The mousy girl screams "Violence, violence!"

In many ways, the following photo is the culmination of every bit of fightyness in my entire life up until now. In other ways, it's as clear an indication you could want that I've gone completely mental. It's also one of the things I'll want deleted if I ever get accused of anything 'wrong' and am hounded by the Daily Mail.



But it's mainly a photo of the day I went to the Bristol BJJ open wearing a t-shirt with the Street Fighter logo on the front, then choked a man out to take third place in the tournament. It can't be coincidence that, in the five minutes before I had to fight, I was visaulising the incredible moment in Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie, where Ryu gets set to Hadoken a furious Sagat in the chest at full power, while the music swells and the wind blows the grass nearly horizontal. And if it was, then ask yourself this: how come I lost the second match, when I wasn't thinking about Ryu?

Togetherness

Three miniature stories:

1. Several years ago, at the start of my freelance career and for reasons to do with me wanting to impress potential employers, I ask a large professional wrestler to smack me in the head with a STOP sign. After some coercing, he obliges, I get a photo of it and I go on to have a glittering freelance career which leads me, several years later, to Tokyo. I go to the Tokyo Dome area because that's where the arcades are, and on a whim, go in the official New Japan Pro Wrestling shop. The stairwell's covered in signatures of wrestlers who've stopped by, scrawls and kanji and unrecognisable signatures - but the one that I notice at eye-level as I leave, is Mad Man Pondo. The STOP sign guy. I smile, and it's probably only my imagination that my head twinges slightly.

2. Several weeks ago, in Las Vegas for the launch of the UFC game, I'm pounding Caipirinhas at the bar mid-afternoon when a Japanese girl asks if I'm English. I am, but I'm also dehydrated and drunk enough to immediately start rambling on about fighting and how much I love it. She, of course, turns out to be an ex-international judo tournament competitor, and we spend ten minutes talking about ko-uchi-garis and seoi-nages before I have to take drinks back to my friends. I walk away with a renewed determination to take up judo.

3. Yesterday, I'm training for an upcoming tournament in a near-deserted dojo when a little fat guy with no front teeth turns up, carrying a drum and looking for the owner. 'I do guided meditation with him,' he says, 'I'm a medium, and a spiritual healer.' I don't laugh because my mum raised me right, but then he starts talking about how he boxed in the army. He gave it up after he got a kicking from a lance corporal: 'There were three hits - him hitting me, me hitting the floor, and the ambulance hitting 90.' We have a Right Old Laugh.

The point? I don't know. Maybe - again - that fighting brings people together, because the things you know everyone in it has put up with convinces you of their worth as a person. Maybe just that I mostly enjoy the way my life's turned out, and that it's a good life if you don't weaken.

Next week: less bullshit, more CHOKING PEOPLE OUT. Promise.

Better Than The Undertaker

So that last post was a bit sombre, but I thought I'd lighten the tone by saying that I pulled off my first gogoplata in sparring yesterday. I've never even practised it before! I just saw the Undertaker do it on telly, and he doesn't even do it for real.



Yeah, I'd fucking mash him.

On Not Knife Fighting

So I was in Japan the other day, and I got to Akihabara about half an hour after a knife-wielding maniac stabbed and killed seven people. And inevitably, when I got back, one of my friends asked what I'd have done if I'd been there at the time. As if I hadn't asked myself already.

For the record, I don't think it's that clear cut. From what I hear, lots of people thought there was a traffic incident and that the maniac, unrelatedly, was just pushing through the crowd, so nobody realised that anybody was getting stabbed until it was much too late. But assuming I'd been there, and seen a guy stabbing people like a character from Final Fight, would I have charged in to the rescue?

Honestly, probably not. Best-case scenario, I might have thrown something at him.

Here's the thing: before I got into Brazilian jujitsu (not good for 'knife defence'), I did about two years of Japanese jujitsu, which involved a lot of 'knife defence.' It involved a variety of more or less stylised counters to the six 'main' knife attacks (straight stab, forehand and backhand slashes, lunge to the kidneys, stab to the groin, downward Norman Bates classic), and we sometimes practised with real knives.

It was completely useless.

The reason I'm putting 'knife defence' in brackets is that there's almost no such thing. After jujitsu I did a couple of months' kickboxing with Bob Spour, a very nice man who used to be in the SAS and has probably been in more fights than the entire jujitsu faculty. On the subject of knife defence, he simply waved a knife around – like you, I, or anyone else might if we were seriously trying to murder someone – and said 'How're you gonna defend against that?'

If anyone's still unconvinced, here's a little game you can play: give a friend a marker pen. Wear some old clothes, maybe some glasses if you're feeling safety conscious. Now, the rules are simple: you have to get the pen off your friend. He has to draw on you with it.

If, by the time you get the pen away, you've got scribbled around your chest, you're probably dead. On the inside of your arms? You're dead? On the outside? You're injured, maybe badly enough that you'll bleed to death? On the face? You're almost certainly dead.

For an idea of how damaging and stupid most self-defence classes are, imagine somebody who teaches you to play football by making you dribble around cones and do keepy-ups over and over again but never actually lets you play against anybody else. And when you can do the cones without hitting any and 100 keepy ups in a row he gives you a black belt in football, and tells you can beat anybody at football. And then you enter a football match for the first time, except that the rules are if you lose, you die.

F.X. Toole is my new hero

He's the man who wrote Million Dollar Baby, as part of a boxing stories collection called Rope Burns, and re-reading the intro last night (yeah, drunk, what) I came across this little beauty:

'About the only thing I haven't done in boxing is make money. But that hasn't stopped me any more than not making money in writing has. Both are something you just do, and you feel grateful for being able to do them, even if both keep you broke, drive you crazy and make you sick. Rational people don't think like that. But they don't have in their lives what I have in mine.'

Oh yeah and I got my blue belt in BJJ today. WAR ME.

Vega Is A Fucking Cheat

Something I seem to have been talking to people about recently is that Vega is a fucking cheat. It’s easy to confuse this with other arguments, so let’s be clear: I’m not arguing that Vega is a massive ponce (he is) or an annoying character to play against (also true) or that I don’t like him (I don’t, but only in the same way I don’t like pantomime villains, ie I am aware that they need to exist). No. My problem with Vega is something else.

He’s allowed a fucking claw?

Seriously, how is that okay? Everybody else in the Street Fighter tournament is fighting with their hands and feet, and Vega not only wears a mask (to protect his beautiful face) but has a big, sharpened metal claw, like Mr Han from Enter The Dragon. Even Chun Li (who tends to fight Vega in the official adaptations, partly as a juxtaposition of her strong femininity against his perceived effeminacy, partly because he’s practically a rapist) takes issue with this in the comic version:

‘Your claw attacks are cheap and cowardly’.

And Vega responds:

‘How dare you? You’re in a world where desire and honour are the same, where the strong eat the weak.’

Which is all very well, Vega, except that using a claw sort of suggests that you’re the weak. And anyway, you’ll be pleased to hear that it’s at this point she learns the ki-ko-ken and fireballs him in his fucking face. A more sensible defence of Vega’s behaviour - used by everyone I talk to - is:

The other characters can do fireballs or make themselves electric. Vega can’t, so he needs something to even the odds up.

Which is clearly bullshit, and the reason I’m so upset. See, a claw isn’t too bad, but with this sort of evening-things-up morality you’ve got the thin end of a philosophical wedge that later allows sticks (Eagle), Chains (Birdie) and Sai (Sodom). Then, finally, you’ve got Rolento, who carries a baton and a knife, throws grenades and keeps a posse of guerillas above the playing area with a hook and a piano wire garotte. He's basically everything that's wrong about fighting games, and it's all Vega's fault.



Prick.

Sometimes

...I think that if I devoted as much time to cooking, or learning a musical instrument, or becoming a successful public speaker as I do to fighting, I would be brilliant at all of those things. Or at least, a more well rounded human being.

But then I remember that I don't care - don't really, actually care - about those things.

There's probably a whole nest of pathologies and rationalisations related to my affection for fighting, but that almost doesn't matter. Because like all good determinists know, seeing the strings doesn't make a difference.

Tonight, watching a dreadful display of windmilling between two D-rate kickboxers, a friend of mine, standing next to me but hypnotised by the action, whispered:

'I fucking love fighting, Joel.'

And all I could say was, 'Me too.'

Getting Hit In The Face: redux

I know I've talked about this before, but I got properly hit in the face twice this week, both times by someone I'm trying to get ready for a semi-pro bout. The first one was a flawless spinning backfist - I didn't see it coming, and it caught me on the chin hard enough to make me wonder what the hell was happening. The second one was an unintentional forearm in the face hard enough to make my eyes water, and kind of a new experience. I've been cracked before, but usually the feeling's dizzyness, and you know how to deal with that - shake off the fuzz, stay out of trouble, circlecirclecircle and don't let them see you're hurt. Taking a shot in the nose is different - there's no fuzz, but it hurts so much that you go through a whole range of emotions in about two seconds. The need for revenge; the injustice of a world where such things can happen; the sheer unbelievability of the fact that someone's just smashed you in the face.

These, obviously, are unfortunate philosophical avenues to go dawdling down when the person who's just hit you is about to try to do it several more times, until (and maybe after) you fall over. Bad enough if there's a ref there to stop them doing it - potentially disastrous if you get in a street fight.

Once again, kids: stay out of trouble.

On Handwraps

So I was talking to someone who I really don't want to see breaking their hands the other day, and getting lyrical about the dangers of punching someone in the face/stomach/ribs/shoulder without adequate padding. And then, inevitably, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about handwraps.

I've been spending a lot of time in fight gyms again recently. And something that happens when you're in fight gyms a lot is that you lose that crazy enthusiasm for getting in, killing yourself the entire time you're there and getting out. You need to stretch properly, warm up properly, warm down. Otherwise you'll get injured. And so what if it eats into your training time? You train enough.

Anyway. Part of this preparation is putting on handwraps. You do it after your skipping, sometimes after your shadowboxing, but before you put on the gloves and get ready to hit gloves/pads/faces. Doing it properly, getting it tight, supporting your wrist and protecting your knuckles takes practice. And although some people talk while they're doing it, some retreat into themselves, thinking about the things they have to practice, the things they have to remember, the people that are about to try hitting them in the head. It's the time when things in the gym go quiet, before the shouting and the whappings start.

I've tried meditation before. I've even done it with Shaolin monks. But there's something about putting on handwraps that centres me like nothing else.

The Mystery Of Chessboxin'

What does tapping someone out feel like? It feels like chess.

When you’re first learning to do jujitsu, you might know how a couple of basic submissions and a sweep, and you’ve got a vague idea of what the best position to be in is, but that’s about it. As strategy goes, it’s about as advanced as knowing that castles go sideways and the horsey pieces can jump over things. Sparring between beginners is a clumsy exchange of positions and the winner’s usually the person who makes the least incredibly stupid mistakes. Maybe a couple of months later, you can spot a glaring error – somebody stretching their arms up in the air while they’re mounted, say – and capitalise on it. While you’re a beginner, this is like seeing someone’s queen undefended or spotting a Fool’s mate – there’s a sudden, dizzying, ‘How could they be so stupid?’ moment, following by a quick, euphoric tap. At this level, you still want to punch the air after every win – aware that on some level it was a fluke – but you don’t, because there’s decorum to observe.
As you get better, though, things change. Tapping out beginners who leave themselves open to an easy kimura is too simple, like playing chess against a stupid ten-year old. You need to find better opponents, ones who know that you never leave one arm inside someone’s guard or lean too far forward in the mount. Against these opponents, you need to find ways to force errors, to make smaller mistakes into bigger ones. Like forking in chess – your knight poised to take two different pieces, your opponent only able to choose which one – you might half-go for an armbar an opponent knowing they’ll yank their elbow free, leaving themselves open to a triangle or an omoplata. It’s at this stage that you start to develop a ‘game.’ Unfortunately, there are people who are much, much better at this game than you, and when you’re playing against them even a tiny, almost unnoticeable mistake means you’re going to lose. Against these Kasparovs of strangulation, even putting one hand on the mat for a second is practically an unrecoverable error.

It's when you realise that other people worry about you this way that you really start to love jiujitsu.

FIGHT MONTH

I know, I know. I've been a bit slack about the old ultraviolence recently. There's a reason for that, and that's simply that when I'm not worrying about getting pummeled in the kidneys in front of a crowd of dozens, I just don't train that hard. So I've decided to entire the Combat Sports Open - which is in a month - AND WIN. How? Well, my plan is many-fold. Wait, manifold? I should probably look this up.

1. KICK REALLY HARD
You can't hit in the face in the Combat Sports Open, so the best way to hurt people is giving them a vicious dead-legging. The best way to do that - probably - is to embark on a rigorous programme of plyometric squatting and smashing my shins into a heavy bag as often as possible. Or at least I hope it is, because that's what I'll be doing.

2. GET BETTER AT JIUJITSU
Obvious? Yes. But the last time I entered a competition, I could barely do an armbar. You only get four minutes in the CSO - after that it's a draw - so I need to get better at forcing people to tap out. The best way to do this seems to be going to jiujitsu loads, and fine-tuning the submissions I can already do.

3. SLAM PEOPLE
Obviously the easiest way to set up a submission is by slamming someone into the mat so hard they lose their breath, and that's where part two of my genius plan comes in. My wrestling shot's much improved since the last time I competed, and the plyo/squatting out to make Ultimate Warrior-style powerbombs a mere formality.

4. LOSE HALF A STONE
Yikes. Yeah, to weigh in on the day, I'll need to be about 6 kilos lighter than I am right now. How the hell am I going to manage that? By not drinking beer, dumbass.

And there you go! Updates on my progress as and when.