Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [42]
I and a group of hopefuls applied for the position of tactics instructor and went through a battery of oral and written tests. During the orals, I had to do a presentation of my teaching skills. As a kid, I’d hated public speaking. It made my stomach turn, but now I had something to fight for. For the test, I taught a standard vehicle stop lesson, showing how I would disseminate the necessary information to a class of cadets and explaining why I would teach it that way.
Tommy McDonald and I were the two finalists for the position. Tommy had worked for SWAT and was Sgt. Frank Mika’s choice. Mika was the officer in charge (OIC) of the Tactics Unit. Glen Hees, the assistant OIC, thought I was the man for the job. Both Frank and Glen had worked for my dad.
I’m told that in the end, Frank said to Glen, “You can have McCarthy, but you’d better be right.”
There was a big difference between Tommy and me. I was surprised they gave me the spot. Tommy was a golden boy, and I was a bad boy.
The one thing I knew after getting the job was that I had to prove they’d made the right decision. I can’t justify it, but I have always felt that whatever position I was in or whatever team I played for, others were always trying to replace me. I know it sounds crazy, but even if I was the captain of the team, I still felt that the coach was looking to put in someone else so I had to continually prove myself. It’s my own personal paranoia that’s stayed with me to this day. In this case, it did ensure one thing: the cadets would get the best I had to give, guaranteed.
The change of scenery and pace, both at work and at home, came at just the right time. I’d told Elaine one of the perks of working for the LAPD was that if you ever got tired of what you were doing, you could try something else.
I felt I’d accomplished a lot of good in the four and a half years I’d spent in CRASH, but there comes a point working with gang members when you just want to kill them all. There’s something about them that makes you think you can change them, and I guess it takes about four and a half years to realize you can’t.
Returning to Elysian Park seven and a half years after I began my career there, I was undoubtedly a different person. The academy had changed as well and mostly for the better. When I’d been a recruit, I’d gotten about 908 hours of training. When you think about it, that’s pretty scary. I read somewhere that you needed 1,500 hours of training to become a cosmetologist, to carry around scissors and cut someone’s hair. You need only 900 hours to be a cop, to carry a gun and potentially take someone’s life. It doesn’t quite add up, does it?
The academy hadn’t offered nearly as much tactical training when I’d attended as it did by the time I was an instructor. For instance, my 1985 class hadn’t been taught how to do a building search, but by 1993 the academy had a mock town with houses and buildings to maneuver through. I got to play every day alongside the cadets as I put them through paintball and grappling exercises, and I taught them the proper way to find and apprehend me in the mock town.
I felt being a police officer was all about tactics, learning how to handle oneself properly both physically and mentally in the field. After what I’d seen out there, I had a few pearls of wisdom to share.
In the classroom, I was assigned to teach the course on use of deadly force. Thankfully, it had been given considerably more hours than when I’d been a cadet, which was helpful as I instructed seventy students on department policy, including the proper use of firearms and chokes. All the time I was spending studying jiu-jitsu with Rorion Gracie gave me a better handle on how to train others in certain aspects of force.
Rorion was studying too, though I didn’t realize it at the time. His weekly meetings with the rest of the martial arts panel weren’t necessarily about improving officers’ field techniques. In Rorion’s mind, he