Muggings

When Jack Dempsey was in his 70s, he was the subject of an attempted mugging. Dempsey broke the man’s jaw. All such stories have a tinge of apocrypha, even those gleaned from newspapers, so I have some latitude for embellishment. In my version, the would-be mugger wakes up in a hospital bed, his jaw wired shut. He manages to say, “What happened?” through his wired jaw, and the orderly cracks up. “You tried to mug Jack Dempsey, asshole!”

Mugging is a high risk occupation, without much upside potential, so muggers tend to be pretty stupid. There was a locally famous student at the New York Aikikai many years ago, “Harry, the Muggers’ Mugger” as he was known. Harry was in his 60s, and liked to dress like a “pigeon,” mugger bait in other words, and go out walking in Greenwich Village late at night. He had decorated a wall of his apartment with switchblades, ice picks, and sharpened screwdrivers that he’d taken away from would-be muggers. I don’t know whether he did more than remove their weapons. Aikido, as I have said before, offers the option of being kind and gentle, but there are other options as well.

Dennis, who was a member of Aikido of Berkeley back when I first began the practice, was once standing at a bus stop in the rain with his umbrella over his head. A guy sidled up beside him and put a knife to his ribs, saying “Don’t make any sudden moves.”

“You mean like this?” Dennis said, and raised the umbrella up higher. The guy’s eyes went up to follow the umbrella…

The way I remember the story is that, after Dennis took the guy’s knife away from him, he remarked that the guy was lucky to still have all four limbs still attached, and possibly that such attachment remained optional. Again, as I recall, the guy then politely asked for his knife back. You may imagine the laughter that this produced.

As I say, mugging is not a career for the intelligent.

My friend Dale and his wife Susan were out walking one day, along with a friend of theirs. Susan was six months pregnant at the time. Two men jumped out of the bushes and tried to snatch Susan’s purse. Dale and the friend tried to pull Susan back out of harm’s way, but Susan was having none of it. She was a) holding onto her purse, and b) defending herself with what she had in her other hand, which was a folded umbrella.

She got one of them in the eye.

As the two fled, blood streaming from the one, his buddy called back over his shoulder, “You didn’t have to be so rough about it!”

Mugging is not … oh, hell, you know.

The Sweet Science

In 1896, a New York State Senator named John Raines sponsored legislation that banned liquor from being served on Sunday in New York. There was an exemption to the law: restaurants attached to hotels were still allowed to serve liquor on Sundays.

In response, many saloons purchased the buildings in which they resided (or a near neighbor building), called themselves “hotels,” and rented out the rooms by the hour to the sort of patrons that rented rooms by the hour, i.e. prostitutes. This was a classic loophole, producing classic unintended consequences.

Contemporaneous to the “Raines Hotels” was another loophole, this one in Federal and State Laws governing boxing, or prizefighting. Here, pugilistic competitions were allowed, provided they were as a “scientific demonstration.” Although the phrase “Sweet Science” first entered the language in 1824, in Pierce Egan’s Boxania, in which he used the phrase “the sweet science of bruising,” I have long suspected that the boxing loophole did more for the phrase than anything else.

Boxing is a very artificial fighting style, in that grappling techniques such as used in wrestling (or Aikido) are expressly forbidden. Of course, by “forbidden,” I mean, “used in a tactical way.” Hugging your opponent in a boxing match is a way to disrupt the current activity and obtain the intercession of the referee. This technique was the key to Buster Douglas’ defeat of Mike Tyson in the match that lost Tyson his title.

Tyson was from the “street thug” school of fisticuffs, no surprise there, since he had been a street thug. There was a time, briefly in his early career, when it appeared that he might have it in him to also become a technical boxer. The Tyson-Spinks fight was the culmination of that, a fight that has become legendary as over-hyped, since Tyson dropped Spinks in a minute and a half.

It was an interesting minute and a half, however. Tyson is usually seen as simply a bruiser, and there was some of that in it, of course. But his approaches to Spinks were technically brilliant; Spinks threw punches that Tyson slipped, but he also used the rotation of slipping the punch to cock his entire body for the follow-up. The effect was devastating. Spinks tried to block the return punches, but they had the entire force of Tyson’s body behind them. Blocking was useless against such power. A faster boxer than Spinks might have been able to dodge the blows, but it’s awfully hard to make a strike and then dodge when the return comes back at you so fast.



The young Ali could have done it, however. Ali was so fast that he got away with things that would have been suicide for most boxers. During the first Liston fight, Ali (then Cassius Clay) regularly evaded Liston’s punches by going straight back, something that should and would have been a straight trip to the canvas for anyone but Ali. The result was that Liston was punching air, and destroyed his shoulder over the course of a few rounds.



Tyson, except for a few brief glimpses of something greater, is of the Liston school of boxing, a street fighter tuned up and tamped down for the boxing ring. After the Spinks fight, Tyson’s father-surrogate trainer died, Tyson married and divorced Robin Givens, ran his car into a tree, and was then jailed for rape. Somewhere in there any hope of becoming something more than he was, died.

I think that the three most interesting boxers of the 20th century (certainly in the heavyweight division) are Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali, though opinions differ.



I don’t think there is any way to rank the three of them; their times were so different not even theoretical matchups make any sense. The first two ended their lives in poor circumstances, victims of both a sport and a society that feeds on celebrities then discards them when fashion shifts and age dulls their luster.

Ali still remains something of a creature apart. The connection that the boxing glove allows between physical force and the human brain works both ways, and neural damage is the frequent, perhaps even inevitable result. In Ali’s case, pseudo-Parkinson’s has frozen his face, but its very immobility now resembles the mask of a Mayan god, and only the eyes convey the powerful and generous humanity that still resides within.

Dominance

• In Aikido, one blow can determine life or death. When practicing, obey your instructor, and do not engage in useless contests of strength.
• Aikido is an art in which a person learns to deal with not only one but multiple attackers. It therefore requires that you practice at all times with careful awareness not only in front of you but in all directions.
• Practice at all times with the feeling of pleasurable exhilaration.
• The teachings of your instructor constitute only a small fraction of what you will learn. Your mastery of each movement will depend almost entirely on individual, earnest practice.
• Daily practice begins with light movements of the body, gradually increasing in intensity and strength. There must be no excessive strain. That is why even an elderly person can continue to practice pleasurably without bodily harm, and will attain the goal of his or her training.
• The purpose of Aikido is to train both body and mind and to develop a person's sincerity. All Aikido techniques are secret in nature and are not to be idly revealed to others in public, not shown to rowdy or unprincipled people who will misuse them.
  --Etiquette for Practicing Aikido (by Morihei Ueshiba O'Sensei)
  

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. --Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996)

Unarmed fighting techniques can be loosely divided into three categories: strikes, holds, and throws. There is also the wealth of ancillary behavior, which mostly comes down to either countering moves (blocks), or getting into a good position to use the techniques (called “irimi” or “entering” in Aikido).

The folks who are adamant that Aikido is of no use in a “real fight,” are generally hypnotized by the throwing techniques. But Aikido is also holds, and Aikido holds overlap substantially with other martial arts, and also form part of the core of most police and military unarmed combat techniques.

There are a set of Aikido holds that are essentially numbered (in Japanese) techniques: ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo, yonkyo, gokyo, and rokyo, the latter two being generally considered to be knife taking techniques, but they work against an unarmed opponent just as well. Most of these have analogs in other schools; ikkyo is commonly called an “arm bar” in wrestling, as is a related technique, ude gateme, which also looks a bit like a half nelson. I’d also add another couple of techniques, kote gaeshi and shiho nage to the core list of things that makes anyone claiming that they “wouldn’t work in a real fight” either ignorant or a blithering idiot.

Throws are a different matter, and throwing techniques generally depend upon the movement and balance of an attacker, and it’s generally true that opponents who do not “commit,” i.e. who do not throw the weight of their body into whatever they are doing, do not grab, etc. are difficult to throw. It’s also true that if someone isn’t even attacking you, it’s very hard to throw them. I’m all in favor of not using martial techniques of people who aren’t attacking you.

It’s also commonly believed that Aikido does not use strikes, punches, or kicks. This isn’t true, since it’s necessary to defend against such attacks, so the Aikido uke must simulate punches, knife thrusts, etc. with some verisimilitude, and not being “sincere” about the simulation can get you scolded.

There is also a event called “atemi,” which is a strike of some sort. Some practitioners de-emphasize atemi, believing it to violate the “non-violent” aspect of the art. Others emphasize that the Founder taught atemi as central to practice (notice the first sentence in the quote that begins this piece). The difference is most often split as holding atemi to be a feint of a sort; pulling the attention of the attacker in order to do a technique. But I’ve heard instructors who were pretty blunt about the notion that if you’ve used a wrist lock on an attacker to bring him to his knees, kicking him in the face may well be the most reasonable next step.

As I said in my original essay, “But Does it Work?” sometimes those fancy rolls are because the next event in a “real fight” would be a strike to the throat.

In re-reading that essay, I notice that I missed one of the reasons why I think some people have such an investment in arguing that Aikido is “fake,” and “wouldn’t work in a real fight.” I did note that most “real fights” aren’t exactly “real,” at least not in the sense of proceeding until one or the other participants is unable to continue. No, the idea is for the other guy to “cry uncle,” that is, to concede dominance. The practice of Aikido does not lend itself to showing dominance, “winning,” in other words. Practice is supposed to be harmonious. It’s not a sport, or a “contest of strength.”

I’ve been in three, well, let’s call them “physical altercations” in the last 30 years. That’s a pretty low count, I think, and I’m obviously not much of a brawler. I haven’t written about them previously, partly because there were more than two people involved (which is usually the case), even though only two of us were fighting. But mostly I’ve refrained because I’m a little ashamed of one of them and a lot ashamed of another. So please excuse me if I leave out the reasons for the fights and other things that would make them better stories, perhaps, except not so much better for me. This means that I’m leaving out a lot of prologue in each case. Sorry.

We’ll join the first encounter with the guy throwing cold coffee in my face after I’d rolled down the window to demand that he move his truck from blocking my way. We will ignore the question about whether under slightly different circumstances the coffee might have been scalding hot.

This was several years before I began Aikido training. As a consequence of frequent nose bleeds as a child, I never learned boxing, but I did wrestle for a time at the YMCA. I believe that my weight at the time of my “competitive wrestling career” was roughly 85 pounds. But grappling was pretty much all I knew and I did weigh more than 85 at the time of this particular fight.

I don’t think the guy was expecting me to get out of the car to attack him. I’m positive he didn’t expect me to rush at him, coming in low, to grab him between the hips and knees and lift him completely off the ground in a takedown maneuver. Under other circumstances, that would have been very bad for him, because falling onto pavement, on your back, with someone else’s full weight on you can do pretty unpleasant things to you very quickly.

However, he was standing in front of the open door to the cab of his pickup truck, so we instead went back onto the seat. There was a general struggle, which finally ended when he managed to get his hands to my face and threatened to gouge my eyes. I released him and backed away.

He was pretty much still yelling insults at me as I got back into my car and drove off.

Did I “win” that fight? He could have put my eyes out, remember, or at least he could have made a try for it, and it might have worked. Whatever. It didn’t feel like I’d won anything.

The next one is the one that I’m thoroughly ashamed of, because it was at least 80% my fault, in part because I’m the one who made the threat that initiated the fight. The closest thing I have to an excuse is that it was several years into that-which-we-will-not-call-chronic-fatigue-syndrome, and I was susceptible to mood swings and flashes of rage. I was also still weak, often fuzzy-headed and I hadn’t practiced Aikido for several years, so what occurred is no reflection on that art.

The other guy was small and sturdy and built like a wrestler. In any case, he was a natural grappler, and pretty much marched straight through any techniques, Aikido or wrestling, that I could remember or try. I gave ground and tried to get lower; a tall man can be at a considerable disadvantage against a stronger man who is shorter than he is. Eventually, I wound up on my back, though I’d managed to keep my legs between me and him.

We were in an industrial district in Oakland, in one of those buildings that had been converted to (basically illegal) “live/work” spaces, and we were on top of a large wooden platform that formed the roof of some of those spaces. The platform was maybe 15-20 feet high, and our scuffle had put us maybe 5 ft. from the edge of what amounted to a balcony with no guard railing. His back was to the edge, and I had my legs cocked between him and me.

I whispered, “Keep it up and you’re going for a ride.”

His head snapped around and he realized the danger. He pulled off of me and stomped off. I think there were some more insults involved. It looked for a little while like there might be a rematch, but the words finally cooled, and certain explanations were made. There were no apologies, but some things became better understood.

Did I win? Lose? Would I have risked seriously injuring or killing him? When the matter had been mostly my fault? As I say, I’m just thoroughly ashamed of the altercation.

The last incident took place a few years ago, after I’d re-entered Aikido training. I was working for a time in a “rough neighborhood,” running a thrift shop for a non-profit agency during the Dot Com Bust period. I never felt endangered in the area, but I was aware of the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways that some people act to establish a sense of physical domination of the people around them. This is, I think, automatic for them, and doesn’t really reflect so much on them personally as their surroundings. In other times and places, the dominance behavior is more abstract, more socially derived, less physical and personal.

There was one fellow who I actually like quite a bit, but he was in the habit of doing those little physical dominance things. Joking threats and dominance hypotheticals, as it were. I’d gotten a little tired of it.

One day, when I was out on the sidewalk talking to someone, he came up behind me, stuck his finger in my back and pretended it was a stickup, sorta, kinda jokingly, was the idea, I expect.

I probably recognized his voice, but as I say, I was tired of that sort of thing. Also, he’d stuck something in my back; I did not know what it was. What I did next, I did in much less time than it takes to think it over.

The move is called tenchi nage. As I spun around, my left hand caught his right arm between the wrist and elbow, knocking it aside. (If he’d been using the other arm, I’d have used a different technique). My right hand went up, more or less parallel to his body, sliding off the center line just before it reached his head. He reacted pretty well, flexing backwards to avoid the strike to his head, but the fact is that I could have easily hit him in the throat, chin, or face with a fist or the heel of my palm, if I’d wanted to.

Instead, my arm was outstretched across his body, and he was off-balance, bending backward. All I would have had to do was take a step forward and turn my hip and he’d have been out into the middle of oncoming traffic. Instead, I stepped back and smiled at him.

He smiled back. He never tried anything like that on me again.

Aikido gets called “fake” because it is seen as not using punches or strikes, because it is not aggressive. It doesn’t have tournaments; it’s not a sport, so it doesn’t make for a competition where there are winners and losers.

But I’m pretty sure I won that last one.

But Does It Work?

Yes, I'll get to copyrights, but I'm still thinking about it. Besides, there's something else I want to write, and I need this up here first.

[originally posted to my newsgroup on Mon 19 Jun 2006]

This past weekend I rode over to San Francisco with another member of Eastshore Aikikai. On the way, we got to talking about Aikido on the net, me about my recently going to YouTube and looking over the Aikido videos, her about how she used to read the rec.martial-arts newsgroup.
She spoke to something I noticed on the YouTube comments, that a major theme of any public aikido discussion is whether or not aikido is “real,” i.e. whether or not it would actually be of use in a “real” fight. Moreover, she noted that this kind of question was almost entirely confined to aikido; no one seems to ask it about karate, tai kwon do, kung fu, etc.

So I’m left with two related questions, why aikido, and why not the other martial arts?

Certainly it would be a fair question to ask of any martial arts training, because that’s what it is: training. You can train a soldier to a fair-thee-well, but you won’t know how he’s going to behave in combat until he’s actually been in combat, until he’s been “blooded” in the jargon of the trade.

That’s not to say that there aren’t various methods that attempt to simulate combat in one way or another. For the military, this is “war games” or “maneuvers” of one sort or another. Such simulations can remove some of the unknowns from the equation, like snarled communications, supply disruptions, and sudden gaps in the chain of command. “The Fog of War” is a useful concept, and every time it’s different, so it’s a good idea to give the men a taste of it. But it’s not the same thing as being under fire.

In the martial arts, there are different kinds of simulation. Some arts make the transition to a sport, so you get competition, the pressure of public performance, and so forth. Unfortunately, to make a martial art into a sport, you have to have rules, otherwise it’s far too dangerous. So either you eliminate what might be considered your strongest moves—the lethal ones, in other words—or you pull the punches, as it were. You can, like in fencing or boxing, use special equipment, padding, foils with blunt tips, gloves that protect the hands (though ironically, boxing gloves make the sport less dangerous to the hands and more dangerous to the brain). But such modifications change the essence of the art; there are moves that would be insane in a real situation that are perfectly sensible ways of scoring points in a sport.

Some martial arts are almost pure kata, ritualized forms that are meant to give the student a set of well-practiced reflexes. That is pretty much the way that everything starts out; you can’t learn the language until you have the vocabulary. In those arts, the way of adding some real consequences to the training is through testing. That at least adds some personal ego involvement, which adds some real pressure to the matter.

A major reason why the “does it really work?” question occurs so often for aikido is that it often looks faked. The uke (attacker) comes at the nage (the person doing the technique), the nage does the technique, and the uke goes flying, all as pre-determined as a Wrestlemania bout. The encounter is usually pretty stylized, but the idea of “the uke is just going along with it,” misses an important point. Usually, the rolls, falls, twists and turns, etc. are there because the alternative is much worse. Yes, the guy bends his back and that makes him easy to knock down, but the alternative was an elbow in the throat. We don’t do the elbow strike, but we know it’s there.

As for the throws and all those pretty rolls and slapping falls, yeah, they don’t hurt us. But taking the fall isn’t really optional; the choice is between taking it correctly or getting hurt. I once saw a sensei yelling at his uke, “Protect yourself! Protect yourself!” Doesn’t quite jibe with the “it’s all just a fake” notion, does it?

At Aikido of Berkeley in the early 1980s, there was a student who confided to me that he’d taken up aikido because he found that guys would often try to pick fights with him in bars. He didn’t know why they did it, or even why it was guys who were, in his words, so easy to beat, but he wanted some alternative to pounding the crap out of them. Aikido gave him alternatives.

Don’t laugh, but I once used an aikido technique to take a butter knife away from a 5 year old. He was waving it around, and I was literally worried that he’d “put someone’s eye out.” So I caught his hand in a grip called kote gaeshi, twisted slightly and the knife just slid into my hand. It didn’t hurt him; that was pretty much the point, of course. But he did look awfully surprised. Sure, I was a lot bigger than he was. The outcome wasn’t in doubt. But it certainly helped that I knew exactly how to take it away from him with a minimum of force.

Occasionally, you run into someone who brings some external issues “onto the mat” as the saying goes. Once, I was performing a technique called “nikyo” (Hold your hand out as if to shake someone’s hand, then flip it over so the little finger is uppermost. Now grab that hand with your other hand, thumb on top, and try to bring the first hand’s wrist to your body, with the little finger going up to your nose—that’s nikyo). My uke straightened his arm, went down toward the ground, but tried to grab my leg, to maybe lift me off the ground. I automatically shifted my grip and brought my elbow over his in a related technique called ryokyo. Ryokyo is usually considered a knife taking technique because it is not at all kind; it takes power from hyperextending uke’s elbow. My uke forgot all about lifting my leg, since he was suddenly very concerned about not having his elbow dislocated.

I might not have done it if I’d thought about it, but then again, the point of the training is to teach your body how to do those things. Your thinking has to catch up later.

I’ve been in a number of physical fights in my life, but I’m not sure if I’d classify any of them as “real.” The vast majority of fights are about dominance in one way or another, stopping well short of serious injury, because that isn’t the point of them. In fact, they usually end when one or the other party threatens real injury. On the other hand, I have witnessed fights that were deadly serious, that would not end until someone was badly injured, dead, or the cops showed up. When someone who is used to the one sort runs into someone who is prone to the other sort, Very Bad Things can happen.

I have some confidence in my own ability to Do the Right Thing, if pressed, but also the fear that I nevertheless might fail to react properly. So whether or not aikido would aid me in a "real fight" is an open question. What I do know is that I will expend considerable effort to insure that I never get the answer to that question.