Official Martial Arts Thread

[nicky g]

"fights = dumb"

Yes.

[Senor Choppy]

[ QUOTE ]
Someone set me straight on this black belt as a deadly weapon thing. Once every few years I hear some crap about how some dude isn't allowed to hit anyone because he is a deadly weapon or some crap.

Is there any, or was there ever any truth to this?

[/ QUOTE ]

I have no idea regarding the truth of this, but I got mine before I turned 16 and my aunt earned hers as well. The two of us weren't exactly an elite fighting duo.

[MMMMMM]

Excellent, informative and interesting post, Blarg.

By the way, do you know anyone personally who has learned Jeet Kune Do? Their take on it, maybe?

[nicky g]

It really depends on the art and the school. Some places you can get them relatively easily after a set amount of training. Other places are much harder. In my old Jujitsu style, you had to have trained for a minimum of five years, ran your own club for two (Brown belts could run a club) and do all kinds of completely crazy stuff like defend against live sword attacks (in fact, you had to do that for brown belt). The stories coming out of the blackblet gradings involved broken arms, people losing large amounts of blood, and so on. (Those people failed, by the way. If you got hurt you were always blamed. When we started out we were told if an attacker ever hit you, you had to buy them a drink).
They were psychos, which is one reason I left. But anyway, the point being that "black belt" is not a useful cross-system comparison as it denotes a different amount of skill and experience for every system.

[astroglide]

you have a black belt? in what?

[Senor Choppy]

Tae Kwon Do

[astroglide]

kee cho yil bu
kee cho yee bu
kee cho san bu

[Blarg]

No, I don't know anybody who has studied Jeet Kune Do.

I did see Dan Inosanto and Chris Kent give a demonstration in Hawaii a long time ago. It was pretty cool; Dan also demonstrated butterfly knives, and he was blur-fast with them. He had lots of training before he even got to Bruce, and is one hell of an athlete. Super-coordinated.

Here's a URL to a web site that Bruce's early students respond to questions on sometimes, including Skip Ellsworth, James Demile, my teacher's teacher, and Jesse Glover. Jesse has written some great books on Bruce's teaching, and was his first assistant instructor, long before the JKD days. One of them in particular I'm dying to get again, as it was stolen by someone(I don't blame them). That one was called "Bruce Lee: Between Wing Chun and Jeet Kune Do. He has also trained with Bruce's Wing Chun mentor, now deceased. His name was Wong Shung Leung(Augustus Wong), as I recall, and he eventually wound up teaching in Australia, as did a number of Bruce's seniors. I forget his full Chinese name. A number of prominent JKD teachers post there too. Anywhere, here's the URL. http://www.forumco.com/pauljbax/

Hawkins Cheung was a friend and fellow student of Bruce Lee's under Yip Man back in his Hong Kong, and is very articulate and insightful. Here's a link to a part of his web site with some articles that were published on him in Inside Kung Fu. He comments quite a bit about JKD and Bruce in some of them, and his insights are interesting enough that people from any martial art style would probably find them a pretty good read. http://www.hawkinscheung.com/html/hcarticle.htm

And here's an interview with James Demile, my teacher's teacher and one of Bruce's first students:

http://www.forumco.com/pauljbax/topi...chTerms=demile

And here's a link to the person probably most responsible for Bruce Lee's development, Wong Shun Leung. He was a famous champion of many vicious Hong Kong challenge street fights, some including weapons and multiple opponents, yet was a tiny man. His exploits were followed closely and reported in the Hong Kong daily papers, and he was the man most credited with spreading the fame of Yip Man's classical Wing Chun. Bruce Lee idolized his skills and proven fighting experience, and he stood behind Bruce in Bruce's own challenge streetfights against other schools when Bruce was a teenager.

http://www.wingchun.com/WSLMemories.shtml

[Duke]

sam bu. They're counting in Korean.

And then there are the Pyung Ahn hyung, and then there was Bassai. I forget the name of the next set. It's been 15 years since I studied.

~D

[astroglide]

i remember the next set having "tai go gil chon" (i believe it was the third).