Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Lost in the recent assassination attempt of former President Trump is a sober warning that America might fall.  And soon.  

And we’re not talking about civil war or politics, but war war.  You know…the real thing.  

I know what you’re thinking.  That’s crazy talk.  It’s insane. It’s like saying that my mother-in-law is a great driver or some such kooky thing.  But stay with me.  I’ll prove it.  Ready?

Mike Tyson.  

Seriously.

Back in late 1989 as autumn gave way to winter, Mike Tyson was considered to be quite literally unbeatable.  He’d just demolished yet another hapless victim, Carl “the Truth” Williams in little over a minute with a single left hook back in July.  The “truth” about Williams, it turned out, was that his chin was no match for Tyson’s left hook.  Oh well…no one complained about paying good money (the pay-per-view was $24.99 for crying out loud!) to see a mere minute-and-a-half demolition.  

It was Tyson!  That’s what he did. 

The question was never if he could be beat by that point – we’d stopped asking that question after he obliterated the evidently terrified Michael Spinks in, yep, you guessed it…a minute-and-a-half back in 1988.  (The guy paid to work the bell at Tyson fights was the most overpaid dude in the history of overpaid dudes.) The only relevant question asked by sane adults was how long a guy might last and not whether Tyson could be vanquished.  To suggest such was the stuff that relegated a man to the trash bin of polite society.  It was like saying, “I think there are aliens living in my toaster…” or “I bought a timeshare in Siberia.”  

Yeah, crazy stuff.  No one would take you seriously after such fatuity.  

Ah, but there were warning signs that something was wrong with the Emperor.  And here’s where we should pay attention.  

There were reports and rumors that Tyson wasn’t training seriously.  There were sightings of him out and about, in this club or that, and certainly not training.  If chasing models and drinking was a sport, he was in shape for that, sure, but his patented peek-a-boo style seemed to be accumulating cobwebs.  

Nah.  It doesn’t matter, we thought.  He’s still too good for any modern heavyweight.  No worries.  

Then ESPN showed a video of Iron Mike looking, well, not so iron.  A sparring partner, Greg Page, appeared to, gasp, drop him.  We all watched the grainy video.  And we all said the same thing: he slipped.  No biggie.  He’s fine.  He’s still Tyson, after all.  

Well, then, fast forward to that fateful night in February of 1990 and a guy named Buster.  

The King had fallen.  Badly.  The image of Tyson groping around on the canvas looking for his mouthpiece when he should have been getting to his feet, and then putting it in his mouth sideways, was unthinkable. And then it happened.  Tyson.  KO’d.  By Buster Douglas.  

Well, the signs of decay upon that other great and indestructible force, America and her military, are all around too, just like they were with Tyson.  Unless you’re old enough to remember the Soviet Union, you probably haven’t ever lived a day in the world where you seriously feared that America could lose a war.  I grew up in the 80’s.  The movie Red Dawn wasn’t considered fantasy but an actual possibility.  The movie (and I’m talking the original…the good one with Patrick Swayze) followed a group of high school students (Wolverines!) who flee to the mountains and wage a guerrilla war against the invading Soviet army that had taken over the American west coast.  

Yeah.  Imagine that.  

Anyway, watching a skinny, disaffected 20 year-old with no ninja skills, and certainly he was no John Wick, somehow outsmart the world’s finest security service, that being the U.S. Secret Service, and take a pristine rooftop position in which to shoot a former president, is a grave warning.  How did the world’s finest security force miss a dude with a rifle and a ladder?  This isn’t Greg Page, an accomplished fighter in his own right by the way, knocking down Tyson in sparring.  No.  This is akin to the bucket boy or janitor knocking Tyson on his keister.  It boggles the noodle.  

But that’s not even the worst of it.  

After the former president was shot, narrowly escaping with his life, his security detail failed to get him in a protective group hug designed to provide a human meat shield. You know, the whole “my life for yours” thing.  Trump stood up and was, alas, still exposed!  One intrepid agent was simply too short to shield him.  The now epic photo of Trump’s defiant fist pump with the flag waving proudly above him in that resplendent blue sky would have been another thing altogether if instead of a camera the photographer had been another shooter.  

Again, it boggles the noodle.  

Oh, and what about the lady agent who couldn’t seem to find her holster when she tried to put her gun away?  Was this amateur hour?  She looked like a bad actor trying to play an agent on a low budget after-school-special movie (those were a thing in the 80’s, by the way).  

So, while we all bicker about politics and rhetoric, I’m sitting here wondering what America’s enemies must be thinking.  I’m wondering if that wide-open border that’s let in around 10 million people in the last three years hasn’t also invited some, you know, trained and determined fellows that don’t miss easy shots.  I’m wondering if any of that $7.2 billion worth of military hardware we abandoned in Afghanistan is in the hands of bad guys who plan on using it here.  I’m wondering if the same skill level I saw defending former President Trump would be on display defending the whole country.

You see, after Tyson did indeed fall to Douglas, all the evidence seemed as clear as day.  All the late nights, partying, personal drama, and lack of discipline made Iron Mike merely Mike.  And lots of people could beat that fella named Merely Mike.  Iron Mike had been forged in the dimly lit and sweat soaked gym in Catskill, New York.  Merely Mike had yes-men and obsequious know-nothings all around instead of steely-eyed boxing professors who respected their opponents and knew well how quickly things could go awry.  

Watching the obvious cracks in America’s once vaunted institutions can and should only conjure up the obvious comparisons unless we have the proverbial bats in our belfry.  The Secret Service quickly blamed the whole rooftop being open to the non-ninja loser on the local police.  The local police replied that it was ultimately the Secret Service’s job.  So much for accountability.  Secretary Mayorkas said he has 100% confidence in Secret Service director Kim Cheatle, not, say, 95% or 90%.  One wonders what it would take for him to not be confident in her.  Maybe if his ear was blown off he’d think differently.  Or maybe he’d just blame the local PD too.  Who knows.  

What we do know is that no one gets fired for not doing their job anymore because no one’s job is more important than they are.  And that’s the problem of overconfidence in a nutshell.  The local police chief in Butler county defended the officer that climbed up to see the shooter but climbed back down after he (the shooter) pointed his gun at him.  The police chief’s philosophy is apparently, “whew…at least my officer wasn’t shot.”  

Even though that’s kind of his job.  

In a world where our military, secret service, and decision makers are out partying, so to speak, and not in the gym staying disciplined and accountable, there’s always a Buster Douglas around the corner.  

Knives & Movies

Don’t get me wrong.  I love martial art and action films as much as anyone else does.  I loved John Wick 4 despite there being a 20 minute gun battle in Paris and not a single cop shows up.  We watch a movie and enter a world of make-believe, right?  That’s the whole point…it’s not supposed to be completely accurate.  

But there’s an incredible danger in all of it too.  Especially for self-defenders.  You see, movie action scenes are to self-defense what porn is to romance.  Feasting one’s eyes upon movie action porn is bound to have a deleterious impact upon one’s understanding and expectations of real-world violence.  The suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy a film shouldn’t mean a total divorce from all logic and reality. It shouldn’t be like talking to a politician about economics.

Well, when it comes to knives and movies (and TV shows) we’re definitely not seeing anything close to reality.  

Everyone who trains here at the Academy (in-house and our distance students) knows well our doctrines of the tactical folding knife.  They’ve been taught the brutal efficacy of the way of the blade.  But this is always done by first addressing the big ole elephant that’s sitting on the sofa eating all our snacks and that is the crazy bias against knives as a first line of defense.  

A steady stream of bad movie action has convinced us, with no critical analysis whatsoever, that knives are generally useless, like having suntan lotion in Alaska.  The damage to true knowledge is so great and so vast that we should take a look at what we call the big three.  

First, in nearly every movie/show one sees, the good guy is in a fight with the all-around menace bad-guy and he’s beating the menace.  There’s a little back and forth.  A punch scores here and there but eventually the good-guy’s skill begins to dominate and then…yes, and then…wait for it…the bad guy, after being knocked down one more time, pulls out a knife.  The camera is sure to show us weapon.  The bad-guy, who had the weapon the entire time but decided, despite being a bad guy, to fight fair, now figures that he must even the odds.  Being a tactical genius, the nefarious criminal-dude holds the knife out in front for all to see.  

The good guy sighs (see Dalton in Roadhouse…see Kelly Lynch in Roadhouse too…no wait…forget that…just stay on topic…focus, Jason, focus).  Then the criminal dude attacks by swinging the blade like a crazed toddler trying to water the garden with a hose.  He’s swinging and slashing and the good guy easily disarms him.  Then he thrashes him worse than before because, hey, he pulled a knife and that deserves a bigger beatdown, right?  

The fight was harder hand-to-hand than against the knife, for crying out loud.  Sure. That’s realistic.

Second, and this happens in virtually every film (see the aforementioned Roadhouse again, and don’t forget Kelly Lynch’s Elizabeth Clay…she was sort of gorgeous…forgive me, I was 19 when it came out…wait…focus!), the good guy gets cut.  As in slashed.  As in he’s bleeding.  But it’s no big deal.  In fact, it’s sort of a bad paper cut.  As in, it’s no more serious than stubbing one’s toe in the night on the way to the loo.  It’s merely an opportunity for the wardrobe people to rip the good-guy’s shirt and show off some abs!!  

This is, of course, unless Steven Seagal is the star.  The venerable Aikido master never gets cut.  Never.  If you even think he should, apologize immediately and throw yourself on the floor.  Hard.  Do it!  

Third and finally, we have the fact that in Hollywood the only people wielding knives are, yep, those nefarious bad dudes.  There are a few notable exceptions to this, of course, like Rambo and Crocodile Dundee. But those guys notwithstanding, the knife-wielder in Hollywood is almost always the sinister type rather than the hero.

So, what have we learned?  What’s been rammed into our subconscious as we sit there mindlessly chomping on overpriced, over-buttered, and over-large tubs of popcorn (enough to feed even Steven Seagal these days!)?  That knives are ineffectual in combat and that even if you cut the enemy, it’s likely only to make him angry.  Oh, and if you have a knife, it’s likely that you’re the bad-guy.  Good guys don’t carry knives.  

An old Greek fella, Socrates, famous for his appearance in that classic, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, once remarked that the unexamined life isn’t one worth living.  So true, that.  Well, it’s apropos here too.  The unexamined self-defense system is an accident waiting to happen.  The depiction of knives in Hollywood, if accepted uncritically, robs us of a tremendous self-defense tool.  

Tactical folding knives are better than concealed handguns for virtually all self-defense scenarios!  Yes, you read that right.  You’ve heard that vacuous line: don’t bring a knife to a gun fight, right?  Well, we aren’t talking about storming Normandy Beach.  We’re talking about a self-defender, trained and prepared, utilizing a small tactical folding knife, usually at distances within six feet against an attacker.  When you’re trained properly (and everything takes training) the blade has tremendous advantages over a handgun.  We detail them at length in my book (JKD’s Way of the Blade) but here’s a few to consider:

The knife doesn’t run out of ammo.  

The knife isn’t going to have a “friendly fire” accident.  How in blazes could you cut someone you didn’t intend to?

The knife is perfectly suited to counterattack the hands/limbs of the enemy, thereby neutralizing the threat without having to use lethal force.  

In the hands of a skilled operator, the knife is extraordinarily effective and virtually impossible to disarm.  Moreover and in contradistinction to Hollywood, a cut from a knife is serious business.  A snap-cut to the hand is quite likely to disable the attacker right then and there because that hand is now inoperable.  The criminal sort of needs that paw in order to do whatever nefarious bad-guy things he intended to do in the first place, right?  You see?  This is what we mean by movies obliterating our ability to think about self-defense realistically.  They show bad-guys getting shot by a Glock and literally getting knocked over, but knives merely scratch people.  It’s madness. It’s nonsense. It’s like my early 20’s. Wait…never mind that.

The point is that most of us think that knives are mere toys and won’t work for self-defense only because of this claptrap we’ve seen in movies.

So, don’t be fooled.  

Knives can be and are noble tools in the hands of a trained self-defender.  They’re extremely effective at exactly the range where self-defenders are forced to operate (close-range).  Get one and get good training.  

And go watch Bill & Ted again while you’re at it.  The time travel is more realistic than the fight scenes you see in movies.  And don’t bother with the new Roadhouse. It’s terrible. You’re welcome.

To learn the incomparable genius of self-defense with a small knife check out Sifu Jason’s “JKD’s Way of the Blade” on Amazon. If you already have a copy, buy another. Buy ten. He needs to put his son through college. Just saying.

A Thinking Man’s Game…Not Guesswork

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says something like, “guessing is free…guessing wrong can be very expensive.”  At least I think it’s an old Chinese proverb.  I’m getting old and can’t remember where I picked things up sometimes.  Nevertheless, the point is valid.  Especially in fighting.  The stakes are rather high, after all, and being wrong could very easily lead to being KO’d and/or beaten to death.  And that’s a bad thing.  A very bad thing.  Like being forced to drive in Atlanta.  Or going to New Jersey.  Or being a Cowboys fan.  Or taking my mother-in-law shopping.  Yeah, that bad.  

Seriously, though, combat is a careful business.  

It was Bruce Lee who said that there’s really no such thing in Jeet Kune Do as a direct attack.  All actions, in order to minimize the risk of getting nailed with a counter, should be preceded by some form of preparation/feint or should be a counterattack.  In other words, don’t guess wrong.  

Lee wrote in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do that drawing is closely allied to feinting.  To be sure, it’s probably one of the least understood aspects of JKD and a subject that’s rarely broached in classes and seminars.  Instructors give it short thrift…treating it like a crazy uncle at the family barbecue.  But far from being an embarrassing aspect of the system that we wish would just go away, drawing is an essential tactic that the smart fighter seeks to master.  To an uneducated spectator, the successful draw will often look merely as a counterattack.  In point of fact, the best stop-hits and counters were first a draw.  

The confusion exists because of the nearly straw-man caricature of drawing.  Yes, a draw is the deliberate invitation for the enemy to attack a target that appears undefended.  But this doesn’t – repeat does not – mean that we stick our chin out and drop our hands.  A draw is a calculated piece of fistic precision designed to exploit the enemy’s tendencies.  A draw is rarely so obvious as dropping one’s hands or something like that.  

A better example of a real-world draw would be stepping just inside the fighting-measure and using one’s leading hand to jam the enemy’s forward hand.  This not only takes away one primary line of attack, but it strategically invites the enemy to fire a rear hand blow that can be readily countered…perhaps with a stinging jab from the already advanced hand.  

Lee said, “drawing uses the method of strategy and the method of crowding or forcing.  Being able to advance while apparently open to attack, but ready to counter if successful, is a phase of fighting that few ever develop.”  The use of draws in such form is critical if one is faced with a reach deficit.  Think of Julio Cesar Chavez stepping in the pocket back in his heyday.  He’d often crowd his opponent, inviting an exchange to which he would expertly counter.  The JKD and Wing Chun fighter, not limited by boxing’s rules, should make ready use of this tactic.  It’s the thinking man’s ability to bridge the gap and create angles through which they can deploy a variety of tactics such as holding and hitting (trapping).  

A draw doesn’t always have to result in a strike being thrown, by the way.  A good example (again used by a shorter fighter versus a taller foe) is to burst forward in a crouch.  This often causes the enemy to lower his guard, even if ever so slightly.  At that point the JKD fighter can surge upward with a heavy straight lead punch or even an overhand.  Tactics like this are virtually limitless and should be studied and practiced until they can be executed with precision, speed, and fluidity.  

Too much time is spent developing technique but not enough on the tactics to deploy them.  By that we mean: without running into the enemy’s counter.  The question that should greatly concern us is: how do I control the enemy?  Studying and practicing the art of the draw gets us out of our own heads; it protects us from being kings of the classroom yet clowns on the street.  

The idea at work is to “guess carefully.”  We want to study the enemy and his potential.  The master fighter is able to manipulate his foe through smart tactics so that his/her technique is applied with minimum risk and maximum reward.  

Think of marketing/advertising for a second.  Most ads we see rarely (if ever) discuss the quality of the actual product.  Instead, ads commonly use emotion, especially humor and sex.  If you know your audience is a bunch of dudes, sex is a powerful tool…a draw.  If your audience is men and women, humor works better.  (I doubt my wife will want to buy a new refrigerator just because Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn was hawking it…just saying.)

A good martial artist should see combat like this.  Study the enemy.  For self-defense we assume that he’s going to be highly aggressive.  A passive violent assault is sort of a contradiction in terms, right?  That being the case, we should plan to use that against him. A steady diet of counterattacks and draws should be headed his way so as to both exploit his aggression (overcommitment) and minimize our risk of running into a shot.  

Sun Tzu, a fella who knew something about warfare, and was seriously underpaid on his masterpiece, The Art of War, once said, “know your enemy and know yourself and you’ll win every battle.”  Indeed.  What does your enemy want?  What is his primary goal and plan?  How is he likely to engage?  What are his primary tools and attributes?  

And lest we think all this talk about feints and draws are the mere stuff of sporting combat and not self-defense, let’s face the fact that predators almost always use this process themselves.  They seek the most opportune time to strike – often ambush style, having “drawn” their prey into a momentarily weak position.  

This is a very broad subject and worthy of extensive consideration, so we’ll leave you with this:

Attitude determines awareness.  

Awareness determines position.  

Position determines technique.  

Simple, Not Easy

I once asked Ted Wong what he thought was the greatest obstacle in teaching JKD.  Without hesitation he replied, “having to repeat yourself.”  What he meant was that most of us are always trying to learn a new trick or some special secret instead of mastering the basics and keeping the main thing the main thing.  We all have this tendency to major in minors, don’t we?  Just look at the diet industry.  We spend billions buying products to help us get thin when it’s rather clear that we need to put the hamburger down and go for a jog.  But it’s always easier to eat the cookie…and then another. That’s the rule of life. Simple doesn’t mean easy; it takes great discipline to stay focused.

Moreover, by not keeping things simple – that is, applying the basics to life – we find that an increasingly stressful “complexity creep” sets in. The rule is: hyper complex systems are always downstream of bureaucracy and bureaucracy is the result of people forgetting what the main goal is. Focus on a derivative point instead of the primary thing and we find ourselves buried under a thousand illogical burdens. Ever work at a big company? Or at the biggest – the government? They’re classic examples of complexity creep swallowing up simplicity.

In that case, working in a bureaucratic nightmare, stress might kill you. Yeah…but under the pressure of a violent assault complexity can and will literally kill you. The genius of Bruce Lee was that he had the courage to not only understand this but he resisted all attempts to complicate matters. Since his passing, and despite the much appreciated work of Ted Wong, his protege, JKD has often fallen prey to the exertions of martial bureaucrats. Something catches their fancy…something draws their attention rather than the simple goal of keeping oneself as safe as possible in an unavoidable violent encounter and here comes that regrettable avalanche of complexity. And confusion.

JKD shouldn’t be confusing.  It’s simple but not easy and the key to understanding its application is actually hiding in plain sight.   Where?  Well, in the very name – jeet kune do, which means, of course, the way of the intercepting fist.  Now that should clear up some confusion right away as to what the intent of the system was/is and keep us from running down a multitude of rabbit holes.  

So, what’s in the name?  Well, for starters the word “jeet” generally comes into English meaning to intercept.  From this we derive the idea of stopping or cutting off an attack with one of our own.  When people ask me what JKD is I bring them to the name to illustrate its foundational purpose.  Countering an attack scientifically has the great and underappreciated value of diminishing one’s risk of the reverse: running into a shot yourself.  So many knockouts happen because the attacker ran into a strike he/she didn’t see because, well, it’s impossible to keep everything covered when attacking.  To diminish this great risk, the counter-attack is indispensable.  In fact, the all-time boxing great, Peerless Jim Driscoll, devoted an entire chapter of his book, The Straight Left, solely to the stop-hit.  

In real world fighting, people don’t stand still.  Watch the average demo on YouTube and you’ll see the other guy pause while Sifu Fantastic does his super-duper-awesome stuff.  Lee called this dissecting a corpse.  Real people keep firing back, often swinging wildly with haymakers and hooks.  If one of those connects – goodnight.  Bruce Lee understood this and realized the danger of complex motions in fights and instead relied heavily on the interception tactics to keep himself from getting unceremoniously KO’d by some knuckle-dragger’s haymaker.  The best defense, of course, is a good offense and the best offensive tactic is to meet an on-rushing attack with a well-timed counter-attack, thus borrowing great force from the attacker.  There’s tremendous shock value in getting the bad guy to run into a counter-strike.  More on this later.  

So, basically, this is the main goal of Bruce Lee’s JKD – to use counter/interception tactics against attacks.  

Straight hits like the lead punch, eye-jab, side kick, or straight kick, best facilitate the intercepting concept and leave the JKD fighter with less exposure to danger than roundhouse strikes.  Thus, JKD was built, like its parent arts of Wing Chun and old-school fencing influenced boxing, around straight hits.  Take a look at Lee’s own work in the Fighting Method series.  In one volume he covers ways to deal with different attacks.  Take a look at the photos.  An attack while walking down the road: low side kick.  An attack while getting in your car: low side kick.  An ambush from behind: low side kick.  Ah!  You can see a pattern here.  The obvious being (besides the apparent danger of walking in a bad neighborhood while wearing sissy-white pants) that Lee preferred cutting off the attack with an attack instead of anything more complicated.  

Now, some controversy comes in at this point from those that say such interception tactics won’t work for everyone because they aren’t as fast as Bruce Lee was.  Their answer to this false dilemma is to insert other complicated techniques to solve the problem.  It’s a false dilemma, though, because it leaves footwork and evasiveness out of the equation.  Think of the intercepting kick or punch like a gun shot.  If a man was running at you with a knife and you have a gun, and the distance was fairly close, it would certainly be to your benefit to move while firing.  Likewise, if an attacker rushes you, the assumption is that you will likely have to move to avoid the attack.  The genius of JKD is that like a gun, one can fire the straight lead punch while moving, hence achieving interception and defense simultaneously.  There are other means of doing this, like slipping and hitting, or parrying and hitting, but the goal is always the same: avoid being a target and hitting back at the earliest possible moment.  If you’re fast enough to nail him right away, great.  Do it.  If not, hit and move.  Still simple. 

This is quite literally why Lee coined his method the way of the intercepting fist – the straight punch and/or eye-jab are the only weapons one can consistently fire while on the move.  A hook or cross or some other tool can only be thrown once with movement and then the fighter has to reset.  The straight punch, though, demands no considerable disruption of balance so the JKD fighter can fire multiple shots while in transit and/or until the attack ceases or another good target (groin or shin/knee come to mind) becomes available. Lee didn’t call the straight punch the backbone of JKD for nothing.  The whole of the system is a set-up for it.  An opponent that runs into a heavy counter lead punch – delivered by a bare fist – makes himself decidedly less good looking in short order.  That’s why the bare knuckle fighters of old leaned slightly back in their stance.  Getting punched by a bare fist is slightly less pleasant than trying to find a parking spot at the mall during Christmas season (which leads to wanting to punch people in the face, but that’s another article).  

This was the simple truth that Lee built JKD around – this is the rock and the foundation in which everything else is in orbit.  The intercepting straight punch or kick, from the JKD on-guard, supported by footwork, slipping, parrying, and the other weapons when applicable.  It’s simple, yes, but not easy.  

Wing Chun’s Secret Weapon – the Fook Sao

The following is an excerpt from Sifu Jason’s new book, “Wing Chun’s Foundation: Siu Lim Tao.”

The Fook Sao section is the slowest, not just in Siu Lim Tao, but of any of the Wing Chun forms.  It’s importance is accentuated by this very fact and we do well to consider it carefully.  Not only is it the slowest section, it’s also the most eccentric looking thing you’re going to do in Wing Chun.  Period.  Having your hand cupped weirdly in front of you and moving it with painful slowness along the center line has to be the most un-combat looking thing a person can do in a combat system.  So, what’s the deal with it and why is it so important? 

There are two primary things to know.  First, it’s teaching us to attack and defend the center of mass.  Second, it’s teaching us the fundamentals of close-quarter contact or, in another way of saying it, street-fight clinching.  

The aspect of defending and attacking the center of mass is something akin to making sure your gun is loaded before a gunfight.  The modern martial art world is so shot through with hysterical and illogical support of MMA that it simply doesn’t occur to most of us that the easiest way to truly injure someone is by hitting them in the throat.  Sure, there’s the occasional joke about a throat-punch here and there but no one practices it and even less than that, no one practices defending it.  

This isn’t to say that we hope to see broken windpipes in the octagon soon.  No, of course not.  What we’re saying is that in a situation where it’s life or death, with someone much larger and stronger, such attacks are critical.  The Fook Sao structure, is therefore, the key to being able to achieve real self-defense skill.  To have a self-defense system that eschews the attack and defense of the body’s weakest link is the height of folly.  

To be clear, sparring and drills of that nature are very beneficial for one’s accuracy and timing.  That’s certainly true, but they can give one a dreadful false confidence.  In real-fighting, the sort of thing Wing Chun is concerned with, it’s necessary to attack and defend the softest, most vulnerable targets.  And that’s exactly where Fook Sao comes in.  

The key to it is the elbow position.  If the elbow flares out, the structural support is broken and the enemy will be able to break through your guard.  It should be known, in light of this statement, that a good Wing Chun fighter, properly trained and educated in the reality of fighting, is nearly impossible to grapple with due to their ability to seize the throat of the enemy whenever they (the enemy) vacate the center in order to grab (as seen in the photo above).  Misapprehension of the core principle of Fook Sao is catastrophic to your Wing Chun.  There is no “hand-chasing” or “baby-sitting the hands” in Wing Chun!  Attack and simultaneously defend your center mass and vulnerable targets.  You don’t care about the centerline as an abstraction.  You care about the targets and center of gravity the centerline protects.  The centerline isn’t a thing; it’s a reference to those things.  

If Fook Sao isn’t chasing hands then what is it chasing?  It’s “chasing center” or “chasing critical targets.”  In this way, by learning how to properly occupy and control the centerline (in reference to these targets) one becomes a formidable self-defender.  The throat/neck, jaw, and eyes, as well as one’s balance (by pushing, pulling and shoving) are constantly attacked with fast, springy power developed by the Fook Sao section.  

The other aspect of this section that’s exigent is the ability to clinch/bridge properly.  Unfortunately in fighting we aren’t always able to hit the target we want.  Sometimes things aren’t going our way.  There are two ways that one can deal with, that is to say, shut down the offense of the enemy in a helter-skelter environment.  One is to be mobile and use evasion.  The other is to tie them up.  This is, incidentally, why grappling methods work quite well at times.  It’s the tie-up that keeps the grappler from getting hit if they do it properly.  The thing is, Wing Chun people often don’t understand this connection with grappling methods.  A BJJ fighter that is able to grab his enemy is able to nullify their striking.  You see this also in boxing when fighters use the clinch.  

Well, the Fook Sao represents any top or outside hand.  Tan Sao represents the structure you need if you have an inside hand relative to your opponent.  In other words, Wing Chun clinches, ties up their hands (or bridge) to gain control of the enemy so they can’t strike.  Fook and Tan, amongst other things, but chiefly, are types of clinching positions.  Wing Chun has been nearly ruined because people don’t understand this and use chi-sao as a game of “Gotcha” or some hyper-technical arm wrestling match.  No!  A thousand times, no!  We bridge.  We tie them up!  We use these logical and fundamentally sound structures to shut down the offense of the enemy and launch our own attacks.  This section is the gateway to understanding close-quarter fighting.  

This aspect of fighting, clinch control and striking the body’s most vulnerable targets, is virtually unknown today.  I’d go so far as to say that the systematic training of this is utterly absent from modern fighting arts.  The closest we get is the clinch in Muay Thai, boxing and grappling systems.  The methods of those arts differ but they all use variations of the clinch to control the offense and balance of the enemy.  Wing Chun, you should know, seeks to achieve the same thing yet with the critical difference of using close-range striking to the throat, neck, jaw and eyes.  To leave these targets – both the attack and defense of them – out of Wing Chun is to eviscerate the system.  In order to achieve this objective, though, we must master the Fook Sao principle and structure, which mean we must master Siu Lim Tao.  

JKD & Boxing

The True and Practical Origins of JKD

Excerpt from the upcoming book, “JKD Infighting”

For all the hand-wringing and overly philosophical meanderings about what JKD is or is not, let’s get this out in the open.  Let’s not meander and make a big deal out of what should be patently obvious to one and all – as obvious as the day of the week.  Bruce Lee’s JKD is a self-defense/martial art offshoot of old-school boxing.  His foundation was Wing Chun and he saw that as a practical system of combat but for two reasons he adapted a more boxing framework to his JKD.  

First, he couldn’t finish his Wing Chun training.  When Lee left Hong Kong in late 1958 he left behind the Ip Man school.  Ip Man’s approach to teaching, we should note, was very much based on practicality.  He encouraged his pupils to test the theories and training for themselves rather than blindly taking his word for it.  This was – especially for a Chinese fighting method in the 1950’s where loyalty to the Sifu was paramount – a radical thing.  I contend that it was this that was the central aspect of the Ip Man school and gave rise to men like Lee as well as his senior, Wong Shun Leung (who was also responsible for Lee’s training under Ip Man).  

At that time in Wing Chun history, the method wasn’t considered a classical art.  Ip Man was an upstart in the Hong Kong community.  He’d been chased out of mainland China by Mao’s forces and left without his family and forced to scratch out a living in a city still recovering from the ravages of Japanese occupation in WW2. During that period from December of 1941 thru August 1945 food had been so scarce that hundreds of thousands perished.  When the occupation began there were nearly 2 million people in Hong Kong.  By the time they left there were only 700,000.  It was a time that’s hard to imagine for the modern westerner when one of the greatest health threats facing the impoverished in America is obesity!  In Hong Kong at that time, the people were literally starving to death.  Please keep that in mind when you see old photos of that era.  

At any rate, we can understand the toughness of a people who’ve survived such a war and such horrific deprivations.  And it was to these survivors – men like Wong Shun Leung – that Ip Man broke from tradition and told to go test the stuff to see if it worked. 

Which brings us to the second reason that Lee moved toward boxing in his later years.  

Quite simply, in America, which had been, by comparison, untouched by the ravages of war, and was awash in material wealth, there wasn’t a culture of “trying things out” in the  martial community like there had been back in Hong Kong.  But driven by the philosophy of Ip Man, that being that a theory had to work in practice, Lee was hell-bent on practicality.  Boxing offered this to him.  It gave him the ability to test things out and, not only that, but a rich history of adaptation and change.  In short, to Lee’s mind, boxing was the logical extension or, perhaps more accurately, the martial sibling to his foundation art of Wing Chun.  

The proof of this is a letter that he sent to his senior and mentor in Wing Chun, Wong Shun Leung.  Here’s the letter:

“Dear Shun-Leung, Jan. 11, 1970

“It has been a long time since I last wrote to you.  How are you?  Alan Shaw’s letter from Canada asks me to lend you my 8mm film.  I’m sorry about that.  It is because I have lost it when I moved my home.  That film is already very old and I seldom use it, so I have lost it.  I am sorry for it.

“Now I have bought a home in Bel-Air.  It is about half an acre.  There are many trees.  It has the taste of a range.  It is located on a hilltop near Beverly Hills.  Moreover, besides my son Brandon, I have had a daughter, Shannon, who is seven months old now.  Have you re-married?  Please send my regard to your sisters.  Recently, I have organized a film company.  I have also written a story ‘The Silent Flute’.  James Coburn and I will act in it.  Stirling Silliphant is the screen-play writer.  He is a famous screen-play writer (In the Heat of the Night).  We plan to make the first fighting film in Hollywood.  The prospect is good. About six months later, the filming work will begin.  All who participate in this film are my followers.  In the future, Steve McQueen may also work together with me.  

“I am very excited about this plan. As to martial arts, I still practice daily.  I meet my students and friends twice a week. No matter they are western boxer, Tae Kwon Do learner or wrestler, I will meet them as long as they are friendly and will not get angry.  

“Since I started to practice realistically in 1966 (Protectors, gloves, etc.), I feel that I had many prejudices before, and they are wrong.  So I change the name of the gist of my study to Jeet-kune-do.  Jeet-kune-do is only a name.  The most important thing is to avoid having bias in the training. Of course, I run everyday, I practice my instruments (punch, kick, throw, etc.).  I have to raise the basic conditions daily.  

“Although the principle of boxing is important, practicality is even more important.  I thank you and Master for teaching me the ways of Wing Chun in Hong Kong.  Actually, I have to thank you for leading me to walk on a practical road.  Especially in the States, there are western boxers, I often practice with them too.  There are many so-called masters in Wing Chun here, I really hope that they will not be so blind to fight with those western boxers may make a trip to Hong Kong.  I hope that you will live in the same place.  

“We are intimate friends, we need to meet more and chat about our past days.  That will be a lot of fun?  When you see Master Yip, please send my regard to him.  Happiness be with you!

“Bruce Lee.”

When we couple this letter with the fact that Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, published posthumously and originally intended to be a manual for his personal students, was actually copied itself from old boxing and fencing manuals, we have settled the issue of JKD’s origins.  Our contention that Lee’s JKD followed the principles of boxing and that he owed this to his instruction in Wing Chun from Ip Man isn’t speculation but, rather, the direct words and deeds of the man himself.  In the famed Tao, often seen as evidence of Lee’s martial genius, he literally copied dozens of pages from old boxing and fencing manuals. Modern boxing had grown out of the fencing era, relying on straight hits, footwork, timing and deception.  So, indeed, he was a genius but a different one than most of us are led to believe.  

The infighting presented in this book, therefore, will have a greater streak of boxing running through it than the JKD Foundations book.  At long range, JKD can resemble fencing a bit more but that’s all gone when you are fighting in the trenches.  A thing to note, of course, is Lee’s own words in the letter to his mentor.  He says that though boxing principles are important, practicality and realism are the key.  What this means is that Lee built his JKD on the well vetted and tested principles of boxing.  Modifications made for street-fighting – such as takedown defense, head-butting, eye jabs, low blows, etc. – while necessary and extremely helpful in the cause of personal defense, are still in orbit around the boxing principles.  Those principles are what Lee liked to call aliveness.  In particular, they’re evasion, powerful striking from any angle, and mobility.  

If you were so inclined to say that JKD is simply boxing then, we would disagree.  There’s a difference in building on the foundation of a thing and being that thing. A boxer can cheat but he would have to make a conscious effort to override his muscle and tactical memory in order to do so.  The JKD approach is a scientific “cheating” – a highly organized, yet simple adaptation of the boxing methodology in order to help keep the self-defender as safe as possible in the event of a sudden and violent encounter.  Thus, JKD is like boxing but isn’t boxing.  On the other hand, those JKD variants that are less like boxing and more like something else – like say, Kali – are less like JKD too.  To jettison the boxing roots of JKD – especially on the inside – is to cut oneself off from the scientific nature of the combat. 

To prove my point, I’d like to offer this example.  

Back in 1996 my school was very small.  I had a 400 square foot place on Wade Hampton Boulevard in Taylors, South Carolina.  (Talk about humble beginnings…the Lord has blessed my work mightily!). One evening a guy came in and asked why I wasn’t teaching BJJ.  He went on to explain that unless I was teaching Gracie style BJJ that I’d be out of business in short order.  The strength of his argument rested upon the small sample-size evidence of the recent UFC matches in which Royce Gracie was dominant.  

Well, to this I replied that boxing was still the king in any universe where people throw punches at each other.  As soon as the fighters adapted their tactics to account for BJJ – that is, learned to sprawl and punch properly, you’d see a radical reordering of the UFC.  He laughed derisively at that and shook his head in a way a man shakes his head when someone tells him he was once abducted by aliens.  Or that 9/11 was an inside job.  Or that you can trust Congress.  

Anyway, here we are over 20 years later and we know that a UFC fighter without boxing is an accident waiting to happen.  

We must add, though, that the old-school boxing we present – and that being Jack Dempsey style predominantly – is better suited for all-out fighting than MMA.  This is due to the variables like asphalt rather than mats, headbutts, eye, throat and groin strikes, multiple opponents and so on. We’ll cover all this in more detail as we go but we remember that Lee’s goal was realism and that he once remarked that boxing was “over-daring” due to its reliance on rules.  It was his belief that a martial artist was training for war, not sport and that sport, while extremely helpful in regard to testing certain aspects of one’s game, if left unchecked, would dominate one’s understanding of self-defense and thus weaken it.  We remind the reader that if you aren’t cheating in combat you aren’t trying to win insofar as we define cheating as the use of tactics and targets that are the most difficult to defend.  

In closing, if you think that Dempsey or Tyson were destructive, and they certainly were, then you need to understand how and why that was the case.  That’s what made Lee such an outstanding thinker.  He saw people getting the results he wanted and began his research there.  JKD infighting is, therefore, the extrapolations of close-quarter boxing applied to street-defense – all-out, life-or-death combat.  

Wing Chun A Close-Range Science of Self-defense

Excerpted from Jason’s upcoming book, Wing Chun for the Modern Warrior

It’s well noted from the writings of self-defense and dueling experts of the past few centuries that there were a particular group of fighters to be avoided.  These less than esteemed, but highly feared men were called rough-and-tumble fighters.  Indeed, the highly skilled and cultivated of the day, including the great Colonel Monstery, that renowned duelist and warrior of the 19^th Century, were less than enamored with these fighters, considering them barely above the ranks of savages.  But feared they were.  Monstery himself advised against ever fighting these men.  

This should draw our attention because the masters of the past, unlike today, were not dealing with sport rules for the most part.  These were men that fought with bare fists, with knives, swords, and sticks.  These were the type of men that make contemporary manly men look like sissies.  Many of today’s so-called fighters are, for better or worse, sport fighters and they are conditioned to fight according to rules.  These duelists, quite naturally, sometimes died from their competitions so it’s fair to say, in the very least, that they had a view of combative things that should speak truth to us across the decades and centuries as we face an ever more violent society.  

So, what was it that engendered such fear amongst the highest and best of the warrior elite from these uncouth barbarians?  Well, simply put, they were savage in-close fighters by all accounts.  They were eye-gougers and head-butters; they were foul inside warriors that attacked the jaw, the eyes, the neck and throat.  They held and hit.  And they hit low.  They had no regard for decency.  They would even bite whenever and wherever they could.  Yes…this was a class of fighters in that day.  Ruthless, savage and in your face.  As was noted, to win a fight against these men often still relegated the victor to some sort of serious injury.  They were best to be left alone.  Think of the famous fight between Bill “The Butcher” Poole and John Morrissey in New York in 1854.  No one wanted to fight such men.

Well, my friends, as we seek to engage contemporary threats it’s best that we live in the real world.  We should note that these past duelists were often concerned with honor in combat.  Those men were living in a time when people had a code and that code effected even the way men behaved in combat.  Incidentally, it was noted in newspaper accounts of the day that some Chinese immigrants, when fighting, fought a very “dirty” game too – much like the rough-and-tumble group.  We can have a debate on the reasons for the West’s collapse of virtue and morality some other time, but it’s unthinkable for the modern warrior to insist it isn’t happening.  When I was growing up in a poor town in Upstate New York where there were plenty of fights among the young men, myself included, it was unthinkable to hit a downed opponent or someone who said, “Uncle.”  The witnesses were sure to intercede – they would police themselves, if you will – if one party continued to put it on a boy unable and/or unwilling to defend himself.  

Those days are, sadly, regrettably, as gone as most of the vestiges of old America.  Like I said, you can say what you want about the changes of this country in the last 20-30 years.  You can say that we are stamping out injustices by eradicating the old moral codes.  You are welcome to that opinion but there can be no denying that this is a more dangerous place than it was when I was a child.  This isn’t the same land where an 8-year-old boy could go off from home for the entire day, come home only when the street lights came on, and the parents not worry.  That would get most parents arrested today.  It’s unthinkable.  Because everyone is doing what’s right in their own eyes, pornography, violence, and lack of respect for authority rule the day.  People seem to have confused liberty with anarchy and, thus, they’ve replaced rule of law with lawlessness.  All of this, quite naturally, means that if you are in a fight, you are much less likely to be in a fair fight than in the past.  

It’s in this world that we live and it’s in this world that a person must consider his or her self-defense method.  

And it’s here that I wish to tell you that Wing Chun should be your choice. It should be your choice exactly because it’s a science of infighting, which is to say that it’s a logical and comprehensive system very much like what the rough-and-tumblers were doing a century ago.  This alone should make any warrior stand up and consider Wing Chun over other systems.  

A number of years ago a martial arts teacher from a nearby school paid me a visit.  He identified himself as a grandmaster.  This was because, as he explained, he had modified the original Karate system he’d learned so much that it was an entirely new system, thus granting him the coveted title grandmaster.  For the next several days afterwards, incidentally, I identified myself, and expected to be addressed by one and all, as “Your Worshipfulness-ship.”  That was, of course, something like what Hans Solo called Princess Leia in his first go-round with her on the big, bad Death Star.  We all had lots of fun.  

Sorry. I digress.  

Anyway, aside from delusions of grandeur, my erstwhile visitor told me all about his vaunted system and how thorough it was in dispatching one and all.  It was a complete system, he said.  How complete?  Well, he counted some 1200 techniques.  But then, without any prompting at all from me, he declared, “But don’t get me wrong…in a real fight I wouldn’t mess around – I’d poke him in the eye and break his knee.”

Fascinating.  

Now, naturally, one wonders what all the other 1,198 techniques are that he won’t use or, in his own words, mess around with.  One wonders how much free time a man has when he can devote his life to the mastery of 1,198 techniques that are “messing around”.  Perhaps he could have devoted such time and energies to other endeavors more productive – like carpentry or landscaping or winning and holding Euro-Asia in Risk.  Or, if he really wanted to waste time, he could have become a writer.  But I digress again.  Quite sorry.  

This seems to be the majority report, however.  Every conversation I have with martial artist, boxer, MMA dude, and civilian alike, there is the same refrain: “If I’m in a real fight…I’ll go after the eyes and all that stuff…”  This seems, in my humble estimation, as ubiquitous as the proverbial, “the check’s in the mail” or, when I’d ask a girl for her phone number, “…just give me yours…I’ll call you.”  (That only happened once or twice.  Seriously.)  

The truth of the matter is, though, that men and women hardly ever rise to the level of their challenge – especially in a violent encounter.  You’re only as good as your practice.  And if you never practice something, there’s little to no chance that you’ll pull it off effectively in a fight.  And this is exactly where Wing Chun should interest everyone and anyone interested in seriously protecting themselves.  I mean, if you want to break boards, go break boards.  That’s fun.  I get it.  Plus, the school makes money from you having to buy all those innocent, never bothered anyone pieces of wood.  And if you want to roll around on a mat (and streets and parking lots are full of nice padded mats, right?) then go do that too.  It’s fun.  I understand.  But if you’re thinking of maximum self-protection then don’t kid yourself.  What you master in practice is what you’ll do in a fight.  Wing Chun is a science of the very stuff everyone else says they’re going to do.  It’s that simple.  

Some Basic Facts

When I’m asked about Wing Chun the first thing I tell people is that it’s a fighting science.  Generally, I’m asked this in environments like the office at my school or at a convenience store where someone asks me about the shirt I’m wearing.  You’ll note that you’re hardly ever in a nice, safe, padded environment; you’re generally surrounded by stuff – and hard stuff at that, like counters, tables, windows, cars and pavement.  Besides, if you’re in a padded environment all the time, you’re either insane or a sport fighter.  But I repeat myself again.  

So, we have limited room to move.  That’s very important to understand.  And the room you have to move is wrought with potential dangers.  For example, falling on a mat or getting slammed against a cage doesn’t quite compare to falling down a flight of stairs or striking your precious noggin on the edge of a table.  Wing Chun, therefore, is a science of close-range footwork, pivoting and shifting.  It’s a transportation system designed for the urban jungle, not the ring or cage.  Imagine vintage Tyson moving, coming in fast and using angles – very aggressive but smart too.  Wing Chun footwork is designed to take the fight to the enemy while not letting him face you directly.  It’s a system of angle stepping, shifting and pivoting that seeks to nullify the other guy’s offense while setting up your own.  

Next, it’s a system of attacking and defending the body’s center-mass and most vulnerable targets.  

For example, I often explain Wing Chun to new students with a little demonstration.  I tell them that I’m going to grab their eyes and that they should try and stop me.  Well, this isn’t the garden-variety way most people think to start a fight.  People are generally quite taken aback by this as it seems particularly barbaric.  But to the Wing Chun fighter, dying or being maimed by a criminal is what’s barbaric.  Therefore, any means at our disposal to avoid such is a rather good idea.  Anyway, as I shoot forward, untrained people are rarely quick enough to block or get out of the way of the rapid and economical attack and, in short order, I have thumbs on both eyes (not hurting them, of course…we don’t do that until after they sign up).  If they do manage to avoid the initial burst, they do so with poor mechanical structure. They lean back or pull to the side awkwardly, leaving them off balance – easily pushed or pulled in that unsafe environment of hard objects.  Or they get an arm in the way.  But this is momentary because Wing Chun’s unique in-fighting training drills teaches one to instinctively clear obstructions and move on to the target with minimal fuss.  Perhaps at this point I don’t get the eyes, though.  Maybe it’s the throat, or neck, or driving the jaw back.  Whatever.  Wing Chun teaches you to let them help you hit them.  Indeed, by not fighting force with force, you go where the openings are.  

Anyway, in short order you have an example of why Wing Chun is so effective.  Unlike the rough-and-tumble guys of the past, where they often traded blows, and everyone was injured (kind of like a modern Presidential election) Wing Chun teaches you to control the enemy while hurting him, thus obliterating his ability to respond in kind.  It’s simple, but not easy.  There’s a clear system that’s more comprehensive than just gouging an eye.  After all, if you think you’re just going to poke a guy in the eye, what happens if that’s his plan too?  We remember that this seems to be everyone’s stated goal.  That being the case, our system of self-defense should assist us in not only attacking the enemy’s weakest targets but also in simultaneously defending our own.  This is no small point, incidentally.  If we both walk away maimed and/or blind, I can hardly count that as a victory.  An eye for an eye is hardly a good fighting tactic – in fact, it works once and only once.  

Wing Chun, therefore, is a brilliant close-range system that teaches the simultaneous nullification of your enemy’s attack and the delivery of your own.  It does this with an ingenious methodology that is logically structured and tactically brilliant.  With all due respect to the great Wong Shun Leung, who once remarked that the best form of self-defense would be to become invisible, but if you can’t do that, learn Wing Chun – I’ve always preferred a more effective way of dealing with enemies if possible.  Remember the first Terminator movie?  Now that’s how you deal with an enemy!  Send a life-like homicidal robot back in time to kill his mother.  That’s the ticket!  Of course, that’s rather hard to do considering that you need both a time machine and a homicidal robot.  More still, that whole shebang would likely be rather cost prohibitive too and only rich people would have them (look out Bernie Sanders!!).  Sadly, that being the case, I think Wing Chun is your go-to self-defense method.  

You Don’t Know Jack!

With all due respect to Ayn Rand, who was Jack Dempsey?

Frankly, it’s a JKD tragedy that more of us don’t know who he was and, more importantly, what impact he had on the Little Dragon and JKD.

If you watch footage of Lee pulverizing the heavy bag in his backyard – beating it like it owed him money – you’ll notice a very distinctive manner in the way he threw his punches.  Well, that is, after you recover from the shock of seeing a man so small punch harder than many people can kick!  How did he do that?  That’s the question.  He wasn’t always doing it that way.  In fact, after his legendary and very frustrating fight with Wong Jak Man, Lee rightly reasoned that he needed more hitting power.  That altercation with Wong, after all, went on for way too long though Lee threw something like a gazillion punches.  Licking his tactical/technical wounds afterward, he knew he needed more power.  

And that’s where our man comes in – Jack Dempsey.  

First, it’s important to understand that Bruce Lee was both a man of ideas and action.  He wanted results and he knew that the best way to get them was to find men that had already gotten them.  So, do you want punching power?  Who better to learn from than a fighter they called the man-killer?  Seriously.  You don’t get that moniker by slapping like a sissy.  Especially in the heavyweight division.  

So, how good was Dempsey?  Well, he was the heavyweight champion from 1919-1926.  In his career, he won 51 times by KO (records vary because of the shoddy nature of some of his early fights.  Not only this, but he fought dozens of “exhibition” matches against top fighters of his day and dispatched one and all).  The thing is, of those 51 KO’s, 25 were in the first round.  He was a menacing, snarling, two-fisted, panther-quick destruction machine.  But, lest you think he was all power and no skill, Dempsey was a master boxer – a scientific and intellectual destruction machine of historic proportions.  No less a fighter than Mike Tyson tried to pattern himself after Dempsey.  

Dempsey’s title winning performance against a giant of a man named Jess Willard is instructive as to his incredible offensive capacity.  In the first round, after prowling along the rim of the fighting measure, staying outside of Willard’s daunting reach (he was 6’6 and 240lbs!), Jack connected with a thunderous barrage.  Willard, who had previously killed a man in a boxing match, was sent to the canvas seven times.  Seven.  To his credit, he kept getting up only to get hammered back down again.  By the end of the round Willard wasn’t the same man anymore.  The soon to be former champion had a broken nose.  A broken jaw.  His orbital bone was obliterated.  He lost hearing in one ear.  He had multiple broken ribs and most of his teeth were gone.  

This was a match – fought nearly 100 years ago on July 4, 1919 in a sweltering 100-degree heat because there were no stadium lights yet – that changed boxing history and kicked off what would be known as the Roaring 20’s.  No one had ever seen such a pulverizing spectacle.  Never.  Especially in a title fight.  

In all, Willard, the fallen giant from Kansas, appeared to be a casualty of one of the mighty guns from the recently ended World War.  No.  He was simply the latest victim of the most destructive fighter in boxing history.  Dempsey later said he felt sick to his stomach looking at Willard, appalled at what his inner fury and skill could do to another human being.  And not just any regular fellow, remember – but a man who had beaten Jack Johnson, a champion and a man who outweighed him by 50 pounds.  

Due to the epic destruction of the reigning heavyweight champion, Dempsey became larger than life.   In a time when the heavyweight champion had no parallel in sports, he was now the emperor of masculinity, as it was said.  No one had ever seen anything like it and even today it’s virtually impossible to understand the heights Jack scaled in popularity.  One story can give us a little perspective, though.  

Eddie Sutherland was a powerful Hollywood director in the 20’s.  He was convinced that his lover, the famous actress Clara Bow, was having an affair.  So, he told Bow he had to go to New York on some business, check on some plays that might make good movies.  They shared a limo ride to Union Station in Los Angeles, hugging, holding hands and even weeping as they parted.  But Sutherland got off the train in Pasadena and took a taxi back home.  When he went to Bow’s mansion, having a key, he let himself in.  The bedroom door was locked.  He began knocking and wouldn’t go away as Bow yelled at him to leave or else she’d call the police.  

But who calls the police on their lover?  She was stalling.

Finally, she opened the door.  She was wearing a bathrobe.

“Where is he?”

“Who?  It’s just me, Eddie,” she said and tried to usher him out of the room.  

“There’s a man here!  I smell a man.”

“What are you, a bloodhound?”

He looked under the bed.  Then he checked the closets.  Finally, he came to the bathroom door.  It was locked.

“I know you’re in there,” he shouted.  “C’mon out here so I can knock your teeth out, you yellow son-of-a-bitch!”  

The door opened.  

There stood Jack Dempsey.

Eddie Sutherland had just called Jack Dempsey a coward and threatened to knock out his teeth.  

Quickly coming to his senses, Sutherland smiled and apologized.  “Jack…I didn’t know it was you.  Just kidding, Jack.”

Some reports have Sutherland getting Jack’s autograph before he left.  Imagine that.  Imagine finding a man in bed with your girl and you get his autograph.  And then you tell all your friends.  That’s how famous Dempsey was, and that fame was built upon those thundering fists.   

Until Dempsey’s time, scientific punchers were unknown.  Knockouts happened more from a fighter being worn down than blown away by a single punch or quick barrage.  We now live on the other side of this history and, therefore, it’s easy to miss the significance of it all.  When Babe Ruth his 59 homers in 1921, and then broke his own record with 60 bombs in 1927, other hitters in baseball were lucky to hit 10 or 15.  But that was the 20’s.  Jack’s fists inaugurated that golden era of sports and he wasn’t hitting baseballs; he was decimating professional fighters.  

Sure, there were hordes of crude punchers – wild men that rushed forward swinging with all their might.  Get this image out of your head.  Those types of men were – and are – crude brawlers.  They may have been heavy handed (if they were any good at all) but Jack was a surgeon, but his goal wasn’t to fix, but to destroy. 

In the fight with Willard he was at his destructive best.  The first half of Round 1 was what most people call a “feeling out” period.  Great action and surreal damage followed in the second half of the round but it was the first half that’s important because it shows Jack’s patience.  Dempsey stayed outside of Willard’s mammoth 83-inch reach.  He was giving away nearly 50-pounds too and big Jess was looking to catch Jack with an uppercut on the inside, so Dempsey was careful, stalking, waiting, and expertly clinching on the inside when his attacks didn’t work.  

No great knockout puncher can be impatient.  What makes them dangerous is their controlled fury – their careful aggression.  And this has to be the case because if they rush in foolishly they’ll catch a counter-punch coming in and that’s always bad because you give the punch more power by running into it.  Aggression can and will be used against you and fighters that attack must be all the more vigilant against mistakes lest they end up taking damage on the way in.  

Well, right around the half-point of the first round Jack caught big Jess with that falling-step jab – a punch that Bruce Lee would later adapt as his own.  It caught Willard flush and opened him up for what the sports writers of the day called a barrage.  Today we’re used to such language but it wasn’t popular then.  It was a reference to Dempsey’s short and pulverizing hooks on the inside.  He’d go to the body with both hands, hammering shots underneath a fighter’s guard and then he’d rip hooks at the head.  It reminded the ringside writers of World War 1 artillery barrages.  

Well, Dempsey let loose on Willard’s body and then crashed a hook home.  It landed flush and big Jess slumped to the canvas in the Ohio summer heat.  It was the perfect hook.  It fractured the champion’s cheekbone in thirteen places.  Willard sat there with what Grantland Rice called a dazed and foolish look, his face “twitching in pain and bewilderment.”  He rose AT six and was met again by a Dempsey left-hook.  Half of his face was already destroyed and now six teeth were dislodged.  The teeth scattered, bloodied, onto the canvas as Willard went down again.  

It remains to this day perhaps the worst beating ever administered in a title fight.  The damage was so appalling that rumors developed over the years that Dempsey had used “loaded” gloves.  But Dempsey didn’t need to cheat.  He had mastered the skill of using all of his bodyweight in every punch.  That was his secret.  And he wanted every fight to be over in a hurry because he reasoned that the longer a match went on the more likelihood that he could be injured.  “I never go in confident,” he once said.  “Any sucker can get lucky and give you a crack in the chin.  I go in, saying to myself, ‘kill ‘im, kill ‘im, kill ‘im.  Otherwise, he’ll kill me.”

So, Jack, you see was the perfect fighting machine.  Hard to hit but rabidly aggressive.  Scientific yet with animal instincts.  Ferociously aggressive but tempered by smart tactics and precision technique.  

And that’s the odd part of it all.  Scientific men – men of intellectual precision and careful thought are not thought to be aggressive.  It’s naturally assumed that high aggression and intellect are antithetical.  All throughout history this bias is in evidence; men of the mind think that men of action are beneath them.  Victor Davis Hanson, the brilliant historian, points this out about Patton.  The great war general was the best read and most probing intellectual of his day, but his aggressiveness made others think he wasn’t an intellectual.  Patton swore a lot and spoke in ways that dripped with the fury of combat.  He said, “son, it isn’t your job to die for you country…it’s to make sure the other son-of-a-bitch dies for his.”  This isn’t how a professor talks.  But both Patton and Dempsey – and later Bruce Lee – would ask us to check our premises.  Ideas, to be true, must work in reality.  That’s the test of an idea.  Does it work?  And Patton was a philosopher of war; Jack was a philosopher of the ring and of man-to-man fighting.  They were men of the mind.  Indeed, they were two of the most honest men to ever live because they put their own bodies on the line to see if their theories worked.  

Interestingly, Dempsey, like Patton, hated war and fighting so much that they took no risks.  They studied how they might end matters as quickly as possible.  That’s the goal.  For Dempsey, it was knocking his man out.  When that happened, Jack knew he was safe.  The best self-defense was KO power.  

As evidenced in his book, Championship Fighting, of which Lee was a serious student, Jack was a highly scientific puncher who knew how to get every last bit of payload into every punch.  Jack didn’t believe in light punches as set-ups – that’s what fakes were for!  No.  He was all-in on every shot and from him Lee learned what became essentials in the JKD system: the power-line, falling-step straight punch, and the four ways to get maximum power in every punch.  This can’t be overstated: to watch Lee hammer the heavy bag is to see a Dempsey student.  

There was a key in Dempsey’s approach that coincided with the Wing Chun Lee already knew.  Jack, unlike other boxers, threw his straight jab (which he called the jolt) with a vertical fist.  This allowed Lee to seamlessly integrate the new skills into his already existing framework.  Jack taught in his book to throw the jolt with a step, hand before foot.  Most people mistakenly believe that JKD’s non-telegraphic structure comes from fencing only.  But there’s an enormous difference between striking someone with a blade and punching him.  Dempsey provided the structure to punch with balance and power without telegraphing.  And this revolutionized Lee’s game.  

After the stepping jolt (the falling step), Dempsey taught that power punching came from not just springing forward (off the back foot) and falling forward (the gravity assist you get from the explosive step provided your punch lands before your front foot hits the floor) but also from upward surge and shoulder whirl.  He said that in punching, the fist gets all the glory but it’s really only along for the ride.  Every blow should have maximum body structure behind it.  Bomb them, he said!  And so he did – and so did Bruce Lee after him.  Jack Dempsey made a heavy hitter out of Lee and Lee acknowledged this publicly by writing to his idol and mentor.  That’s right!  While so many JKD teachers obsess over every little detail of Lee’s life, seeking insight in the most asinine ways, they miss that Lee openly acknowledged Jack as his inspiration and teacher.  

There has been this myth floating around in the JKD world that Lee, after abandoning Wing Chun (itself not entirely true) researched dozens of systems in order to find the truth.  It’s not important why this myth abounds but it surely is a myth.  Lee knew right where to look for his need of power.  He looked at the greatest puncher of all-time.  When we understand this, we avoid two critical errors. 

First, we know the source and can avoid trying to reinvent the wheel as so many erroneously do.  Thus, if you aren’t studying Dempsey’s footwork, evasion and punching structure, you aren’t studying JKD because that’s what Bruce did.  Again, go back and watch Lee training in his backyard.  The footage is all over the internet now, so it’s no mystery.  And watch him sparring.  You won’t see him practicing Kali or Muay Thai.  The structure and goals of those disparate systems are contradictory to those of JKD.  The evidence is clear that Lee, to gain more hitting power and freedom of footwork as well as aggressive tactical skill, studied the sweet science.  In doing this, he transformed his method and developed JKD – the sweeter science.  

Second, on the question of did Bruce Lee ever fight (read that: compete), you can rest assured that his sources certainly did.  Dempsey was so formidable a fighter that he KO’d two armed muggers when he was in his 70’s!  What’s the best way to deal with an armed assailant?  Knock him out.  That’s Dempsey.  So, anyone who wishes to dismiss JKD because Lee didn’t have a competitive fighting career is ignorant of the fact that JKD’s sources – in this particular case Dempsey – knocked out world-class fighters with superlative skill.  This is, therefore, the heritage of Jeet Kune Do.  Real Jeet Kune Do stands as much, if not more, on the shoulders of Dempsey as it does on Ip Man and Wing Chun.  

That Jack Dempsey isn’t known as a primary source of JKD is, as I said, a regrettable tragedy as it relegates students to trying to reinvent the wheel.  People say, “man…Bruce could hit harder than anyone his size…he hit like a heavyweight.”  They say this as though Lee was superhuman.  No.  He was a student of Dempsey – and you can/should be too.  That’s where it started.

So, who was Jack Dempsey?  The most fearsome puncher in boxing history and, believe it or not, one of the foundations upon which JKD was built.  There is, simply, no JKD without him.  

Fighting Speed!

Was Bruce Lee fast?

That’s like asking if the Avengers franchise made any money.  

Or if the sun is hot.  

Anyway, with all the bickering and disagreement in the JKD/Wing Chun world, one thing everyone can agree on was that Lee was exceptionally quick.  He was so fast, in fact, that it seems hard to imagine him being so popular without all that speed.  But, more to our point, the very system of JKD is built on – and absolutely requires – a fair degree of speed.  I’ve said before that the system is built around the stop-hit, which is to say, counter-attacking, and you can’t do that if you’re too slow.  That would be like an ugly model, or a clumsy dancer…or an honest politician.  Slow JKD is a contradiction in terms.  

Now, you might think that speed is an essential quality in any fighting art but that’s actually not true.  Speed will help, of course, but it’s far from the dominant attribute of, say, BJJ.  JKD, on the other hand, rests upon the foundation of quickness and without it the whole structure comes tumbling down.  

But what kind of speed are we talking about here?  And how do we train for it?   

First, we must have the right technical/tactical structure of the ready position, footwork, and straight, non-telegraphic strikes – preferably from the forward side.  Each of these three technical points integrate without contradiction into the tactical framework of what JKD aspires to do – stop-hit the bad guy!  Lee was obviously gifted with good genes for movement speed, but he understood how important it was to not waste movement and/or have a bad plan of attack.  

If there was a secret to the whole thing it was Lee’s understanding of the importance of foot-speed.  Most people treat footwork like an afterthought.  In JKD, it’s the central thing.  Always.  Fighting is about moving and distance control.  The man that controls the distance controls the fight.  This being the case, he worked assiduously on foot-speed both in technique training (footwork) and physical conditioning.  He favored footwork that was cat-like and efficient.  And by all accounts, Lee didn’t jog – he ran!  Fast.  Like he was getting shot at.  Up hills.  And he rode a stationary bike full speed too – with the resistance as high as it would go.  Oh, and you may have seen photos of him on a trampoline.  He used that for more power and explosiveness.  All of this translated into an amazing level of movement speed.  Thus, the first big secret to his speed was in his legs.

You see, Lee knew something about fighting that most people simply ignore: good footwork can and will beat every attack.  It’s a basic but painfully true fact that if you can cover ground faster than your opponent, you have a significant advantage.  And this was Lee’s goal with all of that conditioning.  In JKD, we preach the “four hits” – hit first, hit straight, hit hard, hit often.  Without foot-speed, you aren’t going to hit first because you’re at the mercy of the other guy’s movement.  Being first is the heart and soul of JKD philosophy and training because action is always faster than reaction.    

If you take a look at the vast majority of fighters, they move around, or they fire their techniques.  Rare is the fighter that uses footwork as part of their technique.  One such fighter was Roy Jones Jr.  In his heyday, Roy was always boxing from the fighting measure – too far from his opponent to be reached without footwork.  In fact, he used distance like a JKD fighter would – as his primary means of defense.  He’d counter-attack expertly from the rim and he’d attack with lightning quick shots when his opponent wasn’t set, darting in and then shooting back out (or angling offline).  He never hung out inside the pocket, awaiting a receipt, so to speak.  Yet, while everyone was amazed at how fast Roy’s hands were – and sure they were blazing fast! – it was his explosive footwork that carried him expertly in and out of range.  He was so good at this that one time, against a poor fellow named Richard Hall, he actually ended up behind the guy at one point.  For a terrible moment, Hall actually didn’t know where Jones was!  He did this, lest you forget, against another professional – a man paid to fight!  

Add to this that Lee favored straight hits for JKD.  Many fighters lose their discipline under pressure and use round-house type punches and kicks.  But the straighter the strike, the more direct it is, the faster it is.  More still, you can throw combinations better and the straight hits integrate into your footwork/ready-position mix too, allowing you to move and adjust distance with an incredible rapidity.  

But there’s something else.  Movement speed is only one part of the equation.  A fighter must have good timing too.  To be fast in fighting is to be fast “on-time”.  Simple movement speed is superfluous if an action is executed at the wrong moment.  In fact, timing can be said to be the most crucial element in all of combat because nothing – literally nothing – works without it.  Lee understood this and meticulously added timing drills to JKD training.  One example is the Jab-to-Jab drill.  There are several variations of this essential drill but the most basic one is for you and a partner to stand opposite a heavy bag.  One partner initiates an attack with their jab and the other tries to counter-jab as fast as they can.  While the reacting partner is getting the best work in during this drill, both parties actually benefit.  The initiator must be cognizant of their pacing, not falling into a predictable rhythm.  And, above all else, he must not telegraph his strike.  Of course, the counter-puncher is trying to beat his partner to the punch.  You can add difficulty by having the initiator step back so they have to use footwork with their attack.  You can also allow the starter to fake too!  Lastly, the counter-attacker can use different counters like the side-kick or cross to the body.  

Pop-ups on the mitts work wonderfully too.  Have a trainer “pop” a line (like a jab or kick) and hit the target as fast as you can.  The unpredictability is key.  

So, in all, remember that a fast punch or kick is nearly useless without footwork and timing.  With them, though, you have a nearly unbeatable combination of qualities because speed kills – your opponent if you have it, or you if you don’t.  

Happy training.  

JKD’s Most Important Technique

It’s probably surprising to hear that something so (allegedly) basic as the Ready Position is JKD’s most important technique.  I understand, I really do.  But we need to deal with this because not understanding the primacy of JKD’s On-Guard is the central mistake infecting Lee’s fighting method.  Seriously.  

First, let’s cover why it’s so important.  

To begin, the Ready-Position is ready to do two primary things: hit and move.  Specifically, it’s ready to fire non-telegraphic straight BOMBS, preferably from the lead hand/foot.  Assuredly, the rear-side gets in on the action but only as a coup-de-grace.  The supremacy of straight hits is a critical aspect of JKD that we shouldn’t take for granted.  Unfortunately, too many people do.  The JKD Bi-Jong is the launching pad from which the primary weapons (lead punch, side kick and snap/hook kick are thrown).  Any significant departure from this set-up will invariably degrade the efficiency, power and speed of these weapons.  

Next, the Ready-Position is ready to move.  It’s easy to confuse movement with footwork.  Any fool can move; JKD fighters move their Ready-Position by means of specific footwork designed especially for this purpose.  If, for example, you bounce when moving, instead of shuffling as you should, you obliterate your ability to instantly fire when needed.  First, you have to stop bouncing, then reset, and then fire.  This literally destroys your JKD because now you can’t instantly counter-attack.  Your options then are to try and avoid everything by running or getting into a brawl.  

In this, one can see the careful integration of the three technical fundamentals of JKD: the Bi-Jong, JKD/fencing style footwork to transport the on-guard, and the pulverizing straight hits.  It’s a package deal.  If one of these go, the others are soon to follow.  And this is why you absolutely cannot, repeat cannot, simply add things willy-nilly to your game and call it JKD.  

Roundhouse swings and bad footwork are generally added by the student because they haven’t been taught that keeping the on-guard position is of central concern.  After all, if I lose focus on this, I’m liable to throw strikes that telegraph and/or make instant recovery impossible.  The goal of the JKD fighter is, as Bruce called it, stillness in motion.  That is to say, we want to fire without warning from the ready-position and then return immediately to it.  That’s it!  The more we deviate from this standard, the harder everything else becomes.  

Constant drilling must be done in order to ensure that the JKD fighter is able to maintain their discipline under pressure.  The Romans once had the greatest military on the planet. They called their practice maneuvers; their maneuvers were called bloodless battles; their battles were called bloody maneuvers.  

If you’ve ever been to an amateur MMA or boxing event, you’ll notice how wild the fighters can get.  Clearly, they know better than to swing so hard that they fall down if they miss, but novice fighters do this all the time.  Why?   Simple.  They haven’t yet developed the discipline required to control themselves under pressure.  This is no small point.  Pressure causes us to make mistakes, so the JKD fighter must train and train and train – not until they get it right but until they have to try to do it wrong!  

With all this said, it shouldn’t surprise you that Bruce Lee said that all JKD practice was the practice of the ready-position.  The fighter that’s always ready to hit (hard!) is a dangerous fighter.  And the JKD tactical mind-set is to “get off first” – to stop-hit or counter.  Even the attacks in JKD are actually “early” counters because the enemy is off balance or, for whatever reason, unprepared.  Everything in JKD swirls in orbit around the interception/stop principle and this simply can’t be achieved without the integration of the technical fundamentals of the on-guard, footwork, and straight bombs.  

So, why do so many people mess this up?  Well, there are numerous reasons but let’s focus on two big ones. 

First, people erroneously think that JKD’s governing philosophy is relativistic, which is to say that anything goes and there are no fixed principles.  But if you say there aren’t any fixed truths, you just said one.  Get it?  By saying there are no absolutes, you’re saying one.  We can avoid all this confusion by properly understanding what it means to “have no way as way.”  This should be understood – primarily – from a tactical standpoint.  Feints, draws, traps, counters, changes of timing, angle, etc.  These are all the when and why of fighting.  The technical structure of JKD, though, isn’t able to be varied much at all (though it can, of course, be tweaked for practical purposes) for the very reason that human anatomy is a rather fixed thing.  

If I drive someplace, I’m bound by certain specifics.  What kind of car do I have?  What’s the speed limit?  What kind of law enforcement is there?  (Remember George Carlin’s number one rule of driving: if the police didn’t see it, I didn’t do it).  What are the traffic conditions?  You see, we’re “bound” by certain things but also tactically free to adjust.  If there’s a traffic jam on my primary route, I can take another highway.  I can leave earlier or later to avoid congestion.  What I can’t do is mount a missile launcher on my roof and blast my way to work – tempting though that is.  

Naturally, we are free to do whatever we want, but we aren’t free from the consequences.  

Which leads us to the second error – complexity.  The scourge of complexity happens because we fail to properly identify the facts of reality.  The JKD on-guard/straight hitting/footwork combination allows us to best control distance, avoid being a good target while simultaneously attacking the softest targets of our enemy.  And this isn’t going to be easy because the other guy is trying to hurt us.  He’s going hard and fast and he’s moving.  This necessitates ruthless efficiency.  Any complicated movements that don’t achieve simultaneous evasion and counter should be jettisoned.  We endeavor to keep it simple because the stakes are high and the other guy won’t cooperate.  

In all, there’s no way to simplify fighting if you’re out of position and can’t counter-attack.  This is why the JKD bi-jong is absolutely the most important technique because without it, nothing else works.