A two-stripe blue belt from Tucson is reportedly “still processing” a tournament weekend that cost him $847 and produced a bronze medal in a three-man division where neither opponent showed up.
Tyler Beckman, 31, registered for the adult blue belt middleweight division at a regional tournament in Phoenix on March 29. He began preparing six weeks in advance.
The expenses, which Beckman documented in a spreadsheet he has since shared with four group chats and his therapist, are as follows:
- Entry fee: $125
- Hotel (one night, Holiday Inn Express, booked late): $189
- Gas (round trip, Tucson to Phoenix, 2014 Subaru Outback): $94
- Weight-cut supplements (electrolytes, Pedialyte, fiber gummies, a $34 sauna suit he used once): $200
- New competition gi ($179), competition-legal belt ($22), mouth guard he forgot in the hotel room ($38): $239
Total: $847.
Beckman arrived at the venue at 7:15 a.m. for an 8:00 a.m. start. His division was called at 2:47 p.m. He had been warming up intermittently for seven hours.
Of his two registered opponents, one posted an Instagram story from a brunch restaurant at 11:30 a.m. The other, sources confirm, had not registered at all and was confused when contacted about the bracket. “I signed up for the open class in February,” he reportedly said. “That was a different tournament.”
Beckman received a bye in the semifinal. His final opponent was also the brunch opponent. The bracket collapsed into a single-entry division. Tournament organizers awarded Beckman third place by default.
“They handed me a bronze,” Beckman said. “I didn’t lose. I didn’t win. I just… was there.”
The medal — a zinc-alloy disc with a generic grappling silhouette and a ribbon that started fraying during the drive home — retails for $2.40 on the tournament supplier’s wholesale website. Beckman knows this because he looked it up in the hotel parking lot before checkout.
His cost-per-medal: $847. His cost-per-match: undefined, division by zero.
Beckman’s girlfriend, who did not attend the tournament but did receive seventeen status update texts throughout the day, offered her analysis: “He spent more on this than our anniversary trip to Sedona. We drove to Sedona. It’s closer.”
Beckman has already registered for another tournament in May. Entry fee: $135. He described the decision as “non-negotiable” and the previous tournament as “a data point, not a pattern.”
The May tournament currently has two other registrants in his division. One of them is the brunch opponent.