About That Title

It´s from Street Fighter 2, obviously.

I say `obviously´, but unless you grew up in a certain set of circumstances at a very particular time, it´s unlikely that Street Fighter 2´s had the sort of impact on your life that it´s had on mine. And I´m going to choose my words carefully here, because the next bit could make me sound sort of mental.

It´s all about the endings. Not Blanka´s, obviously, where a woman who lost her son in the Amazon rainforest twenty years previously deludes herself that a green, electricity-channeling beastman must be her long-lost offspring, because he´s wearing an ankle bracelet that looks sort of familiar. Or Zangief´s, where president Gorbachev turns up and they have a little dance. Or even Chun Li´s - which revisionist historians insist is canon despite the fact Ryu could beat Chun Li just by uppercutting all the time - where she goes back to being a young, single girl, like all girls really want, right? No.

Ken´s ending is your classic Hollywood archetype: he wins the fight, his girlfriend turns up (yeah, at Shadoloo´s secret Thailand base, what?), they get married. Lovely.

Guile´s ending is your classic Jean Claude Van Damme archetype: he wins the fight, he´s on the verge of killing Bison, his estranged wife and daughter turn up and persuade him that murder won´t bring Charlie back, they go home and buy a dog. Magic.

(Note to Guile: killing Bison doesn´t make you ´just as bad as him´. Developing a synthetic drug called Doll which you plan to use to raise an army of brainwashed assassins and murder your way to ruling the world would make you just as bad as him: killing him is just sensible. Sonic Boom his nose into his brain: if Jane doesn´t want your daughter to see that sort of thing, she shouldn´t have brought her to an international fighting tournament.)

And then there´s Ryu.

As the victory ceremony begins, Sagat and Bison take to the podium, which might be surprising to anyone who thought a psycho-power-flaunting megalomaniac would be a bad
sport. But...














WHERE IS RYU, AS THE CROWDS CHANT HIS NAME?














He´s fucked off! Ceremony means nothing to him! He doesn´t even care about winning that much! The battle is all!

Now, you could argue that Ryu is just a stock wandering warrior archetype, that he´s been done a million times and that there´s nothing special about him. You could say that he´s wasting his life. You could also - if you´re being picky - argue that this sort of dedication to fighting wouldn´t be sensible in the real world, and (if you were charged with making a comic about Ryu, say) portray him as a luddite who has trouble grasping concepts like laundry and email.

(Another aside: apparently Miyamoto Musashi - the best swordsman in Japanese history, and as close to the epitome of the wandering warrior as you´ll find in real life - was reputed not to take baths. Ever. He also employed quite a lot of ´tactics´ that you´d probably call ´cheating´in the modern western idiom. But that´s another story.)

You might be right. But there´s something about the simplicty of one man, with a duffel bag full of passports and folding cash, one outfit and no shoes (time saved at airport metal detectors: probably loads) wandering around looking for fights that is undisputably fucking brilliant. It´s been argued that the best videogame characters are blank slates - the less you know about them, the more you project your own values onto and therefore identify with and like them. If Lara Croft, say, made a big deal of how much she liked acid jazz and kittens, and you hate acid jazz and kittens, you´d probably like her less. But because nobody mentions it, you assume she shares your opinions re: music and baby cats, and carry on buying her games.

Ryu´s the same. I don´t need to know that he likes eating and dislikes spiders (he once swallowed one when he was asleep! Thanks, stupid Capcom biography). I barely even need the subtle difference in philosophies hinted at by the arcade version´s AI (at the end of rounds, Ken starts going crazy with hurricane kicks and dragon punches because he´s a massive ponce, while Ryu´s content to wear you down with constant fireballs). I just need that shot of a man walking into the sunset, alredy seeking the next challenge.

Ryu is the best videogame character ever.

A Thing I Don´t Like

Gi rash.

There´s currently a bit on the centre of my back - about the size of an old 50p - that I´ve basically worn away by rolling around and rubbing my gi over. If you can remember the scene from Flash Gordon where Ornella Mutti´s refusing to talk and Klytus goes to fetch the bore worms, it´s like that every time I put on suntan lotion. Only significantly less sexy.

I Thought Of Some Other Ones

1. It´s a handy social shortcut
I went for my first BJJ lesson in Rio´s Gracie Barra academy yesterday. The place was full of genuine badasses and people with ears that looked like they´d been sculpted out of candlewax by a clumsy toddler. As I walked in, four of them were smashing the pads like they´d just been personally insulted. But because I had a gi on and was ready to fight, every single one of them shook my hand and gave me the thumbs up.

2. It makes Not Fighting feel amazing.
Objectively speaking, the ´best´ time I´ve ever had was lying on a beach in Miami, chatting to pretty girls, drinking mojitos and listening to 80s music. But let´s face it - however much money you fling away in the pursuit of ´having fun´, there´s only a finite amount of fun to be had. Unless, of course, you´ve just spent two breathless mintes being suffocated under a gigantic man´s sweat-sodden gi as he tries to break your arm. After that, even breathing the (relatively) fresh air of the gym feels like being a newborn dolphin taking its first lungful of oxygen, and even the chlorine-tinted tapwater from the drinking fountain tastes like life. After my last training session, I was ten cents short of buying a frosty iced tea, then found an extra coin in my pocket. Subjectively speaking, that was probably the happiest moment of my life. I imagine it´s like coming out of a car crash with a newfound respect for life, only a bit less traumatic.

3. It puts my head in a terrifyingly aggressive place.
No, not necessarily a good thing. But anyway.

A quick word on forearm chokes: in jujitsu, they´re sort of frowned upon - usually used by big men against little ones (because they don´t really work otherwise), they´re one of the least technical, most strength-oriented moves you can do. They´re (relatively) easy to defend, but if someone´s really trying to put on one you, then at best you´re going to get a sore jaw, or maybe a bruised trachea. I don´t use them, because I´m a gentleman.

Anyway. During my second training session today, I got paired off with another beginner - a gigantic white belt who probably outweighed me by 15 kilos. He started the sparring session by insisting that I prop my leg up in an odd position...which turned out to be a way for him to practice the sweep he´d been working on. He ended up sitting on me and - inevitably - went for the forearm choke. And even though I was exhausted from rolling all morning, my first thought wasn´t ´Shit.´or ´Tap!´ It was ´Forearm choke, eh? You´re going to pay for that, you little bitch.´

He turend out to be quite a nice man, as it happens. But I swept him and tired him out anyway.

Why I Love Fighting

Lots of reasons, really.

I´ve done enough different types of fighting, in enough places, with enough people, that I love all sorts of different things about the noble art of beating people up.

I like the ridiculous quasi-fighting of Capoeira, with its rules that emphasise beauty of movement and not getting your spotless white pants dusty by falling over.

I like doing back somersaults in wushu, even though they´re basically a bit stupid. I like doing layouts (where your body´s totally straight, non-gymnasts) even more, although the only person I´ve ever seen hit someone with one was a CG version of Spider-Man (when he fights Mary Jane´s muggers, comic fans).

I like the feeling of snapping someone´s head back with a perfect jab when I´m boxing, especially they´re windmilling in and trying to hurt me. See also: hitting them with a really good leg shot that bruises up their thigh right where it´ll slow them down.

I like Brazilian Jujitsu because it´s the complete opposite of boxing, not about reactions and speed so much as it´s about outthinking and controlling your opponent. Because someone can be nailing you with the same move again and again, but if you learn the right counter to it, suddenly it won´t work any more, and that´s brilliant.

I like the camaraderie and respect that fighting creates between the people who do it, because you can´t really spar with anyone for any great length of time if you honestly think they´re a dick.

Lots of reasons, then. But one main one: because fighting makes you feel like you can do anything.

Not just because you´re good at beating people up, obviously. I´m semi-good at beating people up, but only if they aren´t much bigger than me or armed with anything, and since I only weigh 75kg and the sorts of people who might like to hurt you tend to carry around things to do it with, that discounts quite a lot of people I might get in a fight with. There´s a self-confidence that goes with knowing you could beat up a layman or fairweather fighter: definitely. But there´s more to it than that.

Here´s the thing: fight with enough people, in enough places, for long enough, and almost nothing else scares you. Once you´ve taken a few shots from someone who isn´t going to back up or let you get a breath, talking to new people at a party is absolutely nothing. Once you´ve walked into a classful of people who want to strangle you or sit on your chest until it feels like your ribs are caving in, no yoga seminar or pottery workshop is even remotely intimidating. And once you´ve gone from being the person who gets sat on, hit, strangled and dead-legged to the person dishing it out - or at least making the competition take you seriously - any other challenge should be simple.

I haven´t played many other sports at any kind of serious level. I can just about appreciate the difficulties of catching a good cros-court volley on the rise and smashing it into the opposite corner for a match-winner, or bending a free kick over a wall and past a goalie. I don´t know if they make you feel like that.

But I suspect not.