Another Interesting Exercise, and a thought about Boxing vs. Shotokan Karate

Shotokan Karate is all about exercises. The basics are drilled in exercises for your entire life as a Shotokan Student.

The Kata are exercises, and so is one-step sparring.

Recently my back went out, and I had an enforced opportunity to study three great books a buddy of mine had given me for Christmas. They are wonderful, magnificent books.

One of them is American Combat Judo, by Bernard J. Cosneck. One is Championship Fighting, by Jack Dempsey. And the third is back on the bed, and I'm not going to go pick it up and check it because my back is out today.

But when I looked at page 32 of American Combat Judo, I was reminded of a technique called "the arm drag"; a wrestler uses that technique to get behind his opponent.

Now, we all know from the reports of bouncers and police statistics that the fight is likely to start one way, and it'll often continue that way for the entire length of the fight.

That is, the bad guy will get nice and close and try to use a roundhouse right to hit you in the head. The reason he wants to be close is because he wants to be inside your reaction-time range, so that you can't effectively see and respond to the bad guy's technique. He uses a sloppy, slow, and very powerful roundhouse right because he's used it a lot in the past, and it's worked well for him. It may well be his only technique, but he has a lot of confidence in it.

All variations of that approach by a bad guy in a bar are referred to as "a sucker punch".

Here's an exercise that I may want to add to the days when I'm not training with Sensei Koyama.

I have a partner square off, nice and close, and his job is to swing for my head, and my job is to try an arm drag to get behind him. Seems to me that after we dance for a while, he should get to try any sort of punch he wants with either hand, because you can apply an arm drag to either arm. The defender only gets to use the arm drag, and does not apply any offensive technique.

After all, once you're standing directly behind your opponent, you ought to be able to think of some effective way to end the fight, no?

Then we swap.

Did I mention that I'd be wearing a head protector build like a tank? Him too, I suppose. And did I suggest that we'd both be wearing fist protectors (sort of like expanded foam boxing gloves, but smaller in diameter).

Seems to me that there would be relatively little opportunity for injury, and a good deal of opportunity for practical benefit.

Because if you can learn to get behind an opponent when he's really trying hard to hit your head, that might be a good thing to know.

Seems to me you could potentially end the fight without hurting your opponent very much if you were standing right in back of him.

And that would be good, too.

p.s. I first looked at Jack Dempsey's book, Championship Fighting, when I was in grade school. It's gotten much, much better since then. Or perhaps I've gotten smarter. It's hard to tell.

For a Shotokan Student, it's a useful excursion through the world of a related but not identical way of hitting opponents. There are areas that an orthodox Shotokan Student will find moronic, like Dempsey's choice of striking surfaces on the fist. But in Okinawa, serious students of karate sought wisdom from many teachers (remember that Funakoshi himself studied with multiple teachers)and multiple sources.

So understanding the mind of a very, very serious western boxer is probably a good idea for students of Shotokan Karate.

Just a thought.

p.p.s. while a Shotokan Student might well disagree with Mr. Dempsey's opinion of the best part of the fist to use to punch an opponent, it is entirely possible that after three rounds with Mr. Dempsey, his opinion might expand a bit. The historical evidence suggests that Jack Dempsey could hit like a freight train. A really, really big freight train.

Now, again, we aren't comparing apples and apples when we compare punching by a boxer with a gloved fist to punching by a karate student with a naked hand.

But the experience of punching with bare knuckles is just different than punching with a glove; at least, those who have done both say that. And one interesting sidelight on bare knuckles is this: in old style bare-knuckle matches, the boxers were schooled to use a vertical fist for their left jab. The idea was that the configuration of a vertical fist without a glove fit the configuration of a naked face pretty well.

NOTA BENE: if I am very fortunate, I will never get to find out whether my opponent's vertical fist to my face, or his horizontal fist to my face, does more damage. Some people know how to hit, and with them, even an accidental punch can break the bones of the face. I've seen it several times, and each time, the result involved a surprising amount of blood or breakage.

Probably final p.s. Somebody who gets in lots of bare knuckle matches would have an interesting appearance after a while, since you get hit if you box, bare-knuckle or not. Picasso nose, cauliflower ear, and full dentures, I would think. I may try to find some illustrations.