Despite his own experience of a perfect fight (one move, complete takeout) and a bad one, John likes his new art because the sparring feels more like he imagines a fight should feel. It matches his assumptions and, like many people, his assumptions override reality.
If you study a formal martial art, there is another set of assumptions that you must deal with: the assumptions of your style. The first major assumption is a belief in what a “fight” is and looks like. The second is what defines a “win.” For the old style of Jujutsu that I study, the assumed opponent was an armed and armored warrior, the assumed environment was a battlefield full of armed people, the assumed situation was that your weapon had been dropped or broken suddenly, and the assumed goal was to get an opponent’s weapon, probably by killing him. This list of assumptions drives almost everything in the style. It forces a close, brutal, quick, and aggressive concept based entirely on gross motor skills.
Most styles and instructors are remarkably well adapted to getting the win in the right kind of fight, and crippled when the fight doesn’t match their expectation or when the conditions of a win change.
Every style is for something, a collection of tactics and tools to deal with what the founder was afraid of. A style based on the founder’s fear of losing a non-contact tournament will look different, even if it is just as well-adapted for that idea of a fight as my Jujutsu is for its time and place.
Understand thoroughly what your style is for. Violence is a very broad category of human interaction. Many, many instructors attempt to apply something designed for a very narrow aspect of violence, such as unarmed dueling, and extrapolate it to other incompatible areas, such as ambush survival. My Jujutsu, for instance, is wonderfully adapted to close-range medieval battlefield emergencies. From there it is a fairly easy stretch to predatory assault survival, but difficult to adapt to either sparring or the pain-compliance/restraint level of police Defensive Tactics (DTs).
Each instructor also has assumptions based on his or her experience, training, and (too often) television and popular culture.
At a seminar, I met a martial arts instructor of great skill in his specialty—under the right circumstances, he could dodge and send people sailing with very little effort. It bothered me, because the operative concept was “under the right circumstances.” If someone rushed him from at least two long paces away and flinched past their own point of balance, his techniques would work. Otherwise, not so well. They didn’t work, generally, on the other instructors there, and he had brought his own student so that he could demonstrate successfully.
I don’t think this was conscious. I met the instructor and talked with him. I genuinely liked and respected him. I believe that in his own mind, his techniques did work on the other instructors. If they didn’t, he attributed it to our vast skill. I don’t think for a second that he realized that he had taught his student to flinch in a certain way so that the techniques would work.
The two long paces bothered me more, because he espoused that attacks happen exclusively at that range, and they don’t. He set me at that distance and asked how I would attack. I smiled, walked up, put an arm around his shoulders, and fired a knee into his thigh. He laughed and said, “I’d never let you get that close.” He just had. Without a beat, he turned back to the lesson.
He had superb skill and he (or his instructors) had rewritten the map of the world so that the techniques would work. Since the techniques required two paces, attacks must come at two paces, right? Otherwise, the techniques would have been designed differently. Right?
Imagine studying something for a decade or more that you will never actually use. You have worked to perfect it, but without a touchstone to reality, how do you know what perfection looks like?
He told me about a serious assault he had been subjected to—it was bloody and messy, an ambush at close quarters with lumber and boots. It didn’t happen at two paces, or from the front. The two he could see were closer than he believes he would ever let anyone get, and he didn’t see the third.
I assume that sometime after this incident he found his martial art, fell in love with it, and found great comfort and a feeling of safety in its practice. Does he ever think about that attack within the context of what he teaches? How do illusions become so powerful that they seem more real and affect beliefs more than an event as horrific as the one he experienced?
The assumptions of his style and his respect for them were able to outweigh a brutal and critical personal experience. That is powerful and very, very dangerous.
section 2.2: the power of assumption
Some of our assumptions are so closely held that we will cling to them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Many, many people discount their own experience as an “aberration,” preferring to trust in “common sense” or tradition or the word of an “expert.”
I’ve caught myself doing this.
I’ve had five real encounters with knife-wielding threats…sort of.
The first was downward stab at my shoulder from a teenage girl that I blocked and armlocked easily. So that doesn’t count, right? It was too easy, not the scary and desperate situation I’ve trained for— and it was “only a girl” and only a pair of scissors.
The second was a straight-up assassination attempt. A somewhat unbalanced relative tried with all her might and speed to put a steak knife in my kidney from behind. I’m only alive because I saw a reflection and my body acted immediately and explosively. Was it a “real knife defense” if I am aware that I’m only alive because of luck?
The third was in a casino in Reno. I was ordering a bum who had been stealing credits from other customers to leave, and he pulled a knife. I stayed calm, hands up, and continued moving towards him, keeping my voice calm. I knew that my legs were slightly longer than his weapon range and I was fully prepared to kick as soon as the critical distance was reached—it wasn’t going to be a friendly sparring kick, either. I was going for a forty-yard punt. With each step forward that I took, he took one backwards until he was out of the casino. It never went to combat. Does it count?
The fourth was searching a fresh arrestee in booking. He was a little drunk, his cuffs were off, and he had his hands on the counter facing away from me for the pat search. At the base of his spine there was a roughly cylindrical object under his shirt. I thought “knife!” at first, but when I asked him what it was, he said, “Let me show you!” and he spun, reaching under the shirt exactly the same way I’d practiced to draw my weapon from under my jacket. He never got it out. Knife or gun, I didn’t know and didn’t care. I hit him as hard and fast as I’ve ever hit a human being, driving his head into the wall, the counter, and sweeping his legs out from under him. His head hit three hard surfaces—wall, counter, and floor—in about a second. If he never got a chance to draw, was it really weapons defense? If I thought it was a knife and it was only a cigarette lighter, does it count?
The last should have been ugly. A freak on PCP was placed in an isolation cell in Reception. With his fingers, he pulled six concrete screws out of the wall to get access to the stainless steel mirror. He then broke the steel mirror in half so that he would have one shank in each hand. On-duty staff sprayed him with five large canisters of pepper spray and he didn’t even shut his eyes. So they called us, CERT (Corrections Emergency Response Team). We handled it without a problem. Does it count as knife defense if I was dealing with it as part of