Some martial artists are. I’ve been in a handful of real fights, some where I was on the unfriendly end of a weapon. The martial art I first trained in dealt explicitly with real-world stuff. We did nothing that was sport-oriented, everything was meant for practical application, much of it was based on dislocations, breaking bones, and potentially deadly target areas. It was mostly grappling and throws mixed with strikes. Evasion, escape, and ways avoiding a fight before it started were also important principles. That shaped how I looked at fighting and other martial arts schools later.
One of my criticisms of mixed martial arts matches is that the rules they impose—which are there for good reason, the safety of the participants—favor the kind of fighting that eventually dominated. People often bring UFC or other events in as litmus tests of what works. It works in an arena with rules, two fighters, and a ref. It’s not real life.
You damn sure don’t want to be rolling around on the ground with a guy in most situations. In bars, you’re giving his buddies free shots at your head and kidneys. In the street in most cities, you’re getting up close and personal with whatever nasty possibly disease-ridden debris is there in the gutter. Broken glass, bits of metal, and close encounters with concrete curbs can seriously cramp your style even if you happen to “win” such a fight. In any fights with more than one opponent you NEVER want it to go to the ground. If you go down, you’re probably going to the hospital. If you’re really lucky, you won’t have any permanent injuries.
There have been a couple of threads about martial arts recently, asking whether training matters at all. No one would propose a situation like, “Who would win a one-on-one game: an NBA player or Joe Average who plays pickup b-ball at the Y?” but that’s essentially what people are asking in these threads. Of course training makes a difference. There’s no magic to it. People with training generally are better at doing something than people without that training. Some martial arts have a better area of focus or a better repertoire of skills, in my opinion, but pretty much any martial arts training beats knowing nothing about how to fight.
The only danger in training is gaining unfounded confidence. You’re not a badass because you’ve taken a year of karate. Any teacher who creates an atmosphere that is conducive to such thinking is both immoral and an idiot of the highest order. After a year, you’re like an undergrad at university; you should be starting to realize the boundaries of your own ignorance. A good teacher would let you know where you’re still weak and make sure you understand the limitations of your training versus the outside world, while still maintaining a reasonable level of confidence. Unfortunately, I’ve not seen many good teachers out there, so the immoral idiots are sometimes in the majority.
Hey, I just picked up Tracy’s DVD on the 22 kata’s and yellow through black belt techniques to get my sorry ass back in shape. Don’t wait 20 years to see if you still remember long 3 :smack: He’s definately the Parker lineage even if it’s the Tracy brand.
Minor pet peeve hijack: Every martial arts class I’ve taken has eventually had us learn how to fall safely. They always teach how to fall on flat, smooth, usually padded ground. They never teach you how to fall safely on stairs. Where do I always fall? Stairs. You know how much slapping out helps when you’re falling on stairs? Not much.
I’m reminded of a bit in Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, where he talks about how Angel’s routinely pound on those ‘karate guys’ - because the karate guys forget that when you fight with one Angel, you fight with them ALL - doesn’t matter who started it, or who was at fault. Also, the Angel’s had a nasty habit of continuing to fight, even after injured.
Similar to the reason I have been in the number of fights that I have been. I played rugby in college and our general rule was that if you saw a fellow rubgy player in a fight, you jumped in. And since there never seemed to be a lack of people that wanted to prove how tough they were by fighting a rugby player, we had our share of scraps.
Yeah, I’m wondering that myself. Because you know who a “street brawl” is usually with in my world?
-Fat stupid drunk guy who still thinks he’s in a college fraternity house
-Asshole lawyer or banker type who thinks spouting off about how much money he makes will scare you into not financing an M&A between your fist and his teeth
-You’re basic 22 year old kid shooting his mouth off who thinks playing JV football in high school made him a toughguy.
And the usual “technique” is shoving each other or scrambling on the ground like a couple of kindergardners on the playground until the bouncers eject them.
IOW, white, spoiled out of shape bigmouths with all bark and no bite unless they have 40 lbs and 3" on you.
I don’t know any Hell’s Angels or ever see any in the bars I frequent.
I hung out in the meanest, toughest bars around. Not because I was into that, but because I happened to like live rock and blues music, and those were the kinds of bars that had that music. Lots and lots of bikers. In fact, I kind of hung around in that circle. We’re not talking about Hell’s Angels, but just working class guys who drove bikes, lived hard, drank a lot, did their fair share of recreational drugs, etc.
One thing I discovered when I went to university - it was a lot easier to get into a fight in a college bar than in a real tough bar. Because in a college bar there are a lot of young drunk males who don’t actually understand what the stakes are. So they bluster and swagger, and when they fight it’s usually a wrestling affair with a punch or two thrown until various buddies pull them apart.
In the tough bars, fights usually end with one guy being carried away on a stretcher, or being helped away by his friends while spitting out teeth and nursing a broken arm, broken fingers, or other serious damage. As a result, people tend to be a little less inclined to fight for no reason. Treat the people around you with respect and dignity like you want to be treated, and you’ll have no problems. In fact, a few of those guys becomes close friends that would still back me to this day if I ever got in trouble.
In a college bar, you could get in a fight just by looking at the wrong girl at the wrong time, or accidentally making eye contact with some guy in a bad mood.
Yeah, that was one of our criticisms of the judo and aikido guys we would get in our dojo occasionally. Their ukemi is tailored for a nice even surface. Aikido in particular does rolls from too high of a position, IMO. We did weird stuff like jumping over a wall (simulated by a crash pad) and rolling out, or practicing for taking high falls by dropping about a body length in height from a bar or tree branch, or falling when your legs are immobilized. We learned how to roll on concrete or asphalt—really lets you feel where your hot-spots are when you’ve got small bruises over the places you’ve banged a couple of times. The discomfort pretty much forces you to learn to do it right. We didn’t slap out unless needed to protect something more vital, like your spine. Our basic rolls didn’t include slapping out. Your body pretty much learns when that’s needed by being thrown and taking lots of falls.
Principles are pretty much the same for doing all of these successfully. Make yourself—your body and your movements—as smooth as possible. If possible, use your limbs to absorb shock and get you as close to the ground as possible before beginning the roll. Protect your head by tucking your neck or twisting your body so that some other body part hits first. Try not to let any one point of your body take the hit, let your whole body absorb the shock. Relax; tensing up makes you all pointy and easy to injure. When you think you’ve got it, test by doing a slow roll on a hard surface. You’ll quickly learn where you’ve got corners sticking out or where you’re being lazy about absorbing shock with your limbs.
When you’ve worked that way long enough, you can take nice smooth rolls from just about any position. I got good enough that I could do a dynamic roll (throwing yourself out of the way of a strike and turning it into a roll) just about anywhere without more than some slight bruising from repeated rolls on a hard surface. Of course, in real techniques, your intent is to project your opponent onto his head or another easily-injured body part, so even learning how to fall well might not save you completely in an actual fight, but it will probably decrease your chances of being seriously injured. Injuries from random falls and other clumsiness will be greatly reduced.
I’ve used ukemi to do stuff like escape a broken ankle from jumping over a bush and almost, but not quite, missing the curb. I let my leg collapse to protect my ankle from the strain, twisted a bit in the air, and turned it into a roll. My friends weren’t sure if they should applaud or call me a klutz. I’ve fallen on the stairs twice. Hardwood flooring + socks + steep Japanese staircases + hurrying downstairs to answer the phone = Sleel sliding downstairs on his back. I tucked my chin into my chest, flattened my back to prevent any one part from impacting first, and tried to let my whole body take the hit. The first time, I had one sore spot between my shoulder-blades because I’d rounded that part too much. The second time, a couple years later, I somehow managed to jam a toe, probably when my foot slipped. Otherwise, I was fine. I might have broken my damn neck if I hadn’t done all that weird ukemi practice when I was younger.
My point exactly. Not like I’m hard core or anything, but I find that the best way to avoid getting into a fight in a college bar or by extension, a post college Upper East Side/Jersey Shore after work happy hour crowd bar is basically carry yourself like someone who when they fight, are there to fight for real. Basically that means not getting goaded into stupid pissing contests with drunk assholes, but also standing your ground.
I was in a bar one time and some typical drunk frat-type asshole (of which I’ve had a lot of experience) is bothering one of the girls my friend and I are with (who, truth be told, we picked up in the last bar we were at). So I calmly but firmly move his hand out of our way and he’s all like “wanna fight?!!”. After debating whether to smash my bear bottle in his face, I simply say “I’m not going to fight you” and then proceed to stand there calmly drinking my beer. Well apparently, he (and his three buddies who I saw earlier) don’t really know what to do. So he’s like “I thought you didn’t want to fight” and I’m like “that’s right”. Doesn’t mean I’m going to go running screaming from the bar like a scared little girl. Basically, it puts them in a position where they have to consider long and hard how much they want to start a fight (my general rule of thumb is if they haven’t taken a swing at you right off that bat, they don’t really want to fight you and are trying to bluff their way through).
Anyhow, on occassion where I find myself in a bar where the clientelle is togher than the spoiled jerkoffs I usually encounter, I generally find that not being an asshole is the best defense.
