Uechi-Ryu.com

Definately a continuim Van

mental conditioning from sport is something that cant be explained , you have to have more will than can be imagined , when your competing against the best , you need to control your emotions , clear your mind , build your intent ..... the long wait to the premier event at the end of the day , and fight then quickly recompose ......

being able to flick that switch , I remember having to lead my Team into a kumite finals , A giant opponent from Uzbekistan of all places had just broken the Australian heavyweight champions Jaw with a spinning hook Kick in the heavyweight mens final , he must of outweighed me by twenty to thirty kilos , the whole team looked at me as to who I was sending out , I was clearly the most expereinced and we were outmatched , and we had bigger guys , but you could see there eyes ..... I got this

you learn a lot about yourself , I couldnt speak much russian , but we had won and had a great night and the respect and comraderie sure transcended any language barrier .

Right on, Marcus.

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Van

I don't want to be misunderstood here. I like sport, but we must be very carefull and differentiat between sport and combat. I am a big fan of boxing, but it took me a while to realise that in a streetfight if you fought like a boxer you could loose. There are things that are not considered by boxers..for example...a streetfighter is not bound by rounds,you do not wear protective boxing gloves, a streetfight can continue when somebody is knocked unconscious or knocked down, you can use weapons, multiple opponents.there is no referee to call time or worse break up a clinch....and the worst aspect of all is that of timing, a boxer has his mind set to fighting 10 X 3 minute rounds or thereabouts and he will pace himself accordingly a streetfight lasts at most a couple of minutes and the intensity and speed can be a lot greater than even a really good boxer is used to, especially when fueled by drugs or alcohol.

Ray,

What you say is all true,but I think it is a mistake to think that tournament competitors, neither know nor train for also the realities of street fighting, where their attributes developed in tournament fighting help greatly_ and I don't mean tournaments where you see a game of touch-tag by people dressed up in protective gear like a bunch of Michelin men_

But maybe you are not thinking this, and it is just the way it is being interpreted here.

Think in terms of stepping back into time a bit, when tournaments were a hard row to hoe with heavy contact and take downs, and imagine people like a Joe Lewis, Chuck Norris, Mike Stone, and even our own Kyohide Shinjio, who was the All-Okinawa heavy contact tournament champion for ten years or more.

No question anyone of these 'sport fighters' would do well in any street fight with empty hands.

Now, if you introduce weapons, it is a different situation. A 12 year old gangbanger with a gun or even a knife, highly motivated, will kill a Sumo wrestler.

Like Stryke said, it is all about the continuum of training...
they are all tools in the tool box...that make the practitioner better suited to self protection.

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Van

Quote
"But maybe you are not thinking this, and it is just the way it is being interpreted here."

That's right, we sometimes have a picture of who we are talking to in our heads, we even predict how they will behave and it is sometimes very wrong. I do like sport fighting.but even those people that you talked about could be taken by surprise in a streetfight........somebody fought Mike Tyson in a streetfight, don't forget.
Many years ago I knew of a gangster who terrorised a business man I knew ,he had a wine bar and this guy used to go in and bully and threaten people to give him bottles of expensive wine.The gangster was big and fat.but back in the day he had boxed, although he never got anywere, however he had "fast hands" and he could unleash a furious assault for about a minute, usually the first one or two punches would take you out, and he would also do it to women who refused his advances...........really I suppose I'm talking about the real underbelly of the city.......the people that you don't want to know

Ray,
We need to be clear on what the point of our discussions is.

Anybody can be taken by surprise in a street fight, and the surprises can be many_ we all know that_ this has been the theme of my forum for years on end.

Any serious student of self defense/self protection is likely well aware of the difference between sports and combat, mindset and dynamics of violence. Even more so if he has done more specific training, or even read books by Rory Miller. But that guarantees nothing in the street.

The underbelly of the world, the young gangbanger, the mafia hit man and the like, will always have an advantage even over the strongest men in the world the most well trained boxers, the best martial artists, the armed man, etc., you name it_ especially if surprise is a factor.

You wrote

Here you are talking about two different horses…the clip of the full contact event is nothing but a sport event governed by rules with a referee in the ring. It is not street combat.

Now if you change the engagement_ by removing referee and rules, and allow the fighters to go at each other anyway they want _you will see a different fight looking more like taking someone out with mindset and continuous striking based on what skills the fighter took to the ring. That would be more like combat, but not entirely, because it is not a street fight, and there is no catching the other fighter by surprise. But think of the attributes each fighter took to the ring.

What we need to concentrate on is percentages of success if there is to be any. And percentages favor the well prepared.

_Catching by surprise or not, underbelly of the world or not, mafia hit man or not, a well rounded practitioner along the continuum we discuss, such as I.e., a Joe Lewis of Chuck Norris, blending their sports attributes with tactical weapons continuum, will have a better chance than the average practitioner, if any chances of fighting back/survival present themselves.

That simple…it is all about percentages.

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Van

I think if we were sitting around sipping a fine old malt and discussing martial arts what I am saying it would be understood, really I suppose what I'm trying to say is that we compartmentalise things.we see things in a certain setting......KATA is one setting and we view precision and intent or focus, then we look at kumite and we see other things "spirit", "fighting Spirit" etc...........and everybody does this, even those who say that they don't, it is a human condition, and one that we can fall foul of.....we look at some kid who looks like a joke with a big old gun.........and he ain't going to shoot us, his bowie knife is a joke, heck.he can't even hold it in a "proper" grip.....these are all misconceptions, what we expect is not what we get, and what we get can look a whole lot less threatening than it really is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gVWeHaZIys

people like these , maybe not these are dangerous, seriously dangerous, and we need to take them seriously although folks don't

What you say is all true, Ray, but I don't think that many people reading my forum would misjudge what is shown in the clip you posted.

Any training, including the kata etc., carrying a weapon_as well as a mindset to use them with some purported skill...shall always remain tools in a tool box that guarantee nothing in a street fight, but may help in dire needs.

You will remember my many threads here in the past, trying to get across the same concepts...

Yet there will be some who won't be convinced, thus the reason for the forum wars we had in the past.

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Van