When most martial artists write, they are trying to validate and promulgate a tradition or a system that they have invented.  They are attempting to build a structure and to appeal to people’s desire to be taught in a structured way.  Not only am I not invested in a system of any kind, but by nature I'm opposed to over-organization and the neat and tidy approach to teaching and learning that is typical of martial arts and especially, the current self-protection trend (about which more later).

This piece of writing started out as a result of Nick Hughes’ challenge on Selfprotection.com to explain why I was dissing karate when I myself had practiced and taught it.  I began writing to set the record straight on certain misconceptions that have plagued me for years.  But like everything I write, this piece touches on many interconnected subjects, and it's bound to digress.

I’m right-brained, and most people are left-brained.  Certainly, the military types who are often found in the martial arts world are about as left-brained as you can get.  Unlike them, I don’t think in bullet points.  I think in a web.  So when you read this, you’ll have to try and follow my spider-mind because my web has a purpose and a logic, but it isn't simple.  I’m articulating a complicated subject the best I can.

Here's one thing I know for sure.  If I had taken an orderly, systematized approach to martial arts, I never could have progressed to where I am now.

And in a sense, that’s the whole point with regard to me and karate.  I was never a part of it and it was never a part of me (as I’ve said in my autobiography).  I’ve said it so many times, but some of the karate aficionados simply can’t take it in.  Over the years, any number of martial artists have expressed surprise and even disbelief when I told them that I hadn’t picked up anything worth learning from my study of karate.  Some of the top names in karate had acclaimed me as the best karate man they had ever seen.  How could I turn around and denounce karate? 

Those who believed in karate often turned their backs on me when I refused to embrace it as they did; others, like Nick Hughes, prefer to dismiss my insights and hours of training, research and application, by calling me ‘an anomaly’—some kind of genetic freak, I guess.  People like to call me a genius because it absolves them of responsibility for doing their own hard work.  And I suspect that for some, trying to flatter me by calling me a genius (or a madman—isn’t it the same thing?) is really just a way of dismissing what I’m saying about martial arts so they can feel more comfortable about what they’re doing—after all, what I do must be just for geniuses, right?

There’s no mystery to my accomplishments.  It’s just that the top names who sang my praises had often been trained one step at a time within the strict formal, hierarchical regimes of the Japanese systems and their Western counterparts.  Therefore, they couldn’t imagine how somebody could do better through training themselves outside the box.  But I had been brought up in a military culture, I had internalized various images of the ‘ways of the warrior’ that were extrinsic to Japanese martial arts (most notably, I’d picked up on my father’s example in his military gymnasium), and from a young age I had taken to anything physical like a duck to water.  And most importantly, I loved to fight. 

So what’s not to believe?  If you engaged in teaching yourself guitar, for example, through the process of trial and error in the same way that I taught myself martial arts for the nine years I spent in the Army before I ever entered a karate dojo, I’m sure that with an equivalent natural aptitude, commitment, and persistence, you’d reach a pretty high standard.  And that’s all I did.

For me, going into the karate systems, the whole thing was a breeze; that’s why I rose to such a high grade in such a short time.  And that’s not me being self-aggrandizing, it’s just that the karate systems are so laughably bad.  Of course that begs the question, why did I practice karate at all?  But that’s one of the subjects of this piece, and I’ll be coming to the heart of it later.

* 

Here’s a key factor in my development.  I had an ultra-aggressive attitude and was prone to resolving arguments with extreme violence.  This, taken together with the fact that I was a self-taught natural athlete, had made my martial arts different from the very beginning.  I can remember using ground and pound instinctively during an altercation with another schoolboy in the lobby of the Majestic Station Hotel, Ipoh, Malaysia at age eight. Nobody taught me.  Sitting astride Brian Hearnes I beat the shit out of him, and every time the staff or the screaming Army wives present managed to drag me off, I fought my way back for more.

When my mother eventually turned up I was dragged off and given a serious beating on the spot, but you know what?  The beating she gave me was worth it. For the very first time I felt empowered, and it was the feeling of empowerment I got through fighting that became central to my existence as a young man.  Part of this empowerment came through my ability to take the beatings that my mother frequently dished out.  People have read about my mother’s abuse of me in my autobiography and some have remarked on the psychological damage she inflicted.  But my take on it is this.  I turned what would have been powerlessness into strength and determination.  She might have beaten me, but she never defeated me, and she knew that—in fact, it would drive her into a greater rage when she saw that she couldn’t get to me.  I was able to detach myself from the beating, and learning to do that factored into my ability to take tremendous punishment in a fight whilst remaining focused on what I had to do.

What makes me different from many of my contemporaries is that I’ve actually embraced violence.  I don’t see it as something abhorrent in the context of a fight between equals; it’s only abhorrent when the strong prey on the weak.  Many martial artists maintain an aura of moral superiority, as though they have mastered their base impulses and sublimated them to a higher goal—you see this a lot in T’ai Chi.  But in fact the practitioners don’t even know what those base impulses are in the first place.  They’ve never put themselves in a position where they might find out.  In order to control your own violence, you have to first find it, arouse it, and then start to get a handle on it and give a positive direction to the energy arising from it.

But martial arts systems, like religions, generally suppress not only individuality, but the primal impulses of their participants.  For those students who are low-key to begin with, they are never challenged to find anything violent within themselves through fighting.  They swallow the line that you don’t have to fight fire with fire.  More highly-charged individuals are taught to repress their violence through the practice of the kata and bunkai, or to channel it into a highly controlled sporting event such as Ippon kumite.  But the end result is the same: the chaotic element of violence is kept under tight control and can never really be experienced within the system.

Violence was central to my development as a martial artist—when I write out these words, it seems obvious that ‘violence’ and ‘martial artist’ should go together.  But when you look at most martial arts today, there’s nothing resembling violence going on.  As a young man, I wasn’t practicing for some hypothetical encounter by an attacker on the streets, or hoping to deal with some drunk on the door.  I was actually  going out and  looking for fights so as to try out for real what I’d taught myself, and I often pitted myself against men who were larger and older than I was.  Sometimes I would fight in a calculated way so as to test a move; other times I’d just fight for a euphoric high.     

I taught myself.  For the nine years I was in the Army, whenever I saw, read about or heard about a move (or whenever a move just popped into my head), I would try it out in the barracks, the NAFFI, on the streets, or in the out-of-bounds areas of Nairobi and Benghazi (which often included  running battles on the streets with the locals). Shortly  after being dishonourably discharged from the Army and working at Courage’s brewery as a drayman, a heated  argument over a barrel of beer developed between myself and another drayman while we were loading up for a delivery.    Seriously pissed off, I knocked the guy out with a flying headbutt and shattered  his jaw in the process.  I’d seen the move in a TV wrestling show hosted by Ken Walton.  The guy was standing about six feet away from me and the move just popped up in my mind’s eye.  The next moment I was flying through the air head-first.  The guy was rushed off to hospital and I was sacked on the spot. That’s what I mean by trying out a move.

Talking about Ken Walton:  apart from the grappling and submission moves I’d picked up in Irving Hancock’s book The Complete Kano Jujutsu, Trevor Leggett’s  Championship Judo, Anton Geesink’s My Championship Judo and a couple of others (I can’t recall the titles), I picked up a lot of  grappling  and submission moves just by  watching wrestlers like Johhny Saint and George Kidd in action  on Saturday afternoon TV.  I’d then rehearse the moves with my mate Pete Cook, a junior boxer, and at some point down the line I’d try them out in a fight.  

On my website I’ve told the story of knocking out a six-foot plus MP when I was 17 with a round kick to the head.  What I didn’t mention was that I’d learnt the move from an illustration in Leong Fu’s  Karato course—or it might have been Joe Weider’s.  This is what I mean by being self-taught.  Not that the kick to the head finished him off completely—whilst I was bathing in the glory of what I had done and talking to those who had gathered round to ask me where I’d learned to do a kick like that, he came back at me.  The ground and pound I gave him put him in Catterick Military Hospital for a few days, and I have to add that he’d have spent a few more  days in a military bed if I’d known at the time that he was an MP.  From my experience of them, MPs were bully boys and thugs, and like most squaddies, I despised them.

*

In Nairobi I was posted to a transmitter site about 40 miles out of town. It was here, inspired by Oyama, that I seriously began to condition my hands and forearms by beating them on the tubular metal frame at the end of my army bed, which I’d wrapped in thick rope.  I also soaked my hands and forearms in a mixture of beef brine and vinegar, a recipe I got from my father.  I got the camp chippy to make me a makiwara, but after seeing the real thing many years later I realised I’d got the dimensions wrong from Oya Reikichi and E.J Harrison’s book The Manual of Karate. Mine was over 6 ft., solid and unbreakable, but those upon which I was to later practice were about 4 ft, flimsy, and easily broken.  

Although my conditioning regime had worked on my hands and forearms to a remarkable degree, I didn’t have knuckles anything like Oyama’s as depicted in his book What Is Karate.   So, one evening after anaesthetizing myself with a few beers, I went outside and set about trying to knock down a wall with my fists.  The result?  Two very large egg-like  knuckles on both hands which, when the skin finally healed and became calloused, served me well in the streets and bars of Nairobi against locals, squaddies and RAF personnel.  When I hit someone they often not only went down as if they had been poleaxed but many of them had lumps on their heads  as if they had been hit with a ball peen hammer.   

Oyama also inspired me to get seriously into  breaking, much to the annoyance of the site Sgt Major, who couldn’t figure out why  every one of the  paving slabs on the site, though still in place, were cracked—some of them twice.  Also, holes started  appearing in doors and walls and shelves started  disappearing, all thanks to my breaking practice.  I got my first taste of judo at the RAF judo club in Nairobi but because the calibre of the members was so low, I got bored and left.

It seems ironic now that Oyama was my inspiration in karate in the early days, because when I actually saw him in action his ability in no way matched up to the hype.  The legend of Oyama turned out to be largely a fiction, but as a young man I believed it.  And it was that belief, that imaginary benchmark, that drove me to strive for a higher level of performance as a fighter.  This is a phenomenon that we see a lot in sport.  For example, after Roger Bannister ran the four minute mile, everybody was doing it.  He’d broken through a barrier in people’s perception of what was possible.  Now let’s say that the clock had been fixed convincingly, and he hadn’t actually done it.  That’s what happened with me and Oyama.  I believed those breaks could be done, and so I did them.  I believed the whole mythology.  Only later did I learn that he had never had the amount of fights he’d claimed, the breaks were suspect, he’d never killed a bull...etc. 

I picked up information about fighting wherever I could find it.  My next posting put me in charge of a transmitter station in Benghazi.  There I leaned the rudiments of using a knife by way of an old Arab night watchman called Zahid whom I befriended.  This old guy also taught me some stand-up grappling moves and body-strengthening exercises, as well as how to make and use a sling. The site was occasionally bombarded with rocks by gangs of youths outside the perimeter fence, and at night wild dogs roamed the aerial field.  Using the sling I had fun dealing with the kids by day, and at night I went out and hunted the dogs.  I kept strategically-placed piles of rocks around the aerial field for that purpose.

In Benghazi I converted the small Nissen hut I was allocated into a dojo/gym complete with makiwara, homemade  ground-ceiling ball and  punchbag, weights, skipping rope, and numerous other pieces of equipment.  I also had a candle stand, and with a single punch or combo I could extinguish candles from more than a foot away.  Around this time—again  inspired by Oyama—I was also taking the top off the occasional bottle and  slapping and punching through bricks.

The role of breaking, hand conditioning, and heavy bag work is misunderstood in some segments of the martial arts fraternity these days.  Breaking has become stagey and is usually just a trick to give the illusion of power or chi or whatever, and as a result some martial artists distance themselves from the whole business of breaking.  My breaks weren’t done for the benefit of an audience and none of them were fixed.  The reason for doing breaking in the first place was that I needed some means, other than fighting, to objectively test the destructive effect of my hands.  These tests weren’t a substitute for fighting, but part of process of honing those  tools I needed  to fight with.