MINDLESS MUSINGS

I was 11 years old when The Karate Kid was released. Back then it took a while before any big movie made its way down under, so I was probably 12 when I got to see it. I can still remember rushing into the cinema with my mate Jonno because we were late. We missed the beginning, but by the time the credits rolled we exited elated right alongside the rest of the packed theatre.

We all walked out of that movie with a sense of hope and maybe even a little thirst for vengeance on a few people. I have never seen any statistics, but I would be very confident that enrolments in martial arts schools spiked markedly not long after that film was released. Who wouldn’t want to take down bullies?

Me and most of my friends were not among the tough kids in school and we weren’t fighters, so we were very keen to learn how to kick-ass; especially when it required no actual fighting!

Think about how absurd the premise was:

• Daniel had taken a few classes at his old home.
• Mr Miyagi was trained by his father, and we have no information regarding if he ever had to use it.
• Mr Miyagi trains Daniel and they never go any harder than very light sparring.
• The Cobra Kai psychos train full contact against various opponents, and most have competed in one or more tournaments.
• Johnny and his pals are black belts, and I highly doubt that John Kreese would be giving those things out lightly.
• Daniel enters his first tournament after training with Mr Miyagi for around 7 weeks and takes out Cobra Kai.

Where’s the problem?

First off, I don’t think anyone, at least us kids, caught on to the 7-week thing. We were all on board and just accepted the montages as meaning a lot of time had passed. We all understood that it was a fantasy and many aspects were exaggerated, but none of us could shake the idea of secret techniques and training methods that transform a wimp into a bad ass. It might take a few years, but it was possible.

Never mind that we never saw any of the tough kids using anything more than wild punches and sloppy wrestling whenever they scrapped. We all doubted when our fathers would insist that a good boxer would destroy one of these Karate clowns, yet as we moved into high school it was often the kid who had trained in boxing who did the most damage. Although any kid willing to trade blows earned respect and those giants who were big for their age also held a lot of sway.

I never saw any of the kids with black belts (usually karate or taekwondo) use any snappy techniques if they did actually get into a scrap, but somehow the myth survived.

My Greek friends were all enrolled in goju ryu karate at the St. Peters town hall. For some reason my mate Wayne and I enrolled in the taekwondo classes that ran on alternate nights to the karate. I can clearly recall telling one of my cousins about the class and him saying “Taekwondo is good, that’s all of them combined”. I was feeling pretty good after that. A perfect example of our total ignorance right there folks. What the fuck is “all of them” anyway?

The Ultimate Fighting Championship was still almost a decade away and I have mentioned in an earlier post our extremely limited exposure to what was going on in the rest of the world. Grappling was not really a thing. Wrestling was either the phony Pro-stuff or the boring Olympic stuff. Without knowing the difference between judo and jujitsu they both meant the same thing to us and seeing it in the movies it looked damned effective and used a lot of strikes.

We understood that Kung Fu was different to karate, but all the different styles were incomprehensible to us. Like karate, kung fu was an all-encompassing term; maybe slight variations here and there, who the fuck knows? Those chop saki guys (and gals) kick serious ass. Our blind spot was that this all happened in fictional movies or TV shows.

The only time we saw two fighters go at full force for real was boxing or the new (to us) sport of kickboxing. No prizes for guessing which one our fathers preferred and recommended. This was not Muay Thai mind you. No elbows, knees or legs kicks yet. Most of us wouldn’t see that until a few years later.

Somehow our wishful thinking convinced us that the new breed of kickboxers were just karate blackbelts who made the transition to going hammer and tongs in the ring. You could train techniques with light sparring in a dojo and when you get that black belt you can go full throttle with someone trying to take your head off.

All this while knowing damn well, that the reason none of us took up boxing was because sooner or later you were going to get punched in the face – repeatedly and hard. I don’t think anyone connected those dots in that exact way, but that was the major flaw in the average karate dojo system. We didn’t fight.

Ironically, the karate school that would probably prepare you best for a street altercation would be Cobra Kai. That kind of intensity, pressure and pain would require the kind of fear conquering needed to perform in a violent encounter. Criminal charges and psychological damages aside, Johnny would be much better equipped than any McDojo martial ‘artists’.

Like I said earlier, in the hierarchy of the school brawlers I cannot think of any martial arts experts, and this goes on through most of my life in bars, on the street, on the news. An entire industry built on fantasy! How much money was spent on getting fit, flexible and gaining the ability to kick hard, fast and accurately? It wasn’t wasted, unless the person actually believed they would be able to fight like Bruce Lee did in his movies for real.
Looking back on this post, one thing stuck out to me. The martial arts we held in such high esteem were the very ones we saw characters in the movies use to beat up multiple bad guys. The myth was born on the silver screen. As kids we lacked the real-world experience of our fathers who had yet to see one man take down a bunch of blokes on his own using high kicks and fancy moves. Maybe a nutter who punches like a thrashing machine and has a rock for a head, but not a kung fu master.

Anyway, Wayne and I didn’t last too long at St Peters Town hall. If memory serves me, we dropped out when they told us we had to pay for yellow belt grading. More laziness I would say; the money was just a good excuse.

I would continue searching for that mystical system that could make me a bully-basher without having to get punched or kicked in the face and I would continue to see untrained people beat the shit out of people without connecting the dots. I learned a lot; how to fight was not one of those things though.