He had been interested in martial arts for some time, but it was not until he was eighteen that René Lange from Linden chose jiu-jitsu. It became a hobby that got out of hand. Lange (66) recently achieved the prestigious eighth dan in the sport. He therefore belongs to a very select group in the Netherlands. “I hope to be able to do this for years to come,” he says. “Until my students say that the old man should not be on the mat anymore.”
Lange took up jiu-jitsu at the time to remove some of his insecurity and to learn how to defend himself. As an 18-year-old, he worked in the catering industry and when he finished early one evening, he walked into a sports club in Nijmegen. It turned out to be the first of many steps.
Jiujitsu appealed to him because of its versatility. “It is the precursor to many defensive sports. For example, if you take away the kicks and punches and the chokes, then you have judo,” he explains. In fact, you can do almost anything in jiu-jitsu, it is a very mean sport. Think of it like the cage fighting of the past.” Lang sees jiu-jitsu as an effective self-defense sport: “There are all kinds of techniques, but if you are attacked, a good kick between the legs is also very effective. Or look up.”
Fighting matches was never his goal, but he did have another wish. “There were guys training with a black belt, which seemed great to me. I felt like I was standing at the bottom of the mountain and at the top I saw the man with the black belt. I thought I would never make it, but the distance to the top was getting smaller and smaller.”
After obtaining his first black belt, a world opened up for him. “For example, I started thinking about examinations at district level. I also started teacher training, even though my teacher at the time didn’t think that was for me. I felt little support, but I persevered.” He recently achieved eighth dan, partly because of his services to the sport. There are only three of them in the Netherlands that are still active.
In daily life he benefited greatly from jiu-jitsu, especially when it comes to discipline. Whether in the TBS clinic where he worked, as a danger management teacher at the police or at his own company in resilience training. He combined his work for more than thirty years with his own Budo school Kihon in Cuijk, where at least a hundred students now train.
“There are sometimes bad ones, but I always take up the challenge.”
“We have a nice club and we train hard. There are sometimes bad ones, but I always take up the challenge. I am sometimes asked by parents how I manage to calm down a class of 25 to 30 children, while they cannot do that themselves with two kids.”
Lange believes that jiu-jitsu can bring a lot to society. “It is good for motor skills, there is a lot of attention for breaking falls, it teaches you discipline and children become more resilient. The mental part is very important: daring to say when you don’t want something. It is a strange world these days. In the past, there used to be a fight, a few blows and then it was done. Nowadays they kick you in the head when you are lying down or they stab you. I tell my students that you have to be completely cuckoo to do that.”