Chapter 407 - Training for the Movie 1 (1/2)

The other day Jake was training even more willingly and had also returned to running training for marathons and also for the 10,000 meters sport, as he was in his best physical condition he trained as well as before traveling to Tokyo.

If Jake had not told Coach Davis that he had not trained since the marathon, Coach David would have thought that Jake had trained while in Miami, after all, Jake went almost two weeks without training and should have performed poorly.

That way he could understand why Jake wanted to increase the intensity of his training and why Jake didn't mind trying to train when he was in Miami, he knew it wouldn't make much difference and so he didn't even try.

In the training of the Tar Heels team Jake also tried harder than in other training and this encouraged his teammates to train more, Jamison and Williams even played well in the last game, but Carter failed to perform well and hindered the team.

This left Coach Guthridge more relaxed because he realized that the players were becoming inattentive in the games, he was also happy to see that he could count on Jake again and would have no problems until the end of the season.

Even though Tar Heels fans and the media had already forgotten that Jake had not participated in a game, the companies that negotiated to sponsor him had not forgotten, with the Lakers' team David Falk had already closed a verbal agreement.

The Lakers were also close to closing the deal with the Los Angeles Clippers team, Nike had no longer responded to David Falk's request for a better contract, but Adidas was still negotiating and was close to agreeing with Jake's requests.

This made Jake happier with Adidas, he remembered that many times players had career crises and needed the support of sponsors at that moment to be able to recover more easily.

This time Jake had not participated in just one game in which his team had won and yet several companies gave up on having an agreement with him, only the companies David had contacted before they continued with the verbal agreement.

If the Tar Heels team won the ACC tournament and the NCAA tournament Jake was sure that these companies would try again for a contract, at that moment Jake would ask for a contract with a much higher value to accept those companies that had given up.

Jake knew he had the skills and when he arrived in the NBA, the companies that trusted him and bet on him would have a lot of return in the few years of the contract, and Jake didn't need the money and just wanted to be recognized for his work as a professional player.

While Jake thought about concentrating fully on training his racing and basketball team, something he had forgotten came back to take him by surprise, one of the members of the film he was going to participate in a few months had come to the university.

Because of university and also the games with the Tar Heels team that basketball season Jake had to join the film crew for The Matrix a few weeks later, and because of that and because his character had many martial arts scenes that required training to make the film's directors the Wachowskis asked to send someone to teach him martial arts while he was at university.

Jake had naturally accepted it because the Wachowskis were already making an exception by accepting that he later joined with the other actors on the film crew, so fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping was sent to train with Jake.

Jake knew many films that Yuen Woo-ping participated in, after all, Jake was a fan of many martial arts films, but Jake didn't know exactly what he would learn, he knew that it was not any real martial arts but only to fight in the filming.

This did not mean it was easier to learn even if it wasn't an original martial art made for self-defense, then if Jake spoke to Yuen Woo-ping a little he learned that it would be more difficult than he thought because he would have to train with cables wires and he would have to do stunts in the air with safety equipment.

Talking to Yuen Woo-ping, Jake learned that many actors ended up getting hurt when doing training in both fight training and cable acrobatics, Jake was confident that his body was much stronger than normal actors, but he still would be careful.

Because of that, Jake would have to stop doing running training again because he couldn't stop going to classes and neither could go to training with the basketball team, as they didn't have the necessary equipment to do the stunts and training in Corporal Jake would learn all the technique and fighting movements before.

Later, when he could leave the university, they would train what Jake had learned in the cables and learn the necessary stunts, as Jake would be the one who needed to fight more in the film, his training would have to be more intense.

The other actors had already been trained by Yuen Woo-ping and so he was worried about what Jake's training would be like, it was usually supposed to be easier because Jake was an athlete, but Jake was too tall and that could make it difficult for him to learn the skills techniques.