Richard writes:
BTW all this talk about how I was trained for this and that, and I could kill you with a punch to the head, or blow out your kidney, blah blah blah. That sounds a little childish guys. My dojo this, and my dojo that. Did’nt you guys ever watch Kung Fu? Did Kane ever talk about how bad he was? Did he ever say, “I can kill you all in a matter on seconds.” ?No…………Why? Because people who are confident in thier abilities to defend themselves and those around them don’t talk about it. It’s just another thing with them. Real men don’t brag.
I don’t know how to break this to you, Richard, but Kung Fu was a television show and Kane is imaginary. Intimidation and psychology are a very important part of the martial arts. If you consider movies to be evidence, you’ll note that there’s nary an Asian martial arts movie which does not involve copious pre-combat display designed to intimidate the opponent. As for childish, you seem to have mistaken my point. I was asserting that any reasonably trained man knows numerous lethal techniques, there’s nothing secret about the weak points on the human body and it’s not rocket science.
And martial artists are far from silent about their favorite subject, as they talk about almost nothing else among themselves. They don’t talk about it a lot around other people for the same reason that mechanics don’t talk about engines around others… because no one else is really that interested. (I think the WWII thread has clearly demonstrated that I know no such constraints on this blog). A group of them can be very annoying to be around, in fact, since the younger ones are almost always throwing kicks at one another’s heads, putting the dog in a leglock or whatever.
As for wrestling, it is a martial art. Most of the kicking schools don’t adequately train for it; our sensei, on the other hand, was a champion high school wrestler and he regularly brought in boxers, wrestlers, Muy Thai fighters, Tae Kwon Do kickers, Judo practitioners and others to show us that there were many, many ways to approach the issue. Wrestlers are harder to deal with than most, but there are plenty of weaknesses in their style that can be exploited, as there are in all styles.
The truth is, if the other person is intimidated by you, that’s 9/10ths of the battle right there. Intimidation was the purpose of the recent Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq and it is also the secret behind government dominance of the public.