Christian Cotroneo
Did the grandmaster immediately execute a head-removing roundhouse, or a “fanged buttercup” that would have left the drunkard wheelchair-bound for the rest of his days?
Nope. The grandmaster threw years of martial arts training to the wind and delivered a proverbial kick to the family jewels.
And what proved to be the coup de grace?”Bashing his head off the bar,” McIlmoyle explains.
“The fact of the matter,” he concludes, “is you look at somebody who’s been studying a specific art for their entire life, and they get into a fight, they’re not using the art. They’re using what comes natural to their body.”
That may be why, for all their grand traditions, fighting disciplines like kung fu, tae kwon do and karate are increasingly relegated to tournaments and showrooms. Meanwhile, a more practical and street-worthy mixed-martial-arts style is pummelling its way to the top.
It’s called Ultimate Fighting; and it’s hard to find a club among Greater Toronto’s 100-plus establishments dedicated to martial arts that doesn’t offer training in the trendy technique. The style is vaulting to North American attention thanks to the wildly popular Ultimate Fighting Championship, a U.S.-based, anything-goes fighting league with its own TV berth.
While many of the GTA’s martial-arts schools still adhere to classical precepts, more and more are diversifying to suit contemporary tastes. One such establishment is Fight Club, in Toronto’s east end, whose name references the 1999 Brad Pitt film. Another is Crazy Bob’s House of Death, which bills its program as “serious training with a sense of humour.” It offers one-on-one training in everything from street fighting to knocking guns out of an enemy’s hands.
The sheer number of fight schools in Toronto promising fast and furious training has also given rise to a fresh, if not flattering, moniker: McDojos.
They cater to the steady stream of men who’ve been tuning in to TV’s Ultimate Fighting Championship. According to Joey Delosreyes, program director at Kombat Arts Training Academy in Mississauga, the show has really boosted the popularity of mixed martial arts in the past 10 years.
“Piss and vinegar,” is how Delosreyes describes many of his TV-dazzled new recruits. “They just have a lot of energy.”
Ultimate Fighting isn’t easily defined, because it incorporates a broad range of techniques, from grappling to Japanese ju-jitsu to the Thai boxing tradition known as Muay Thai. A typical Ultimate Fight features throws, kicks, elbows, knees, plenty of grappling and even a few good whacks while the opponent is on the ground.
Compared to such a gritty, hard-edged style, tae kwon do and karate seem “frozen in time to a degree, and divorced from their combative roots,” says McIlmoyle, a director at Toronto’s Fighting Arts Collective at Dupont and Concord Sts. “They’ve become much more sport and less combat.” At a karate tournament, for example, “generally they’re looking at style points and technique points … and in some cases even artistic impression.”
In other words, best in show.
When it comes to mixed martial arts, however, “everything has been rendered down and all of the crap is out of it.”
McIlmoyle doesn’t see it so much as a trend as a return to traditional fighting roots. Over the years, he says, martial arts have become compartmentalized.
Interested in the striking arts? Try karate. But if you’re looking to throw people around, consider judo or aikido.
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`Often, fights start at striking range … and end up with two guys rolling around on the floor wrestling’ Brian McIlmoyle
martial arts instructor |
Trouble is, in the real world, things tend to go down differently. “Anyone who has been in a fight knows that most have all of these elements in them,” McIlmoyle explains. “Often, fights start at striking range … and end up more often than not with two guys rolling around on the floor wrestling.”
Fighting Arts Collective takes the combat catch-all to the next level, offering a certified smorgasbord of pain, including traditional Chinese wing chun kung fu, which emphasizes rapid, close-range strikes.
A British kung fu grandmaster was once confronted by an angry, bottle-wielding assailant in a bar. “He was top dog as far as kung fu goes in Great Britain,” recalls McIlmoyle, a Toronto-based martial arts instructor.
Did the grandmaster immediately execute a head-removing roundhouse, or a “fanged buttercup” that would have left the drunkard wheelchair-bound for the rest of his days?
Nope. The grandmaster threw years of martial arts training to the wind and delivered a proverbial kick to the family jewels.
And what proved to be the coup de grace?”Bashing his head off the bar,” McIlmoyle explains.
“The fact of the matter,” he concludes, “is you look at somebody who’s been studying a specific art for their entire life, and they get into a fight, they’re not using the art. They’re using what comes natural to their body.”
That may be why, for all their grand traditions, fighting disciplines like kung fu, tae kwon do and karate are increasingly relegated to tournaments and showrooms. Meanwhile, a more practical and street-worthy mixed-martial-arts style is pummelling its way to the top.
It’s called Ultimate Fighting; and it’s hard to find a club among Greater Toronto’s 100-plus establishments dedicated to martial arts that doesn’t offer training in the trendy technique. The style is vaulting to North American attention thanks to the wildly popular Ultimate Fighting Championship, a U.S.-based, anything-goes fighting league with its own TV berth.
While many of the GTA’s martial-arts schools still adhere to classical precepts, more and more are diversifying to suit contemporary tastes. One such establishment is Fight Club, in Toronto’s east end, whose name references the 1999 Brad Pitt film. Another is Crazy Bob’s House of Death, which bills its program as “serious training with a sense of humour.” It offers one-on-one training in everything from street fighting to knocking guns out of an enemy’s hands.
The sheer number of fight schools in Toronto promising fast and furious training has also given rise to a fresh, if not flattering, moniker: McDojos.
They cater to the steady stream of men who’ve been tuning in to TV’s Ultimate Fighting Championship. According to Joey Delosreyes, program director at Kombat Arts Training Academy in Mississauga, the show has really boosted the popularity of mixed martial arts in the past 10 years.
“Piss and vinegar,” is how Delosreyes describes many of his TV-dazzled new recruits. “They just have a lot of energy.”
Ultimate Fighting isn’t easily defined, because it incorporates a broad range of techniques, from grappling to Japanese ju-jitsu to the Thai boxing tradition known as Muay Thai. A typical Ultimate Fight features throws, kicks, elbows, knees, plenty of grappling and even a few good whacks while the opponent is on the ground.
Compared to such a gritty, hard-edged style, tae kwon do and karate seem “frozen in time to a degree, and divorced from their combative roots,” says McIlmoyle, a director at Toronto’s Fighting Arts Collective at Dupont and Concord Sts. “They’ve become much more sport and less combat.” At a karate tournament, for example, “generally they’re looking at style points and technique points … and in some cases even artistic impression.”
In other words, best in show.
When it comes to mixed martial arts, however, “everything has been rendered down and all of the crap is out of it.”
McIlmoyle doesn’t see it so much as a trend as a return to traditional fighting roots. Over the years, he says, martial arts have become compartmentalized.
Interested in the striking arts? Try karate. But if you’re looking to throw people around, consider judo or aikido.
|
`Often, fights start at striking range … and end up with two guys rolling around on the floor wrestling’ Brian McIlmoyle
martial arts instructor |
Trouble is, in the real world, things tend to go down differently. “Anyone who has been in a fight knows that most have all of these elements in them,” McIlmoyle explains. “Often, fights start at striking range … and end up more often than not with two guys rolling around on the floor wrestling.”
Fighting Arts Collective takes the combat catch-all to the next level, offering a certified smorgasbord of pain, including traditional Chinese wing chun kung fu, which emphasizes rapid, close-range strikes.
McIlmoyle also trains students to get all medieval on their foes. He specializes in armizare, a fighting system that was all the rage in Europe during the 14th century. It was a time, McIlmoyle notes, when “an individual’s ability to fight in all situations actually was directly related to their lifespan.”
Although it incorporates empty-handed striking, throwing and wrestling skills, you won’t see armizare as part of Ultimate Fighting anytime soon. The technique includes proficiency with swords, body armour and, yes, horseback combat.
“The relevance of swordsmanship today,” McIlmoyle admits, “is suspect. But the use of a knife, and defence against it … and the empty-handed skills are just as relevant today as 700 years ago.”
Fighting Arts also offers training in jeet kune do, a mixed technique pioneered by Bruce Lee, and the more modern Systema Downtown, a mixed martial art originating in Russia.
Ultimately, wanting to be a mixed martial artist is one thing. Training is another. There are nearly 400 students enrolled at the Kombat Arts Training Academy, but when it comes to those training in Ultimate Fighting-style combat, “it’s probably a very small group.”
Delosreyes counts only two women in that group. “And usually when they’re in it, they’re pretty tough.”
The sport is also dogged by stories about primitive fighting dens in backyards, basements and private clubs with mercilessly few rules.
“There are some associations, some shows, which are just truly barbaric,” Delosreyes says. “And they’re really bad for the sport.”
While he cites secretive clubs in the U.S., such events are also rumoured to take place closer to home, even in Toronto. But those matches are not nearly as prevalent as they are in Asia, where there’s a long tradition of brutal, one-on-one combat.
Burma evolved its own mixed-martial-arts style after years of pitting its fighters against ones from India and Thailand. Brazil developed valetudo, a no-holds-barred tradition that has since caught on in other countries.
Japan is also notorious for taking the gloves off — and paying people much more generously to do so. There, many executives are drawn to Ultimate Fighting, in contrast to the mostly working-class fans in North America. A ticket can go for as much as $2,800, which translates into more money for combatants.
Martial artist Paul Minhas has been to Japan more than 20 times. “With the right sponsors,” he says, “someone in the upper ranks may earn a six-figure contract.”
Still, if the grassroots level is any indication, Ultimate Fighting will get bigger, and more lucrative, here. In 1994, Minhas founded Ultimate Martial Arts in Scarborough to teach Muay Thai. Today, Muay Thai has been absorbed into the curriculum, and the school is entirely devoted to mixed martial arts.
The average price for aspiring fighters is $50 per month, which includes classes seven days a week. And almost all the 750 or so students incorporate mixed martial arts into their training.
Like the British kung fu grandmaster, Minhas has been in a rare bar brawl in the past. And like that grandmaster, he knows when art must yield to simple survival.
Indeed, his last fight, several years ago, was an exercise in simple.
“All I used was a right hand and two left knees. Very basic stuff.”