Indigenous Ability

Today’s combat voyage will take us into the mind of a legendary Civil War guerrilla fighter and what he learned from 17 th -century French drama. We’ll discuss two logical/cognitive fallacies and how they can drive even quite effective martial arts into useless margins, and, if we’ve been paying attention we’ll wind up back with our guerilla fighter and how to “ play the game well by not playing the game at all.” We’ll start with our French drama and not the Guerrilla warrior, you’ll see why we start here before we’re through. The following passage is from Moliere’s 1670 play The Bourgeois Gentleman , the premise of which is that a shopkeeper newly come into money decides that to be one of the upper-crust he needs to take great pains to “become cultured.” He engages numerous “culture instructors” who gladly take his money and leave him none the wiser or better cultured. One of these “culture instructors” is a fencing master who teaches him a few basics in the form o...

In 1986, John Hackleman launched his gym The Pit and fighters from this base were known as pit-fighters. The most renowned of these pit-fighters was former UFC-light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell. Pit-fighting was in actuality a harder form of Hawaiian Kempo, which in itself was formerly known as Kajukenbo, yet another hybrid martial art originating in Hawaii in the late 1940s.  The admittedly awkward word, Kajukenbo, was mean to do honor to the arts that constituted its whole: Karate, Judo, Jujitsu, Kenpo, and Boxing.  Not a bad mix at all. Kajukenbo still survives under that original name, with some branches calling itself Hawaiian Kenpo, and Coach Hackleman ballparking on Hawaiian Kempo [note the “m”] to emphasize the harder approach to training and application that he advocates. I’m sure you noticed that, so far, the arts we have discussed are Eastern in origin. Exactly how do we get to our discussion of rough ‘n’ tumble roots? Back ...

In my daily gig as old school combat archeologist I come across countless stories, tales, anecdotes and reportage claiming that “ The Old-Timers were tougher than ‘these kids today.’” The flip-side to that glorification of the past argument is that “these kids today” get the gift of standing on all of that accumulated old-school wisdom and the added bonus of attaching modern day bells and whistles to make today’s combat cadre tougher than the prior generations. So which story is true? Were the bad-asses of yore the tip of the top? Or…is it today’s crop of combatateers that prove the creamiest? This often leads to the old chestnut of a question “ Who would win between [insert past legend and legend in the making]?” There is simply no way to conduct such past and present comparisons with any sort of scientific rigor without aid of a time-machine. So, until we are provided with such a chronal-distortion device are we left without an answer to the “ Who ...

“ What do I do if I guy had me in this hold?” “What do I do if the guy knows jujitsu?” “What do if a guy is a good wrestler?” Combat Arts Instructors get these kinds of questions all the time. The question usually has a simple formulation with the interrogator not quite aware yet [due to inexperience] that they have posited quite a vast open-ended query. The inexperienced questioner is never at fault for questions along these lines. Here’s where the quibble begins [in Mark’s mind.] Any answer along the lines of: “ Well, all you have to do is just…” The implication that there is a simplistic answer to a large physical endeavor shows a good deal of short-sightedness or a staggering amount of hubris. We never succumb to such simplistic answers to encompassing questions in other physical domains. For example, if our naïve interlocuter asks “ What if I’m playing football and he has the ball?” See?  You immediately would want ...

[Excerpted from our book and DVD set Boxing like the Champs . But…pay close attention, McCoy, was a conman and also loose with the truth—we have always offered our material in good faith that we had the best information for recreations, but , and this is a big but, Crew, I now have in my hands a tract from one of McCoy’s contemporaries regarding how Kid McCoy threw that powerful   “Corkscrew.” The drills we have offered are correct to a point—with the addition of the new insights this punch does indeed go from an elusive curiosity to a powerful clubbing bit of meanness ready to drop into any and all striking arsenals. The new details will be in the book Boxing Like the Champs Round Two to be released in 2020, but we will hep the RAW Crew to the newly uncovered info on ESP RAW 201 , and, of course, we will cover it in the upcoming Boot Camp.] The man born as Norman Selby in 1872, who later becomes Charles “Kid” McCoy (another fighter’s name that he casually adopted as...