Thanks to the power of the internet, I've recently been reunited with three of my favourite kinesiology books. 

Kinesiology, Cooper and Glassow
Kinesiology and Applied Anatomy, Rasch and Burke
Kinesiology: Scientific Basis of Human Motion, Hamilton and Luttgens

Several years ago when I thought we might be relocating to the US permanently, I gave away some of my books.  Others went missing in the Bourne Hill fiasco, and many of my best videos and books I sold to a collector to raise cash. 

Luckily I was able to hunt up copies of these tets.  They're all old, especially the first two.  I like the older books because they contain a philosophy of movement rather than just a scientific analysis of it.  The field has moved on technically, but the underlying concepts and principles of kinesiology remain sound.

 Now of animals which change their position some move with the
whole body at once, for example jumping animals, others move one
part first and then the other, for example walking (and running)
animals. In both these changes the moving creature always changes
its position by pressing against what lies below it. Accordingly if
what is below gives way too quickly for that which is moving upon it
to lean against it, or if it affords no resistance at all to what is
moving, the latter can of itself effect no movement upon it. For an
animal which jumps makes its jump both by leaning against its own
upper part and also against what is beneath its feet; for at the
joints the parts do in a sense lean upon one another, and in general
that which pushes down leans upon what is pushed down. That is why
athletes jump further with weights in their hands than without, and
runners run faster if they swing their arms; there is in extending the
arms a kind of leaning against the hands and wrists. In all cases then
that which moves makes its change of position by the use of at least
two parts of the body; one part so to speak squeezes, the other is
squeezed; for the part that is still is squeezed as it has to carry
the weight, the part that is lifted strains against that which carries
the weight. It follows then that nothing without parts can move itself
in this way, for it has not in it the distinction of the part which is
passive and that which is active.

--The Gait of Animals, Aristotle

It was the highlighted line in the text above, which is included in the prefaces of the first two kinesiology books listed above, that set me on a research that has lasted nearly 40 years.  In that time I have concerned myself with learning how the animal (man in particular) organizes this pressing against that which is beneath to make those changes in position upon which its survival depends.

Without having had access to this material when I did, I don't think I would have been able to progress.  It was the information in these books that enabled me to get past my training plateaus.  It showed me how emotions, thoughts and sensations are translated through the CNS into movements of needed response.  It helped me to understand those factors that are influential upon successful movement. 

In the early 1970s when I began this quest, martial artists were not looking at science.  Now it is in vogue for martial art and self-protection teachers to resouce sports science.  But their approach often seems lacking to me in this essential philosophy of movement.  The use of technical language and concepts may impress the student, but in my observation there aren't many out there who actually understand what they're talking about.  If more of my contemporaries would return to this root level of understanding of basic kinesiology, they might grasp the principles that are essential to understanding and facilitating movement. 

Now, I'm a layman in this field.  But I understand these concepts and principles on a practical level.  I've had three sports scientists (Mark Chen, Jon Law, and Alan Sinclair) who have found that what I was able to explain and demonstrate from my own unique perspective actually enhanced their understanding--despite them having had an enormous amount of schooling.  I've made it my business to understand this material from the inside out.   Often when I was reading  these books' explanation for physical phenomena, it was simply verifying what I intuitively knew as an athlete.  Gradually I was able to get a handle on what my body knew how to do, and articulate it for myself.

And it's this process of articulating and analyzing what you intuitively know that gives rise to further progression.  You can then feed that back into your training.  I always say that you can't refine what you can't define.  When it comes to biomechanics, these books are invaluable in helping you define what the essential influential factors upon movement are.  And it's all in harmony with the process of evolution and the fundamental patterns that I'm always talking about.

When I listen to some of the pseudoscience and 'internal' bullshit that passes for knowledge of the human body, I just have to laugh.  The real knowledge is right there in books like this.  It's not going to hand itself over to you on a plate, but it's far from impossible to comprehend. 

These books can be hard to come by, but if you're serious try and get your hands on a copy of one of them.  They're that good.

When I posted earlier, I forgot to include this link. 

Athletic Development by Vern Gambetta

This is a book by one of the top functional coaches in the world.

On page 143 he talks about the fundamental patterns I'm referring to.   On page 6 he references speed.  There's a lot of other good material in the book.

This guy is somebody I can relate to.  Much of what he's saying rings true with me and my experience over forty years of training myself and others.  Read his book, read his blog, read his newsletter. 

In Benghazi my book collection was getting larger.  Included  within  it  were Croisner, Nadi and Beaumont fencing books, Dempsey’s Championship Fighting,  E.J Harrison’s Manual of Karate and The Fighting Spirit of Japan, Nishiyama’s The Art of Empty Hand Fighting, Jay Gluck’s Zen Combat, R.W. Smith’s Secrets of Shaolin Temple Boxing and A Complete Guide to Judo,   Gilbey’s (actually R.W. Smith) Secret Fighting Arts of the World,  Oyama’s This is Karate, D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, Plee’s Karate by Pictures  and Nakayama’s Dynamic Karate, Samuel Griffith’s The Art of War, Vishnu Devananda’s The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, and numerous books on Buddhism.  I also had all the early editions of the American Black Belt magazine, which I’d discovered in, of all places, a small magazine store hidden away at the back of Waverly Barracks.

Benghazi, where I always carried a knife, was also the place where I got into some really serious fights, knives and all, with the locals (both Arab and Italian)  who hated the British. 

Bampton was my final posting and it was here that I added to my collection of books Donn F. Draegar’s  Judo Training Methods (whose training regimes I followed religiously for many years), R.W. Smith’s books on Tai Chi and Pakua,  Henry Plee’s Beginner to Black Belt, and Peter Urban’s Karate Dojo.

At this point I was also the possessor of a Super 8 projector and numerous  Super 8 films on boxing.  I even managed to find one on Muay Thai from a  Super 8  film shop on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Remember, the whole point of my resourcing all this material wasn’t for academic reasons or for some hypothetical encounter on the streets, but to make me a more effective fighter.  I was still going out and looking for fights   so as to test what I’d taught myself.

One fight that was a measure of how far I’d come was a fight against a former Army  heavyweight boxer whose claim to fame was having fought Brian London. I’ve mentioned it in my website autobiography.  At around ten stone (quite a few stone lighter than him) I quite literally kicked the shit out of him.   After he’d been hospitalized, I fully expected to be put under close arrest.  I figured I was going to the glasshouse, and I actually burnt photos which I felt might be incriminating against me because they showed me breaking slabs of concrete, bricks and piles of wood—doing all kinds of things that I’d got up to that showed I was a martial artist.  I had my kit all laid out on my bed and was dressed ready for the guard room, but for some inexplicable reason the red caps didn’t turn up.  It’s a real shame about the pictures; some of them were the best breaks I’ve ever done, and in complete naivete.

When I was at Bampton I spent a Saturday afternoon visiting the London Kyokushin Kai situated in Vauxhall and got my second viewing of karate.  During free fighting I broke some guy’s arm (I was trying to kick him in the balls at the time—well, they did say it was free fighting, which i took to mean anything goes). On a technical point: whenever I hit I’m already anticipating that my opponent  will try to block or cover, and I’m blasting through the block or cover.  I attack not only the target  but his defence of it; in the case of a karate-type block against my groin kick, I drive straight through the defending arm with my shin.      

Bampton was also where I began teaching myself yoga from various books. I’d dabbled with it in Nairobi and Benghazi using Devananda’s The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, but in Bampton I got serious.  At first I had a few worrying moments with some of the cleansing routines, but in the end not only could I perform all the various asanas, cleansing routines, breathing exercises, concentration/meditative/contemplation practices, but I also began to get a handle on yoga’s philosophy.  I was heavily into it, along with Buddhist  philosophy  (excluding its religious aspects, I hasten to add), and this started to change the way I viewed the world about me. 

Up until then, quite honestly, I didn't have a lot going on inside my head.  I wasn’t thinking about anything other than obvious priorities of fighting, sex, and drink!  I was pretty simple-minded (some would say I still am).  I could put a chain of moves together, but not a chain of thought.  Yoga and Buddhism started to open that up.  On some of the Zen koans and concepts, I’d be breaking out into a fucking sweat just trying to get my head round it.  The development of my self at that point became more important to me than just going along with some military machine that couldn’t give a fuck who I was.

I wanted to get out of the Army, but I was in a restricted trade. My attitude towards authority had always been bad but now it got worse.  I didn’t shave, didn’t clean my kit, only did duty if I felt like it, and if officers bothered me I told them to fuck off.  Eventually my blatant and belligerent disrespect (as well as the fighting) led to my discharge in 1967.          

Though I never saw active service, for my nine years in the Army I was involved in my own private war.  I was a violently angry young man.  And although I never killed anybody (at least to my knowledge) it wasn’t for the lack of trying (on several occasions) or having hit somebody so hard or beaten them so badly that it’s only due to luck that they didn’t die.  This isn’t something I’m proud of.  But it was part of me and it still is.  In many ways, my life has been about resolving this innate violence that I have burning inside me.  I’m talking about it here because all my martial arts training has to be seen in this context. 

I started teaching myself martial arts for the fighting advantage I felt I would get; but gradually I began to get a handle on my violence and I learned to get control over it, whereas when I was young, my violence had control over me.  It’s that work that is the essence of my development, and so my violence is central to any accomplishments I’ve had along the way. 

I think this is one reason I look at everything opposite to the rest of the martial arts world.  A lot of people go into the martial arts looking to deal with guys like me from a defensive point of view.  What they fail to realise is that the very essence of the martial arts is violence.  Indeed, I would argue that the essence of meditation practices is the transmutation of primal drives such as sexual and destructive urges, into something highly focused and charged.  Sexual energy arousal within certain sects of Taoism and Buddhism is a prerequisite for the meditative/spiritual practice.  After all, you can’t direct what isn’t there in the first place.  So violence, and destructive intent, provides the energy for martial arts practice.  The defensive interpretation of martial art skills tends to be controlled by pacifists, and it’s easier to swallow the ‘defensive version’ when we live in a modern Western society that abhors violence. 

What I’m saying here might not be comfortable to hear.  I’m not saying it to big myself up.  I’m trying to get people to understand that in martial arts if you neglect the violence, you’re totally missing the point. 

Now, before I digress too far.  All of this writing is part of my explanation as to my relationship with karate.  With hindsight I wish I’d paid attention to my first impression of karate at Vernon Bell’s.  I wish  I’d paid attention to my second impression that Saturday afternoon in Vauxhall.  But I’d read so many books, and invested so much in my own practice, and I wanted the legends to all be true.  My belief system was locked into overdrive, and it wasn’t until around 1970 that I began to accept the unwelcome truth that karate could offer me nothing worth having. 

But back in 1967 I was only 23 and I badly wanted the myths and legends to be true.  Oyama was someone who had been a tremendous influence on me.  I’d never seen him in action, but I had all his books as well as Tengu of Karate by Augustin de Mello, which was a fictionalization of Oyama.   Kyokushin Kai was the logical place for me to go. 

So even though I’d been less than impressed with the training on my single brief visit to the Vauxhall dojo, I joined the LKK.  At first Bob Bolton insisted I had to attend a beginners’ course.  But I wasn’t a fucking beginner (even if i did call it ‘karat’!).  I’d been doing karate (my version of it anyway) longer than Bolton or Arneil, and probably I’d had more fights than the pair of them put together. 

It didn’t take Bolton long to realise that I wasn’t a beginner.  He went up stairs and got Arneil.  After the two of them watched me perform I was immediately   transferred to the advanced class,  where during  kumite I dropped a Swedish second dan.

‘Always hit them when they’re shifting their weight or stepping forward,’ my dad used to say. I did, and it worked.   What then followed was a year of belting guys in the dojo or in competitions, until finally one night I hit one guy too hard and got banned from Kyokushin Kai.  

Whilst at Vauxhall I was still teaching myself and regularly having street fights. During this period I worked various illegal boxing moves that my father had shown me.  I trained them on an old springless mattress wrapped around a tree, occasionally tried them in the dojo, and also tested them for real on the street.    One was the spinning back fist.  Another move I’d read about and now began to perfect was a kick to the femoral artery/testicles/perineum with the toe of my shoe or folded toes. I trained the latter by doing bunny jumps on folded toes on concrete and wooden floors.  I already knew how to walk on folded toes ever since I’d seen monkey boxers in Malaya as a child.  This was the kick I used on one of Jon Bluming’s  guys in Holland that dropped him and rendered him unconscious on the spot.  Blood was pouring out of his nose and he was in shock.  It was a vicious kick, and typical of my streetfighting mentality; I’d only been in Kyokushin Kai a few months, but already they had me on the team.  I hadn’t really grasped the concept of holding back in a fight, and they knew this, but they still entered me. 

Another favourite move was grabbing or clearing my opponent’s extended probing or threatening hand  and repeatedly striking  the guy in the head  with what ever tool was available at the time.  As a variation, I also grabbed the inside of the jacket sleeve or collar with a single or double regular or cross grip, and again, fired off a volley of shots.  Around this time I was also able to stand very close to someone and control one hand or both, or distract him in some way with my hands, and at the same time kick him in the head with a round kick or front kick.  There’s a photo in my website gallery of this move performed during light kumite with Takahashi. http://www.morrisnoholdsbarred.co.uk/07gallery.htm

Of course none of this is new.  It’s been done by others before and since.  Indeed, there isn’t anything new under the sun, only the details by which it is practiced or described.  Much of the stuff currently in vogue I was doing thirty years ago, as were martial artists across various continents long before my time.  

But the purpose of this autobiography up to this point is to illustrate that whatever mindset, athleticism, conditioning, fighting skills, and rationale that I possessed in the late 1960s and early 1970s (which I was later to build upon), it was not down to the instruction of Bolton, Arneil or Kyokushin Kai karate.  I admit, I was inspired by stories of the samurai and Oyama, even though I was later to find out these stories were just that: pure fiction.  But, stories aside, everything I knew, I had taught myself and picked up from my father and various other sources.  

So for those who believe that whatever abilities I currently have are attributable to the few years I spent in formal karate training: that’s absurd.  My fighting abilities and martial art practices were already in place long before I began training with Bolton and Arneil and the Yamaguchis.

From the very beginning, when I did karate I always did my version of the dynamics and tactics, etc.  Therefore, whatever others have said about me (such as Gavin Mulholland’s intended compliment when he described me as the best karate man he’d ever seen) is ironically, misplaced.  What I was doing was not a representation of ‘karate’, but of the fights I’d had combined with what I’d  taught myself and later augmented through my research within the Fujian, Filipino and Indonesian  systems.  I'll talk about that more later. 

Equally, whatever grades/titles I was awarded when formally practicing  karate for my fighting, physical abilities and technical abilities, these grades weren’t the measure of my karate practice from 1967 to 1973.  They were the measure of what I had already achieved through my own efforts long before I entered a karate dojo.

In fact, I’d go as far to say that the years I spent in formal karate training from 1967 to 1973 (or at a stretch 1974) were a complete waste of time.  With hindsight, I’d have been much further forward as a martial artist if I’d have continued to rely solely on teaching myself during this period. 

With my hand on my heart, I can honestly say I learnt nothing of any worth from Bolton, Arneil, the Yamaguchis, Miyazato, or any other so-called karate master from Japan, Okinawa or the West.  Quite the contrary; what they had to teach was all bollocks.

More about karate in the next installment.

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.

But there is more to breaking than many people think, and I'll pick up on this subject next time.

Some questions have arisen on various forums with regard to my relationship with karate.  To set the record straight, I'll be making a series of posts that will shed light on the events that have shaped my life as a martial artist, including how karate factors into the equation--and how it doesn't.

The seed of my martial art journey was planted when I was eight in Malaysia during the Bandit Campaign of the early 1950s, where my father was stationed preparing Gurkha troops for jungle warfare.  My father also organized sports days and events for the military stationed in Ipoh.  As part of the ‘other entertainment’ he recruited members of the Ipoh Chin Woo athletic association  to put on kung fu demonstrations, and so I  got to see kung fu at these events as well as at the local cinema, street vendors, local temples, recreational grounds, and kampongs where I played or visited my Malay, Chinese and Indian friends.  I can still clearly recall these images, which were to become a part of my personal imagery of how I believed the life of warriors to be. I also internalized images of my father’s physical prowess and the Fairburn-type training, milling, bayonet fighting, fencing and boxing training that he conducted in his gymnasium. I saw men running assault courses and the boxing tournaments that my father organized; I saw Gurkha troops training with the kukri  and engaging in bando-style boxing at special festivals, including the decapitating of a water buffalo with one stroke of a large kukri.  And I occasionally saw the bodies of Communist  bandits on the back of a Gurkha  truck parked near the school I attended.

As I’ve written in the autobiography on my website, I was a somewhat wild  kid, always in fights.  I was daring almost to the point of being suicidal.  My mother’s solution was to try to beat it out of me with cricket stumps, steel stair rods, or anything else that was hard that came to hand.  My father, a member of the Army Physical Training Corps Tough Tactic Teams, took a different approach.  He enforced a military style discipline and engaged me in the ways of the military gymnasium. He  encouraged me in sport to be fiercely competitive even when the odds were stacked against me—and he usually stacked the odds against me himself!  I can recall on sports days in Malaya (as Malaysia was then known), irrespective of how much older  and bigger some of the other kids were, he would handicap me in the sprints, throwing the cricket ball and other events.  He still expected to me win because I was Steve Morris’ son.  

My father treated me as if I were a much older boy; when I had tonsillitis as an eight-year-old child in Ipoh, I recall being  placed  in a Land Rover with a Gurkha driver armed with a Sten gun  at the height of the bandit campaign and making the long journey to Kuala Lumper Military Hospital to have my tonsils out. When I arrived at the hospital I refused to go on to the family ward and was finally put on the male ward instead, where I was taken under the wing of the soldiers who were hospitalized there.  Whatever the challenge, I was expected to rise to it.

Like any other kid, I had fights.  Unlike any other kid, I had lots of them, especially after moving from the rural setting of the Welsh farmhouse  where I was born to the bombed out slums of Nechells, Birmingham at the end of the WWII.  The frequency of these fights increased when I was placed in a military  boarding school in Germany from age 11 to 15.  Then, when my father was posted to Tripoli in 1958, I was persuaded by my parents to become a boy soldier.  As the numbers of boys around me increased, so did the frequency of my fights.  Whilst I’d always been a good scrapper, I  never stopped wanting to be a better one.  My motivation came not only because I loved to fight  and win—especially against older and bigger boys—but also because I ran a money lending racket at Harrogate, and getting my money back plus interest wasn’t always easy, if you know what I mean.   

As chance would have it, in 1959 shortly after becoming a boy soldier I saw an advertisement in Titbits  magazine for Leong Fu’s ‘Karato’ correspondence course (coincidentally, he was from Ipoh, the same place  I had spent some of my childhood).  I ordered it, and it was this course that sparked the next nine years of my resourcing all kinds of martial art material. I  collected  books and magazines on boxing, wrestling, ju jutsu, judo, fencing, karate, and military manuals on close-quarter combat and war  .During the nine years I spent in the Army I also  collected  Super 8 films on boxing (and even one of Muay Thai) as well as books on Buddhism and yoga.  I even became a member of the Buddhist society in Russell Square.  Key amongst my collection were four books I’d nicked from  my father: Jack Dempsey’s Championship Fighting and the three fencing books by Roger Croisner, Aldo  Nadi,  and CL de Beamount.

In hindsight, it was these four books that laid the foundations of much of my thinking about martial arts. However, as a teenager the more I read about  Japan, the samurai Zen Buddhism, and karate, the more I became convinced that the Japanese martial arts and karate in particular would take me to the next level as a fighter.  However, I had never seen karate in action except for a brief glimpse of it on a Cliff Mitchellmore  programme called ‘Tonight’ around  1960. My personal interpretation of karate was largely  based on the kung fu I’d seen as a child.

Then, in 1965/6 when on leave from Benghazi, I visited Vernon Bell’s karate dojo in London. What I had imagined karate to be—indeed, what I’d been teaching myself and testing in fights—was something completely different from what was going on in Vernon Bell’s dojo. I’d placed a completely different interpretation on the dynamics as well as application of  karate’s moves.  At the time, I just couldn’t believe that  what Bell’s students were practicing was  karate, particularly with regard to how they fought.  Their kumite bore no resemblance to any fight I’d ever had, or seen   And when some brown belt  broke a  baked half-inch board  after setting up as if he were going to attempt to knock down the fucking  Empire State Building (I was breaking bricks and slabs of concrete and taking the tops of bottles around this time),  I openly laughed  out loud.  The visit was a complete waste of time and I kept telling myself this couldn’t be karate.

But, as I was to later find out, it  was. So for those who state that it took me 30 years to find out that karate wasn’t what it was cracked up to be—actually,I’d already started to figure that one out  in 1965\6, long before karate had become popularized in the West.