I had studied Chinese Kenpo Karate for two years. I was an instructor, and I had written the training manual for my school. Then I ran into a Hells Angel.
The story actually started when the fast food joint I was working at hired a geeky looking guy. I didn't think too much of him, but then one day I saw him kick a wall. The wall shook like the 1906 earthquake had come again, and I knew that he knew martial arts.
He told me he was learning Kang Duk Won Korean Karate. He said he wasn't that good at it, which I found hard to believe. He said, however, that his brother was a lot better, and let's go see him.
So that night, I think it was a Tuesday, we went down to a house in Sunnyvale to meet his brother. As we pulled up Alex said to me, "I should probably tell you that my brother is a Hells Angel." I blinked, but, naive me, heck...I knew Kenpo, right?
His brother was maybe five foot ten, a little shorter than me, but he had the outlaw look in his eyes. We talked for a while, and then he simply said, "Your Martial Art doesn't work." Then he grabbed me by the shirt front with two of the gnarliest fists I had ever seen and told me to work my first technique on him, and then he named the technique.
I began to move. I held his fists in place with one hand and brought my forearm up to break his elbows, I struck his wrists with my nerve paralyzing downward chop, and when I went to chop him in the neck he tossed me through a wall. Yes he did...all the way through the wall.
He just grinned and extended a hand to help me up, and then he told me to grab his shirt front. I did, and he showed me the self defense technique that they practiced at the Kang Duk Won. He reached over and popped a fist into my chest so hard that I went through the wall again.
This is a true story, and being tossed through a wall twice changed my life, definitely made me rethink martial arts, and prompted me down the road to other martial arts and how to make them work. I spent several years learning at the Kang Duk Won Korean Karate school, worked alongside all manner of people, including hells angels and other outlaw bikers. Included in my education was why a martial art doesn't work, and what to do about it.
The things that martial arts sensei add to their martial art, the slant towards tournaments and making bucks, there's no end to the gimmicks that have screwed up the art. That's why I created Matrixing, so martial arts sensei could fix all that kind of stuff. Click to Monster Martial Arts and see what I came up with.
No comments:
Post a Comment