Put on your goggles as
we will commence mud-flinging at THE
most common form of training that claims to be reality-based or reality
focused---
Duel Based
Training
To get us going let us
define terms.
Duel: A contest between two people with deadly
weapons to settle a point of honor.
No-brainer there, huh?
That definition is
standard and holds, while there may be a variety of weapons at play, and some
differences in how the two Honor-Wounded approach the game, but, overall, we
have two at play in a contest.
[See Barbara Holland’s
delightful Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling from Swords at Dawn to
Pistols at Dusk for the staggering same-ness of it all. Wounded pride, mano
y mano, tragic outcomes, etc.]
No one doubts that the
stakes of the duel are high. Life or death, or perhaps till first blood
wounding, which was still a fearsome prospect in the days before antibiotics.
Hence many duels being
conducted stripped to the waist—even female duelists—cloth fibers steel-pierced
into a wound compounds the chances of infection.
Again, no one doubts a
duel is a deadly, or potentially deadly affair.
But…a duel is still a
contest.
It is still single
combat.
It is still two competitors.
It is, in essence, a
sport with raised stakes.
Civilizing
Peltzman Effects
We must not forget
that “duels” between “gentlemen” pre-existed formalized rules.
Skill with blade,
cudgel, quarterstaff, any weapon at hand, preceded the formal punctilio of “This
is how it is done, and that simply isn’t cricket, Old Chap.”
The duel is the civilizing
or taming of savagery.
It is the
semi-civilized “game” that “Better Classes” imposed upon weaponed conduct to
allow easier entry of the gentry into the ranks of “honor” or “manhood.”
No less an authority
on duels and fencing itself in all its forms from the middle ages to the
eighteenth century, Egerton Castle, stipulates that no matter how elegant or
skilled a fencing master may have been, there was likely something of a
different and “earthier quality” to be found in the “gutters, kennels,
and muddy byways” than in the “Schools of Defense.”
Castle remarked that
it was often more instructive to learn from “villains” [unschooled ruffians.]
“…a fight between
two villains armed only with clubs, or with sword and buckler, necessarily
admitted of a far greater display of skill.” [Emphasis in original.]
Castle asserts again
and again that the true “skill,” the true fearsome work with duel weapons came
from the lower to middle classes, and became “refined” [restrained and
restricted by code] in the upper classes and that it is these “refinements
as imitators” that was the height of the art.
J. Christoph Amberger
in his The Secret History of the Sword: Adventures in Ancient Martial arts
also asserts the point again and again.
The refinements of the
duel, deadly and elegant as they may be, did not hold a candle to the rough n
tumble of the arts’ forebears.
Which leads us to…
Boxing
& Wrestling
At the same time that
young gentlemen were turning to Masters of Defense [shortened via slang to
Fencing Masters] fisticuffs and a bit of wrestling was being offered alongside.
But again, these
versions of unarmed combat were the gentlemanly cleaned up versions of what was
being practiced by the “lower classes.”
Even the more brutal
than today boxing and wrestling that permitted more blows, more holds, more
tactics than we would ever allow today, well, these were borne and codified in
these “Dens for Gentlemanly Expression.”
The rules may have
been fewer than today, but…there were still rules to observe.
And…as a hard-fast
steady Rule #1: A Duel, a Boxing Match, a Wrestling Contest was between two competitors.
No more.
Seconds must stay out
of the game.
This was not the case
where the origins of these “games” were born.
Combat Was
War Based
Sword, stick, cudgel,
halberd, the entire armory was used on a reeling, milling, chaotic battlefield.
Assailants were
numerous and often fore and aft and to either side of the weapon-wielder with
no finesse of one-on-one “honor game” to be played.
Tactics and strategy
differed from the comparatively sober sterile and self-contained arena of mano
y mano.
Village
Games Echoed the Battlefield
The word “field,” in
proper use, refers not to a meadow, or to a pasture as some use it interchangeably
but, only to a battlefield or a playing field.
Fields were places of
battle or contest.
Often “village games”
took the form of taking one item [a ball, a pig, a prized trophy, etc.] from
one village and taking it to another.
The rules of the game?
Anyone could play—entire
villages often did.
The playing field?
Everywhere in either village and all points between.
The Rules? “Don’t
let them take our coveted thing.”
Period.
We Cross
the Atlantic
We find this huge
rough n tumble scrum echoed in the Early Americas.
Account after account
is told of “Indian Games” that involve a ball, an inflated antelope bladder, a
feathered spear etc. being maneuvered from one point to another.
The confines of the
game? Seemingly none.
Accounts tell of play
length taking days and often overnight.
Play crossing miles of
terrain.
At times, hundreds
battling for supremacy—men, women, and children.
Tactics? Evidently—It
was all-in as the listed injuries are copious and some are horrific.
Play did not stop for
injuries.
The wounded were
tended out of the path of chaos.
Games Echoed
Combat/Combat Echoed Games
The story has been
told numerous times of how the smaller less well-armed indigenous Warriors played
hell versus larger better equipped “better trained” forces.
This early “better training”
often took the form of the large-scale version of rank-and-file dueling writ
large.
Indigenous warriors
and Anglo early-adopters recognized that power comes from no rules and did not suffer
from what we take as a given—That Combat Must Be a Duel.
Indigenous warriors,
by training in all-in chaotic games and engaging in battle “games” where
one-on-one was almost never the norm, found it completely alien to stand stock-still,
or to face off, toe to toe, “come to scratch,” or to be blind to the environment
and ALL within it.
These
games often took the form of being at a Deficit.
That is, you face more
than one aggressor, or even in weapon play the “trainee” always faced with a
weapon deficit, that is, no weapon at all, or a weapon considered subpar to the
one being faced.
Forged in a fire of
chaotic realities the young warrior was steeped in an atmosphere more redolent
of reality than any duel-based game.
“Well,
thanks for the history lesson, Mark, but what has this to do with the big training
mistake you claim many are making?”
Boxing is a sport. A
duel. [A sport and duel I love.]
Grappling is a sport.
A duel. [Another duel I love.]
Tae kown do, Hapkido,
Issin-ryu. All are sports. All are duels.
All have rules,
guidelines, tenets.
Their value is in their
adherence to body hardening, that is an aspect of combat.
Their deficit
lies in not living in the deficit.
That is, the duel-based
method has us matching weight classes, skill levels, same blade vs same blade,
same stick vs same stick.
We drill endlessly for
the duel.
Not for the scrum.
The
Paradox
I wager the above
strikes agreement in the hearts of the street aficionado.
Many reject MMA
because it is a sport. It is an agreement.
And then they will
blithely commence a zumbrada with mock knives, or fake tomahawks that
follows some duel-based pattern that is like vs. like.
Combat was
and is born by an aggressor that perceives that it possesses attributes the prey
does not possess—be that strength, numbers, speed, firepower, etc.
Real-world
aggressors do not aggress without presumed advantage.
Yet, we persist in our
gentlemanly ways and elect to prepare to fight off possible life-threatening harms
using a mindset designed to keep young gentleman safe from the bumps and bruises
of the hoi polloi.
We might need to look
to the Masters of Small Engagement and adopt some of their ways.
In the words of one
Gentleman regarding the encountered “Savages” [his words, not mine]
“These Savages have
taught my crack troops a thing or two; too bad it is a lesson my dead men
cannot learn.”
Why merely
read about it, when you can live it? Consider joining The Black Box Brotherhood
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