Fewer Options, Please

Kimbo Slice

The Kuntawman is back after a recent hiatus with an interesting article about Kimbo Slice. In his opinion Kimbo excelled as a street fighter because he was doing what he was g0od at. Once he started training in MMA, he began doing techniques he didn’t excel at, and instead of relying on a few well-executed techniques, he had a buffet table full of options, some (many?) of which were unfamiliar.

Bruce Lee’s theory was that the untrained man had no technique, but he had a natural fluidity that is an asset. Perhaps it was the naturalness of what Kimbo was doing that made him successful as a street fighter.

We also know that when people are confronted with too many options, that decision making breaks down. Perhaps Kimbo’s problem was one of too many choices.

I think this is a valuable lesson: having hundreds of techniques is not a strength of a system, but a weakness. I have thought that one of the reasons for the success of boxers versus karateka is that boxers have fewer weapons, and fewer choices, so that there is no moment of paralysis when the guy who has hundreds of techniques thinks, “Okay, there’s a punch hurtling toward my face, do I sidestep, crossblock, parry, goose neck block, cross step, front kick, side kick, knife hand….” POW!

Many FMA could benefit from simplification, by stripping down to the bare essentials. That way, the student under attack is not trying to decide which part of the curriculum, that includes everything from staff to bow and arrow, he should do next.

The Hidden Knife -SEAMOK

Amo Guro Michael Blackgrave, Note the Hidden Knife.

I’m really pleased to get to know the SEAMOK crew. I must admit that I was put off by their logo, with the vivid tattoo skull, but at its core the group strikes me as rock solid. Visit them on my links. By the way, SEAMOK is an acronym for Simple, Effective, Aggressive, Methods Of Kombate. We are on the same page.

I’d like to share with you a snippet of their knife thinking, from Amo Guro Michael Blackgrave:

“A lot of systems teach to go up the middle and get into the gut of the situation. I teach the opposite…I try to avoid a center-line engagement preferring to cut and flank..off angle and slash….De’Cadena (chaining) with slashes and a few pops to vital areas. This not only keeps me from getting caught up in an inside game tussle where I can and probably will receive serious injury, it also keeps me in play with freedom of vision and movement to scope for potential multiple opponents. It is much easier to engage when the freedom of movement isn’t impinged by being confined to tight quarters (the inside). This also allows me to slash and pop and get the hell out of Dodge!” Amo Guro Michael Blackgrave

I can’t tell you how many styles are hell bent to get right inside the opponent, eyebrow to eyebrow, and duke it out. They are oh-so-confident that they can wade right into the teeth of an opponent’s attack–with a knife!– and emerge unscathed. Reason cannot penetrate these people, because they are so convinced of their ability to trade shot for shot (of course, in their telling of it, they will completely dominate the opponent so that not even a single shot will land).

Let us just say for the sake of argument that I can go inside an opponent, chest to chest, and totally control him, so that he cannot knee me, elbow me, bite me, headbutt me, grapple me, spit on me, or kick me, all at contact range. What about his homies behind me?

Amo Guro Blackgrave’s strategy (and mine) is the logical strategy:

• Don’t go inside.

• Don’t trade shots.

• Given any sort of choice, hit and run.

• Hit and zone to the outside, while looking for his gangbanger buddies.

• If you don’t think he’ll be deterred by the sight of a knife, don’t let him see your knife until it’s too late.

I Don’t Do It All

Once I was training in Cebu City at a kickboxing gym, when one of the students came up to me and said, “We have 49 kicks in our style. How many do you have in yours?”

“Two,” I replied.

Ego is an unavoidable hazard of the martial arts.

I see these styles with curricula as large as the Texas panhandle. They do single stick, double stick, espada y daga, single knife, double knife, boxing, kicking and wrestling (only you have to call it sikaran and dumog in order to be authentic), the staff, the spear, the bullwhip, projectile weapons, the two-handed stick, weapons with a point at each end, etc. Do they really do all of these weapons or do they just want to brag about doing all of these weapons?

For some of these styles I think one-upmanship is involved. “Look at Master Kidlat’s school; They don’t even do spear and shield.”

One guy on a DVD was teaching the 59 angles of the system. Nobody wants to admit that he only does twelve angles, and you really sound ignorant if all you do are five.

Nobody wants to look like his art is “kulang (“lacking,” or “kurang” in Ilocano). Oops, there I go, dropping Filipino language terms to make me sound authoritative. “What, you don’t speak Tagalog?”

I got the lecture the other day from some guy who does a retreating step, an advancing step, a cross-hopping step, the diagonal slide closing step, etc. It sounds even more impressive when you label these terms in Tagalog or Bisaya.

To put all of this into perspective, just this week a co-worker told me of his conversation with an American veteran of the Pacific campaign in WWII. In that conflict it often came down to hand-to-hand combat. The American faced Japanese soldiers who had martial arts training –he had none. In fact, he only had one technique/strategy, and that was embarrassingly simple.

Imagine the field day that the stylists with the 59 angles, the 27 weapons, the 17 different footwork methods, the Tagalog, Bisaya, and old Filipino alphabet would have with this guy. Why, he wouldn’t last 15 minutes! That ignorant grunt didn’t even have diagonal cross-stepping footwork.

Yet he survived and prevailed. In combat to the death the American vet’s only technique was to “bullrush” the slighter Japanese, who were trying to work their complicated techniques on him. Sometimes it came down to him slamming the enemy’s head against a rock. And now he’s a very old man telling his story.

Don’t fall into the trap. Don’t feel like you have to know it all. Be on the lookout for the baseless puffery of guys bragging about all of the stuff they do (and “stuff” is not my first choice of words) in order to make you feel like an idiot, like you’re somehow lacking because you don’t do everything, including the bow and arrow.