like a fighting miracle. And it’s best not to disagree with him because, you know, they only give those things to people who know what they are doing.
dstegon@statesman.com; 445-3677
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