Making the Transition

by Paul McGovern

I thought it might be interesting for my fellow JKD students to hear first hand what it is like for a practitioner of a traditional art, in my case Karate, to make the change to a non-classical approach.

My martial arts career began in 1982 when I commenced training with Richard Bradford of Goshin-Ryu Karate and was promoted to black belt in 1987.

I was fortunate enough to encounter an instructor by the name of Peter Orford during this time and this was my first contact with the art of Kali as Peter had studied in Manila under Ernesto Presas.

It is worth noting that I was fortunate to train with some excellent martial artists of the calibre of Chan Cheuk-Fai in the days prior to frivolous litigation and the risk of getting "cleaned up" at training was an accepted part of the deal.

After leaving Goshin-Ryu, I travelled around training with Kyukoshin, Shotokan, Budokan, Arjuken Karate among others to expand my knowledge.

I first attended a JKD class as an observer in around 1996 and because I was conditioned to believe that a martial arts class consisted of gi-clad students moving in orderly rows, I could not relate to the approach and relative informality.

What I saw was very different to what I was used to.

At this stage, I rejected what I was seeing and this is symptomatic of my being trapped in the classical mess.

My next step was to return to what was familiar and non-threatening to me. Karate.

After once again becoming disenchanted with karate, I joined the JKD Association and was so disoriented and to be honest, demoralised much in the same way that Dan Inosanto was after his initial sparring session with Bruce Lee in 1964 after the Long-Beach Internationals.

To quote Dan, "it was like studying an occupation for many years and being told that you were suddenly obsolete".

I feel that to successfully understand our art, you must engage in a great deal of honest introspection and ultimately finding the cause of your own ignorance.

In my case, I needed to move away from the security of Kata and fixed routines and focus more on effective techniques and fluid responses in order to grow.

There is an excellent article in the latest Blitz by a Karate Instructor that accurately and concisely illustrates the problem with the modern day interpretation of Karate.

Karate as it is practiced today focuses primarily on the aesthetics of the technique as it applies to the competition arena and the premise that the only attack you will ever face is that which uses karate.

In my view and in my experience, Karate teachers will only address the issue of weapons training in the following fashion:

1.) Weapons like the sai, tonfa, samurai swords etc. are taught much in the manner that people re-enact civil war battles with authentic weapons with no  relevance to the real world of self defence.

2.) The other approach is to simply "make it up as you go along".

The insanity of creating a weapons defence where the knife is thrust from the hip whilst lunging forward in a traditional Karate stance accompanied by a kiai (yell) would be amusing were it not such an abandonment of the student/ teacher duty of care.

The defender then assumes a stance mirroring that of his/her attacker and proceeds to attempt to dispatch the attacker with typical karate blows while the attacker remains frozen in place in an aesthetically pleasing but unrealistic stance.

To conclude, people, if given the choice, will invariably seek out the safest, most comfortable and non-threatening alternative when choosing a martial arts school, however, in all good consciousness, martial arts instructors should focus on giving students what they need and not what they want.

This can be undermined in many cases through the need for full-time instructors to make a living through student retention.

I should also point out that as someone who sat through the Anita Cobby murder trial in the late 80's on behalf of Anita's family, I have seen the level of callous indifference that people are capable of displaying toward their chosen victim in the event of an assault.

It is this thought that should be paramount in an instructors mind when teaching self-defence and not about whether the students will excel on the tournament mat thereby providing more champions for the school to crow about in order to attract more students with the resultant increase in revenue.