Iain Abernethy is a great guy, and an incredibly effective teacher of practical karate!
My other karate blog has been around for a long time, and I have enjoyed writing it. And apparently some folks liked reading it, even when I was writing on the Blogger Platform, instead of the Big Boy Platform, WordPress (although someday I’ll get brave enough to take the leap to self-hosted WordPress.org; just not today).
These are the most popular posts of all time from my other Shotokan Karate Blog, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them!
I like watching enthusiastic Shotokan Practitioners demonstrate sparring.
It reminds me why I don’t spar much!
Note: this isn’t very much like a real fight at all. Bad guys really never learned to attack properly!
They attack effectively, but not very well at all. In fact, I give most muggers very low points for correct form.
Lyoto Machida is a lifetime trained Shotokan Stylist. Machida can get away with jump kicks against a fell opponent like Randy Couture. You cannot get away with such kicks in the local Bucket of Blood on Saturday Night.
In general, in a bar, you can always tell which guy is about to be examining the tile between the bar stools by watching who is attempting a kick in a fistfight.
There’s a very nice Hollywood Fight in a movie that I love called “The Quiet Man”.
Note that the fight is not a real fight; the combatants use fists, not thumbs and elbows and knees and head butts. There is a referee of sorts. There are even rules of sorts, although often disregarded.
But there are sucker punches, which you see in the initial phase of real fights. But without the blood, missing teeth, smashed orbits, broken jaws, and boxer’s fractures that would have certainly resulted from this many ungloved punches, it’s not a real fight.
And, of course, Shotokan Karate Sparring, with no contact, and referees, and bare feet, and polished wooden floors, is also not real fighting.
That’s a good thing; if they were real fights, participants couldn’t go to work the next day and face the public.
Shotokan sparring, at least in the early days of the Japanese University Karate Clubs, was a lot more like real fighting. And after the matches between the teams, everybody went to the hospital!
Some techniques are so visually interesting that people go a little crazy with enthusiasm when they are used in highly regulated competitions with referees.
And using spectacular techniques in a prize match, or an amateur sparring match, is perfectly okay; the worst that will happen is that you’ll look silly, and fall on your face, and you’ll get to shake the hand of the winner while you pretend to wish him well.
On the other hand, if you use a “Karate Kid” crane kick (which Machado used to win his most recent mixed martial arts fight against Randy Couture), or a spinning back fist in a bar fight, you will not only look silly, you’ll wind up short a few teeth, and your jaw will need to be wired together for a few months.
If you’re lucky.
The reason that spectacular techniques work in the ring is simple: you have perfect visibility, you’re warmed up, your opponent has been trained in ways similar to the ways you were trained, so a goofy/spectacular technique is a surprise to your well-trained opponent.
Your half-drunk opponent in the bar, however, is really untrained. He probably has only one technique, the roundhouse right, or maybe the head butt. On the other hand, he has only one thing in mind, as though he had been trained by Musashi. And that one thing in his mind is to get close enough to use his one technique, and to use it again and again until you’re out for the count. Or worse.
And you don’t need a spectacular technique to surprise your opponent in the bar; he doesn’t know anything about fighting, and he won’t even see your feints!
In fact, your opponent in a bar won’t even see your attacks!
So what do I suggest you do in a real fight?
My overall suggestion is that you avoid places where fighting is frequent. And that you use distance and a fence to protect yourself if you can’t avoid going into the bar to use the pay phone (you forgot to charge your cell phone again?).
And the instant you see the glimmer of the possibility of a fight, leave. Fast. Cover them with heel dust.
That’s one of the best techniques.
p.s. remember, being the winner in a bar fight isn’t necessarily a good thing, in the long run. There is an old country-and-western song, called The Winner. It suggests that there is a certain amount of wear-and-tear damage associated with getting into fights. The lyric about his teeth rolling around like Chiclets is, I think, persuasive. And dental work is expensive!
p.p.s. Bear in mind that the guy who wants to fight with you in a bar isn’t looking for a fair fight; he’s looking for a victim. And you know what? If you’re on the floor, having bested him with a go-behind and a three-corner choke, his friends (there are always friends) will be doing a tap dance on your heroic head. Getting out is a good technique. Not going in there in the first place is a better idea.
Now, the reason that you study martial arts is varied. But, seriously, if you’re in a fight, that almost always means you weren’t paying attention.
So pay attention! That may actually be the very best technique!
