Quoth Bane:
“I hate fighting a short man. If I have to, I drop into a horse stance, to lower myself to their level, and I watch my knees. I never attempt to dominate from height, rather, from mass.”
Height can get you in trouble. The Perfect Aryan Male has five inches on me and long arms to boot, but if I could slip inside his jab, (which was always tricky), an uppercut would seriously discombobulate him. His mother still hasn’t let me forget the time I almost broke his jaw; in general, smart taller guys learn to respect the uppercut.
One short guy with whom I used to spar regularly had a particularly nasty weapon in the repertoir, an uppercut kick that you never, ever saw coming. I always preferred to trade kicks with him in a side stance until something opened up rather than go face-to-face and end up taking the ball of his foot in my gut, or worse, my chin.
He was frighteningly tough too. A very good barefoot waterskiier who could do tumbleturns and deep water starts, he wiped out rather spectacularly on TPAM’s boat one summer afternoon. When he climbed back on the boat with blood trickling out of one eye and a leg laid open to the bone, his first words were: “Maybe I’ll drive for a little while, who’s next?”
It took a little persuasion, but we finally managed to talk him into letting us take him to the hospital, if only to stop him from bleeding all over everything.