[Best consumed with the blog entry Men That Gave Jack Dempsey Pause & An Education and for the actual visual detailed how-to’s see Timber Beast & Mucker “Rail Fighting.” For a podcast episode on the topic .] Any thrower of hands is likely familiar with Jack Dempsey’s “Falling Step”, that bit of “controlled unbalancing” he [and many an early fighter] used to stack power into forward driven punches. The Falling Step is not a mere stamping of the foot ala show-wrestling ballyhoo theatrics; that is, there is more to the Falling Step than the falling forward aspect. Dempsey’s Falling step was informed by his background as a Mining Mucker, and brief forays into lumberjacking. He makes no claims as to having invented the Faling Step, in fact, he is open and up front about its origins in the Lumberjack Milieu and the spice of pickaxe work among Muckers. [Again, I heartily encourage you to see the aforementioned material to really seat what follows. Men That Gave Jack Dem
There is often more to combat than meets the eye. It is the milieu that forms the athlete. The social environment. The vocations and avocations of the individual. Today we primarily make the milieu the training, the limited gym time we can muster. In the past, the milieu was, well, life, the chosen occupation[s] of the athlete often aided, abetted, and bolstered the combat overlay. Some milieus were more conducive to combat overlays than others. More feared. Among them lumberjacks, gandy dancers, and muckers. A mucker was a miner or canal worker whose job was to man a shovel. Good muckers, like good lumberjacks or good timber beasts had whole body power and coordinated technique that translated into whiplike action of the body as a whole. Shoveling then is not the afternoon shoveling we do now in our yard work. Tree-Felling then is not the winter weekend wood-splitting we do now. Jack Dempsey on Mucker Milieu Mr. Dempsey, among many occupations, came up as