Came across this article when googling my old friend Brian Fitkin to see what he was up to, and I see he gives me a couple of mentions.  The article  starts on p. 12.  There is an interesting point in there that Brian does mention.  People often question the validity of my claim that Oyama's first knockdown tournament (and many of the subsequent ones) were fixed.  Brian more or less confirms this. 

There is one thing about Brian.  We both decided to come home from Japan at the same time.  I'd taken the Trans-Siberian railway on my way over, and that was an experience and a half.  But I didn't want to repeat it going back, and I was going to fly.  But on his way over to Japan, Brian had seen a crash at Moscow Airport and now he didn't want to fly.  So we were due to leave by ship from Yokohama.  But on the day, he didn't turn up.  The boat's now pulling away from the dockside and I'm standing there with Brian Waites and Gary Spiers and Steve Peck waving me good-bye from the dock, and I'm cursing Brian under my breath because I'm stuck on this boat going back the way I didn't want to go.  As Peck and them are getting smaller and smaller with the distance, I'm thinking, WTF, Brian?  Then I see this little tiny launch heading toward the boat, bouncing on the waves, and this guy is standing up waving his arms at the ship.  I'm like, fuck me it's Brian!

One day I'll put up the stories about what happened to us on the way back.  Needless to say, Brian Fitkin is one of the best fighters I've ever seen, bar none.  And a great guy, to boot.  But he's a little more law-abiding than me.

Funny enough, in this same issue on p. 24 Dennis Martin refers to the same incident in Holland, and also claims I nearly killed him....well, have a look.  It made me laugh. 

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.

From my very first break and every one that was to follow I never intended to promote the notion of the destructive power of karate or of myself.  I did breaking because I  saw its direct application to the fight.  Even my ability to break arms with what  Nick Hughes describes as a middle block from karate (White Crane would be a more accurate description) owes much to my ability to break engineering bricks and other challenging materials. The analysis and refinement of the processes involved in breaking would eventually lead to my ability to break bones during an exchange.

Whilst it is true that Oyama was the inspiration behind many of my breaks, I was working purely on the basis of photos.  Nobody taught me to break.  I initiated my own programme of breaking, taught myself, and subsequently analyzed and researched the processes involved so as to gain a deeper understanding.

This is why I do not credit karate for any part of my performance.  My ability to demonstrate ‘supernormal’ power (not superhuman, just supernormal) and my understanding of the psychological, physiological and physical dynamics involved in doing so comes out of my own work.  It owes nothing to karate.  Some karate master didn’t take me aside and  teach me any of it.  Nobody showed me, for example, how to internally generate and externally express the forces by which I was able  to stamp  twice through the Nipori  dojo floor (and as I’ve heard since, crack the cross beam) during a performance of the kata Saifa.  Nobody taught me, or even gave me a clue, how to smash a free-standing milk bottle, do the same to a brick, or crush engineering bricks laying  flat on the floor without supports or spacers.  Nor did anybody teach me any of the other so-called impossible things I’ve done.

Sure,  the karate masters, like many of the kung fu masters I was to see and  meet along the way, rambled on about ki or chi, but when it came to demonstrate this supernormal quality in a  breaking demonstration, striking a compliant student or being struck by one with hands, feet or some object, it was pretty obvious to me that the whole thing was a sham.  It is little wonder that if the so-called masters of the East  fake it, then their counterparts in the West will follow suit and  do the same, to the point where thousands of people fake  their ability to produce destructive power.

I suppose that if you are calling yourself a master, or if you believe you are a martial artist and promote the existence of the mystical powers of ki or chi, then you have to show that these powers are true.  The only problem is that most martial artists have never experienced anything resembling supernormal power, nor are they able to demonstrate it.  So they have to fake it.  

Rather than the ‘masters’ being amongst the most enlightened people on the planet,  they are probably amongst the most  deluded  and deceitful.  When you think about it, it’s really not surprising, because the masters of the East and the West have no reality checks.  Everything they do is about creating an illusion of being a  martial artist  and the possessor of special powers—amongst which, of course, is breaking.  They certainly never have to fight.

As I’ve said, as a martial artist everything I do or did in my training has been supportive of the reality of a fight.  Like karate’s kata, bunkai and kumite, faking or engaging in unchallenging breaks is not supportive of that reality as I know it to be. So when I did breaks they were for real and done with the sense that I was breaking somebody’s bones and that if I didn’t get it right I’d break mine.        

This brings me to conditioning.  Whilst it’s true that bricks don’t hit back, they do have the potential to break your hands or seriously fuck them up if you hit them wrong—not unlike the human skull—especially if  your hands haven’t been conditioned to hit hard things. For me as a fighter, the head has always been the major target, and the knockout, stun or complete disorientation of my opponent the best outcome of my strikes to his head.  However, whilst the more yielding hinge and point of the jaw are favoured pre-emptive RAS targets, relatively easy to hit when the head isn’t moving, they ain’t that easy to hit once the fight is under way and the head is moving all over the place.  Targeting the jaw when the fight’s underway, you’re just as likely to strike the skull, eye sockets, cheekbones, or an elbow that is part of your opponent’s intentional or unintentional defence.

In my book, rather than just targeting the jaw so as  to produce a rotational  RAS  knockout, stun or disruption of the labyrinthine system, it’s better to target the whole of the head and be able  to generate and deliver enough force with your hands to hit anywhere on the head.  In this way you will not only possibly cause a knockout, stun or disorientation, but increase your chances of success by being equally able to collapse an eye socket or cheekbone, shatter his jaw, or for that matter  hit a  defending  elbow without sustaining appreciable damage.  A damaged or broken hand is the last thing you want in a fight!  You need to have your hands free to switch to some other form of attack, hand-fighting, clinch work, a throw, takedown, or some form of defence, for example.

Being able to generate bone-breaking forces with hands that have been conditioned and tested is an important and often overlooked attribute that you should possess as a fighter.  To be able to use your natural weapons with complete confidence and commitment, they have to be tested against something similar to what they will need to destroy—just like any weapon would be tested.  Unlike a prize fighter of the modern era, on the streets you can’t protect your hands by wearing gloves.  Apart from wearing knuckle dusters, the only way to protect them is to strengthen the supportive structures of the hand and also condition your hands so as to raise your pain threshold and become capable of delivering and sustaining some serious impacts.

Testing your conditioning is one of the purposes of performing breaks.  Waiting to test your hands in a fight might be too late; better to test them in the gym. Breaking that is challenging and punishing (i.e., if you get it wrong, your hands are seriously hurt) is the test I chose.  And I recommend it to other martial artists.  Unfortunately, a lot of bricks you see being used in martial arts demonstrations are pre-baked and could probably be broken by a powerful fart!  Where’s the challenge in that?

Because of the strong possibility of damaging the hands in a bare-fisted fight, a lot of people (particularly within the self-protection industry) elect to use the palm rather than the fist in the belief it is the more natural weapon.  But here’s the thing: even though I was able to perform some pretty spectacular breaks by slapping and palming through bricks, slabs of concrete, and coconuts, I was able to perform more spectacular breaks using my fists once they were conditioned.  However, as far as brick-breaking was concerned, my elbows were the most devastating of all.  The trouble was, they were  only effective at close range and in a  limited way.  The weapon I found to be the most effective in a fight at all ranges, levels, and angles was the fist—but only because it had been seriously  conditioned. 

By the way, it’s pretty obvious that conditioning your hands to be able to break static bricks isn’t going to enhance other necessary fighting attributes. (These include dynamic visual acuity, reactive speed/power to a visual or tactile stimulation, visual tracking, visual/tactile memory, dynamic depth perception, dynamic balance, sense of both regular and broken rhythm, perception of interval of time, timing, hand/eye/ foot coordination, dynamic concentration, mindset, opportunism, mental toughness,  anaerobic and anaerobic conditioning, athleticism, fighting skills, tactics and strategies. However, these other attributes can be developed relatively safely in other ways in training).  Having said this, conditioning the hands to break, and learning to perform the breaks themselves, can provide some crucial components toward your destructiveness in a fight. 

If the breaks are challenging, it’s possible to get a handle on how to generate those internal and external forces by which to break bones.  This is accomplished through the development of internal representations comprised of visual imagery and biochemical, kinesthetic and biomechanical factors.  It’s an incredibly difficult process to describe, but one which is fundamental to breaking if you want to make your breaking practice translate into the fight. 

And the fight is what it’s all about.

The subject of breaking and all its offshoots is too big to squeeze into a single post.  So I’ll talk more it next time, and then I’ll be back to ‘karate and me’...

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.

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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.