The white gloves fly, delivering a hard blow to his opponent's head. Spinning at breakneck speed, the lithe figure in flame-decorated trunks kicks hard, thrusting a foot into the bigger man's shoulder blade. But in 12 hours, Uriel Ben-Hamo, reigning Israeli kick-boxing champion, will be in a completely different setting: Jerusalem's Magid Mesharim Yeshiva, studying with his hevruta partner, Shai.
Later on in the day, he'll join his brother Hovav to study the laws of becoming a scribe (sofer stam). The hand that slams into an opponent in the ring tonight learns how to delicately form the letters of holy scrolls tomorrow.
And oh yes: Ben-Hamo - who looks like a slip of a thing until he hits the practice mat at the Team Cogan gym in Malha and starts kicking up a storm - has a dream: "to stand with the championship belt around my waist" when the international Thai boxing championships are held in Bangkok on November 27. For now, however, it remains a dream, as Israel's champion and Team Cogan seek a sponsor to help defray costs for participation in the event.
THE SPIN kicks and fist thrusts are all in a night's practice for Uriel, who doffs his tzitzit and sweatshirt for training gear - tonight just gloves and shin guards, but sometimes protective headgear as well. Bare-chested after removing a T-shirt plastered in Thai, the 58-kg. whirling dervish of devastation sometimes shows up in black hat and suit, arriving from yeshiva aboard his Yusong 125-cc. motorcycle, which he insists also helps him "let go" a little.
Because even as a little kid, Uriel was a handful, his father Haim explains in a phone interview. "As a child, I had plenty of difficulties with his teachers... he didn't like to sit and study, he was a little hyperactive." Tonight, with thrusting, calculated, violent kicks, the 18-year-old is ready to beat the daylights out of his opponents. But it was his father's conversation with a group of rabbis that set him on the path of mixing learning and leg thrusts.
"I asked my father about getting involved in martial arts," Ben-Hamo, wrapping his hands with tape before inserting them into the gloves to avoid injury, says. "At first he tried to ignore me, because it's not something that's so acceptable in the haredi world. But after he consulted with rabbis, he said I could sign up, because they told him that I needed to let off some steam."
Israeli kickboxing champion Uriel Ben-Hamo.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
"I saw that his head wasn't really only in his studies," says his father. "He was attracted to sports, but as a haredi person, I feared it would take him out of the yeshiva framework... When I saw that he was really insistent, I didn't want to go against his desires, so I consulted some rabbis about what to do. I brought up his continuing to study while also finding an outlet for his soul and his wishes. They told me there was no problem. I came back to Uriel and told him I didn't have any problem signing him up for a sports class on the condition that it did not interfere with his other studies, and he promised me that it wouldn't.
"I didn't even know what sport he was getting involved with... I just sent him to a class, and after two years, he came back Israeli champion," his father says with a laugh.
BLAME IT all on Bruce Lee if you like, someone you wouldn't have thought the young Ben-Hamo would've discovered growing up in a typical Shas-oriented haredi family in Jerusalem, with whom he still lives, one of nine children.
Ben-Hamo remembers his first encounter with a Bruce Lee film that he watched with a friend on computer as if it were only yesterday. "As kids we loved Bruce Lee... it was electrifying... he would drop somebody with every blow, it was deadly, fast... I enjoyed him."
Besides, "I always saw myself as an actor, which I really want to be, with God's help - a superstar, famous, the world champion, from a very young age," he says, recounting how at 10 or 11 he'd go "out into the woods near my house and do sit-ups and push-ups."
Then one day he saw a sign in Katamon advertising: "Martial arts, Bruce Lee-style." With his father's blessing now, off he went, collecting Bruce Lee T-shirts and spending two years with Boaz Bar learning martial arts before deciding at 16 that "I wanted to go into ring fighting... In martial arts, there are no bouts, while in ring fighting, you can advance," he explains. "Beny Cogan is known for his work in Thai boxing... I went to talk to him and he saw how much I really wanted to do this, and he said: 'Let's move him up the ladder.' So he started having me take part in bouts."
"He wiped out all the boxers in his category over the past two years," says trainer Cogan, who runs Team Cogan, the Malha academy where Ben-Hamo works out, of his protégé's performance in Israeli kick-boxing and Thai boxing. Thai boxing is somewhat similar but has its own rules. There's an obviously close relationship between the two, and Cogan is fully aware of the potential his haredi protégé has, but also of the polish he must acquire to succeed on the international stage.
"He's very devoted and dedicated, he gives everything of his energy. And not everybody's like this," says Cogan. "He developed very fast - usually it takes somebody else about seven years to get where he's gotten. He's very gifted. He has a lot of patience and can concentrate for a long time - like a yeshiva boy who studies and studies. His devotion and dedication to the sport and training, combined with his physical gifts, allowed him to become Israeli champion very quickly."
Cogan's also not at all surprised Ben-Hamo comes from the yeshiva world, which he says only makes him a better boxer. "Yeshiva life gives you a lot of tools," says Cogan. "If you study in the yeshiva regularly, it gives you the ability to work harder and be very, very serious... think about everything, analyze, ask questions, learn better technique... It comes from that other world."
JEWS WERE fighters in the past, even gladiators under Roman rule. So Ben-Hamo doesn't find it at all strange to combine his two worlds. "Someone looking at it from outside might not be able to understand, but as someone actually doing it, there's no problem," he says, pausing a moment on the practice mat between sparring sessions before delivering a jolting knee to his opponent's side. Twisting, twirling, throwing jump kicks, he quickly vanquishes his foe.
