Well, What Did You Expect?

In my Google Reader box the other morning, there were two posts raving about Lyoto Machida and the effect he's having on karate's reputation. Apparently, he's a mixed martial arts fighter--MMA fighter--with black belts in Shotokan karate and Brazilian Jujitsu, and apparently, after years of people watching the grapplers have much the best of it in the MMA ring, he's making karate look pretty fearsome.

I wouldn't know, for I don't watch MMA. Not really interested. To my mind it looks like a slightly-elevated schoolyard brawl. Very little of what I've seen touted as "karate" in the MMA ring bears any resemblance to karate as I have been taught it. You're entitled to your opinion, and thank God above there are some things that we don't really need to fight about--our opinions on MMA, for instance. So if you think I'm full of it, fine, say so and be done with it.

The thing that interested me is that both of these posts talked at least a little bit about how karate's reputation has degenerated over the years. Once it was held to be a ferocious fighting art. Now, it's widely perceived as something little kids do, along with scouting and Little League baseball and soccer.

And all I could think to myself was, "Well, what did you expect?"

I'm not trying to run anyone or any style down here, but when I was in Taekwon-do, in which I was this close to getting my first-degree black belt before I up and joined the Marine Corps Reserve, Taekwon-do was much rougher stuff than what it seems to be now. And even then--man, it almost hurts to say this...

I never--never, never, never--got more than extremely cursory and wildly unrealistic self-defense training. Kata applications were so wildly unrealistic that looking back on them now, I can't help but think they were pulled out of someone's backside. The attitude seemed to be that if you could kick someone in the snout, that was enough self-defense for anybody.

I kid thee not: I learned more about self-defense and kata applications in three months with RyuTe than I did in several years in Taekwon-do. The emphasis on vital points was, and remains, so intense that more than a few times I've almost felt--well, it's intense. Everything in RyuTe seems to take advantage of some weakness in the human body. Not so in Taekwon-do. A shot to the torso was a point, and that's all that anyone seemed to care about. It was just assumed that that type of skill would translate well to real self-defense situations.

Oh, you might say, "MOTW, you were just the victim of bad teaching." Well, I don't blame those instructors. They were just teaching what they knew. But "bad teaching?" One of them, to this day, runs a dojang here in Tulsa and is frequently held up as one of the greatest TKD coaches in the world. As a matter of fact, I know that he's trained world champions. Another of my teachers was, while he was alive, one of the most highly-rated point fighters in a four-state area. Another one was one of the most highly-rated full-contact fighters in the state of Oklahoma. I had third-dan teachers, fourth-dan teachers, sixth, seventh, and eighth-dan teachers, from associations ranging from the ITF to...well, an association I won't name here.

It's not the teachers. It's the system. Real self-defense knowledge has largely vanished from Taekwon-do and most other modern forms of karate. The point, the tournament, is now all. And when you make a dadgum game out of it, what do you expect but that kids will play? And that when they get tired of the game, as kids do, they will drop it for another game?

No wonder karate's reputation has suffered. People made a game out of it, dropping what self-defense orientation it had right out the bottom, largely for the sake of enrolling more children in classes, and now people see it as a joke.

I'll be blunt: if real karate is concerned with real self-defense, with life-protection skills, it will never be popular in this country, I don't care what Lyoto Machida does. It will always be the peculiar interest of a handful of people who are highly motivated to be able to improve both themselves and their odds of making it home alive and unharmed.

(I am not, by the way, suggesting that children should not study martial arts, only that we shouldn't confuse "martial arts" marketed as a sport or children's game with martial arts.)