Jeff’s Explorings in the World of Martial Arts
It all began with a zine…
A few years ago I was reading a new culture zine called ‘Giant Robot’ and it had some coverage of a strange sounding new sports event called the ‘Ultimate Fight Challenge,’ a no holds barred event where masters of a wide variety of martial arts disciplines fought each other, without rules, in the ring. They had an interview with one of the fighters, a huge black man 7 feet tall and 500 pounds, a semi-famous guy who even did Sumo wrestling. I’ve seen him in some movies. He’s always the silent monster type. Emmanuel something. The interview between him and the little Japanese writer was just wonderful. The guy is very sharp, humorous and clever. He really appreciated the attention of the little zinester. He was a total pro. I was impressed. So I read that the banned UFC events were on video. So I rented some. Amazing. It was cool to see how all the fancy moves and attitude usually didn’t make a hill of beans difference. One fiesty bulldog character, Tank Abbott, has kept doing quite well. What a smirk he has. It also turned out that grappling was winning basically all the matches. The UFC eventually spawned its own type of action and athlete. But before the dust settled, and no one had time to focus and study, one little guy kept winning everything. Royce Gracie. He wouldn’t hurt anyone either. He just jump em and choke em til they gave up. Including the hugest, meanest guys. He was always very polite about it, too. There were several extremely amazing upset bouts where these huge guys would be crushing Royce and he would sneak a toe up from the floor, as they were holding him upside down, and press it on their throat and choke em out before they knew what hit em. The announcers were dumbfounded as well. It was a refreshing sports experience to see something new like this, all full of no-names, going for tiny prizelists.
Royce is a family guy, taught by his dad who was the king of grappling in Brazil, accompanied by a bunch of brothers and cousins. The advent of the Gracies has changed martial arts. It pushed the truth that most fights go to the ground out into the limelight and made everyone have to learn how to grapple.
I also started buying some books and magazines that had articles that seemed to emphasize real world, practical martial arts of various types. I even bought a couple videos. I seemed to gravitate toward the grappling, thai kick boxing, boxing, filipino stickfighting and dutch indonesian silat styles. Sambo was very interesting as well—as expertly shown by the old-fart UFC fighter Oleg Taktarov. All famed for practicality.
I tried to keep to arts that a big slow person could do OK. I realized that arts develop from the culture, so that small people countries developed fast, light arts, and big people countries developed crushing styles or just used guns, passionate countries relied on knives and slapping, that sort of thing.
I started checking out the online Internet info on the topic. I saw a great rec.martial.arts newsgroup post once. Sometime around WW2, the Chinese were guarding an island on their DMZ border with Russia, and the Russians were guarding it, too. It was a tense situation, so much so that the troops were all kept unarmed, so that they had to report trouble rather than get into it themselves. Well, they baited each other. It ended up that a fist fight started and an officer was killed. Each side started staffing their guards with martial artists. Fights became more frequent and national pride was at stake. The Russians kept on beating up the skilled kungfu fighters. Finally the Chinese started finding large fighters of their own who could keep up with the Russian techniques and surpass them. Some very famous war hero stories came from this situation. (I kept the email here somewhere.) But both sides also used the situation to improve their hand to hand combat skills. They found out that what was assumed to be superior wasn’t.
Fit for what?
Well about this time I was wondering about self defense myself. I wondered What is fitness for? It’s first off to cover your basic concerns in life. So that you can mow the lawn, shovel the walk. Push a car out of the snowbank. Without killing yourself. It’s also best to be able to walk or ride a bike or paddle a canoe wherever you might want to go. We mainly use cars, after all, because we have to. Who’d want to otherwise? Then there’s simple health: it’s good to use all your muscles, limbs and joints vigorously every day. Use em or lose em.
Then comes sporting interests. But they seem optional. What’s really next on the list though would seem to be self defense. We are obliged to be able to take care of and defend our loved ones, our values and ourselves. Decent men of old did it. They learned swordfighting, etc. We’re under the same obligation. Remember, cops are there to sort things out after the fact. What will you do if faced with serious trouble? Run. Sure…that’s why we should train in quick sprints, manuevering and overall running. But what about a fight? I think that basic boxing and wrestling skills are something every youngster should learn. Tumbling, falling, without getting hurt. Have fun, learn control and how gravity works.
I took a little judo, wrestling and karate as a youngster but have forgotten it all. You need to keep practicing, or at least do an activity that simulates practice, like Tai Chi. You can do it your whole life.
So I bought a heavy bag and started practicing in my back yard. I worked up to several max intensity rounds. Great exercise. I’d start slow and easy and speed up. I’d toss in some rounds of heavy. I’d go high and low. I’d alternate between hands and legs, elbows and knees.
I bought an old Navy training manual for boxing. My brother Kelvin and I started practicing boxing a little, with the book spread out on the lawn. One of us would take offense the other defense. It worked out nicely.
I thought about knives as well. I usually carry one anyway. The new one-hand models seem great for self-defense. So I bought some foam sticks and knife-fighting how-to info and hoped to practice that with Kelvin as well, but we haven’t gotten around to it. He moved, etc.
Class time!
All this was just testing the waters, getting a little warmup. It quickly became obvious that you can’t teach yourself. That’s all my videos and books did for me! : ) So I looked around for a nearby class I could take. I visited them all. Some were run by lady cops for the local kiddies. Others were highly formal, ornamental asian outfits without much English being spoken and a lot of posing going on, preying mantis-style. I finally found a good one. Laredo’s Gym.
It was kind of scary at first. Rock’n’roll music. Lots of downtown characters. It was the only outfit to offer boxing. The only one that mentioned grappling. UFC tapes to borrow. There seemed to be a good mix of guys and gals, 20-30 years old. It was set up really neat, I thought. Very loose. You paid a monthly fee of $50 and then took as many classes as you liked in the area you selected. They taught JKD (the Bruce Lee multidiscipline invention), Thai kickboxing, and Gracie grappling. What a perfect mix! They offered a free week of classes as a trial. I took them all. They were all great. I was the oldest guy there and the least experienced. But I went in with the idea that someone has to lose. I’d happily be the worst guy. Even slowpokes can learn, though. I’d get better. I’d learn the principles. And it seemed to start working great that way. I also found out that I was just about the toughest beginner. The college kids would start out fiesty but then tire quickly. That was funny. It was also my first experience of diversity in a long time. There were equal mixes of several ethnicities and social classes. Everyone got along fine. It was a little embarrassing to work out along to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ sometimes, but it was neat to just not worry and follow what the kids did.
For an extra $5 a month you could add classes in the other disciplines different from your main choice. I decided on taking grappling to start, as a warm-up, but then I got a ridiculous bizarre bronchitis thing (from the deepwoods, loamy trailbuilding I was doing at the same time). Then I got kids. Then the city built up and added more stoplights. Dang, I just haven’t been able to make myself do that drive 3 times a week ever since.
So that was my visit to the world of Martial Arts. It sure was something and I hope to revisit it someday soon. I want to be able to show Henry what to do and to practice with him.
