regarding high kicks, I once saw an old film (I’m guessing late 70s or early 80s) which consisted of martial arts demonstrations where one of the guys was… well the closest I can describe it is ‘slapping’ the ‘opponent’ upside the head with his foot. THing was the guy was moving his leg faster than most people I’ve seen move their hands. I could not believe how fast this guy kicked. :eek:
Unfortunately I can’t provide a cite. I went through a period when I was younger where I rented every single martial arts instructional/documentary video my library could get its hands on, so I really don’t know which tape it could’ve been or who the fellow was. 
It was in the non-fiction section so supposedly legit, but…
I don’t think he’s talking about kendo but rather kempo karate. Google “kempo karate” and you’ll get dozens of schools for that style. Some places also spell it “kenpo”.
Google turns up 1.73 million hits for “kempo,” including many, many kempo academies.
Kempo/kenpo is a semi-generic term for a branch of mostly empty-hand arts, primarily from Okinawa. Wikipedia explains the kenpo/kempo transliteration pretty well: kenpo or kempo.
You might be thinking of “Sugarfoot” Cunningham.
Most modern army personnel are not very highly trained in combatives. It doesn’t really pay to teach more than the basics, and to practice much at all. Better to train them how to use their rifle and side arm. really the only people that woul be good, would likely be part of elite black ops teams to whom melee combat might be a (non-zero) reality on the field.
What I’d like to see is a no holds barred, to the death, match between a medieval knight or samurai (unarmed) against the best MMA we have today. I have a feeling the modern guy woudl get killed, but it would be nice to see anyway. 
We may be heading into GD territory here but I’m not sure that I’d regard that as a forgone conclusion. There’s a vast amount of knowledge and experience and training out there right now, backed up by lots of public contests so everyone can see what works and what doesn’t work - it’s not like there’s some Super Top Secret Invincible Fighting Method that Sir Lancelot knew and which has been lost to the ages. The top MMA fighters spend all day training for one on one fights - a knight or samurai is much like the soldiers that you referenced, I’ll bow to your wisdom on exactly how they trained but I bet that a considerable amount of time was spent on armed combat (along with other stuff irrelevant to this discussion…I’m sure that plenty of samurai had wonderful etiquette skills) and that’s going to be time wasted in this case.
You’ll find many “americanized” spelling variations, usually done as a way of trademarking a new flavor of a traditional style, or trying to create distiction for a particular school.
e.g. Wing Chun vs Wing Tsun vs Ving Tsun or Shaolin vs Shao Lin vs Shaolin Do.
Sure there is. It’s called “narrative flow.”
Saw some televised fight many years ago between a (I’m guessing) MMA guy and a super duper black belt Karate kind of guy (with a kewl ponytail), the MMA guy started off by grabbing the guy’s ponytail and then dragging him around the ring beating the crap out of him till the ref stopped it. Is about the time I decided never to wear my hair long, just in case.
It doesn’t do that good of a job. It says that traditional Hepburn is the “the current standard” for Japanese romanization, which is not true. Under revised Hepburn (the most commonly used system of romanization today), the n in kenpo does not change to m.
You’re right in that there is no secret technique a knight would have known, I think it will come down to attitude and training.
A skilled MMA fighter today has learned, practiced and executed his skills in… MMA tournaments.
A knight/samurai would have trained & practice with the goal of killing his opponent in warfare, the duel, as well as ‘defeat him’ in the martial sport context of his dojo/sallet. I would expect an experienced knight/samurai to also have executed his techniques IN warfare/duel/judicial combat to KILL his oppoents, as quickly and effectively as possible, something the modern MMA guy probably has not done, in fact, would have trained hard NOT to do.
So the edge goes to the Knight/samurai, though I’m certainly not saying the modern MMA guy couldn’t possibly win, I would say he is at a serious martial disavantage.
I’d also think neither the knight nor the mma guy would pull anything either one of them would have seen before.
I don’t agree with the comparison between the modern infantry soldier and a medieval one.
Combat at that time, for the warrior classes, was overwhelmingly melee oriented. The masters themselves point out the interconnection between the weapons of the time and the grapple (as all unarmed techniques were called). Also, martial arts of the time were not really taught as seperate schools as they are today where there is judo, karate and kenjutsu. A knight must learn all, or be vulnerable.
You’re right though, this is heading into GD/IMHO realm though, sorry guys!
Thanks for the clarification, you might want to correct the wikipedia entry. If you don’t mind, I might email you to get a little more info.
That might have been Erik Paulson in the 1996 World Combat Championship (although Erik’s not a karate guy, he’s a well-rounded MMA guy and shootfighting champ). Here’s an magazine excerpt about it -
- from Erik’s website. I’ve attended some of his seminars in the past and the guy is just amazing, a freaky good grappler. He no longer sports the ponytail and I’ve never asked him about it.
I don’t mind.
Ultimate Fighting is as different from stage combat as action movies with guns are to shooting competitions. Jackie Chan et al. are not in the UFC or other mixed martial arts competitions because that’s not what they’re trained for. The kind of fighting exhibited is relatively brutal sport fighting. Some of the things Jackie does in his movies would probably be very useful in a real fight – some of the improvised weapons, like using a jacket to temporarily immobilize an oppenent, are brilliant – but a lot of it is flash.
UFC fighting is nothing like real fighting. It is sport fighting. Granted, I wouldn’t want to take on one of those guys since their conditioning is great, and they are used to taking a lot of punishment and giving it right back. Their limitation is that they train to fight with rules. Real fights don’t have rules and they often don’t have just one opponent.
Like Kinthalis said, fighting to kill and fighting to fight are totally different things. Historically, weapon training and grappling training was pretty much integrated. I agree with Kinthalis that most MMA guys would get literally killed going up against an historical warrior. Contrary to popular conception, there wasn’t a whole lot of Super Secret Technique stuff in the past, either with samurai or knights. Little tricks like those are usually close to worthless without solid fighting techniques anyway. These people trained in warfare every day for most of their adult lives. Their job was killing people with hand-held weapons. A modern fighter would have a lot of inhibitions that would end up getting him killed, even in the unlikely event that he was a technically better fighter.
That rules out most of what I trained for. The martial arts I’ve learned have all been focused on the practical, as in the “kill or cripple him, and do it quickly” school of thought. Many of the rules here are for safety, which I totally understand as the focus is on something completely different from fighting for your life. Others are there so that fighters put on a good show.
These would severely limit what I could do:
Some escapes from throws or grapples I know use a head strike, eye gouge, or groin shot as either a primary strike or as a way to cause the opponent to let go or adjust his position so there’s a chance to get out of it. The ban on small joint manipulation would take away all the wrist locks, which is a big chunk of my training. Throat strikes are integral to some of the techniques, along with neck strikes and blows to the back of the head.
One of the kata I learned involves getting behind your opponent after avoiding his opening strike and then front-kicking his kidneys. With several of the throws, the object is to throw him so that he lands on his head or neck. Kicking him when he’s down is an insurance move. Taking an extra second to do that means that he might not be able to get up and chase you when you get the hell out of whatever truly screwed-up situation got you into the fight in the first place.
I occasionally watch competitions like Pride, K1, or UFC because I’m interested in fighting. They deserve some credit from the martial arts community because they have shaken out a lot of crap from traditional martial arts and have made schools teach things in a little more practical way. It’s nice to see some of the things my early teachers told me about how real fights happen partially validated, like that striking is definitely not the end-all and be-all of fighting and that high-kicking will probably get you into trouble.
MMA competitions have their place, but you have to remember that they are sports exhibitions. Sports have to balance risk with safety and they are partially meant to entertain. It’s a different kind of entertainment from movie or stage fighting, and is much more related to reality than either of those, but is still substantially different than life or death fights.
I’d like to point out that the MMA Vs. Traditional Martial Arts Vs. t3h rEaL sTr33tZzz debate has been an ongoing warzone in martial arts forums for years. So take what any “martial artist” or MMA spectator writes here with a grain of salt.
As for the OP’s last line, it’s actually kind of funny because “too deadly for the ring” has been one of the reasons given by a lot of traditional martial artists as to why they don’t participate in sport fighting. MMAer’s often counter with the argument that tactics like eye-gouges and biting isn’t effective as often as it sounds, etc., etc…
Like I said, it’s an ongoing thing. Go pop some popcorn and visit some martial arts forums. It’s better than any daytime soap opera.
Actually, I expect the biggest advantage our friendly knight/samurai (yeah, I decided to be a Fighter with the Knight package, but at level 5 I dualled to Samurai and…) is that he’s probably trained to take more punishment. Few modern training regimens are quite as brutal as some of the classic ones Ive heard about. Of cours,e this doesn’t apply to all Knights or Samurai.
Wrist locks are okay, actually; the ban on small joint manipulation takes out finger and toe locks.
True, but so far we’ve been using pretty good spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and nobody’s threatened anybody with the dim mak death touch yet. We’re an unusually classy brand of internet warriors around here.