Mordred’s Victory & Other Martial Mutterings

Preface

I remember making a phone call to my friend Bob Sykes, Editor of MAI (Martial Arts Illustrated) magazine, England. I told him that I’d met this amazing martial arts writer, an impressive man called Jamie Clubb. I told Bob that Jamie really had a strong voice, he had something to say, his views were brave, they were original and above all else, they challenged the social norm. I urged Bob to find space for him in the magazine, as I thought he would be a great attribute.

Bob was sceptical, his magazine was in high demand at the time and there was a plethora of writers desperate to occupy a slot. It was true. There are always more people wanting space in a magazine than there is actual space, but I reminded Bob about two things: 1) I never rang him about a writer unless I felt I had a real find, and 2) Jamie was not just another martial arts writer. He was something special. I felt he had a world class voice. If I am being completely honest, my underlying fear was that the magazine in question, and the martial arts in general would not be able to contain Jamie’s talent once he really let it breathe.

I was right.

And this amazing collection of articles proves my case. The writer is erudite and extremely well read and practised, the writing is literary and compelling and the prose is articulate and challenging for all the right reasons.

So it is a real pleasure for me to write this short introduction for my old friend Jamie Clubb and I highly recommend this book and Jamie to anyone who seriously wants to delve below the surface of martial arts and explore the infinite subtext of budo.

Geoff Thompson 7th Dan British Combat Association (BAFTA* winning writer and best-selling author of Watch My Back), United Kingdom

*Best Short Film, 2004, Brown Paper Bag

Biography

2012 - Jamie with Artis and Ghana

Jamie Chipperfield Clubb was born into a circus family. He lived on his parents’ travelling show until they ceased touring in 1983. Unsurprisingly his background led him to pursue a wide range of subjects and experiences. He has had a lifelong interest in writing, history, psychology, literature, mythology, the arts, criminology, showbusiness, critical thinking and physical development.

He has been a professional performer, an extreme professional wrestling promoter, an administrator for his parents’ private zoo and he is a qualified assessor for National Vocational Qualifications/Qualifications and Credit Framework.

He gained his first black belt aged 16 in Sakiado and went on to train in a wide range of martial arts and modern self-protection systems, gaining several teaching qualifications, including a BTEC Advanced Award in Self-Defence Instruction. Having written for the UK’s leading martial arts magazines he has had the opportunity to train closely with some of the world’s most renowned instructors. He founded his own approach to martial arts and self-protection, Clubb Chimera Martial Arts in 2004.

He wrote and presented the best-selling documentaries, Cross Training in the Martial Arts 1 and 2, in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

His first book, The Legend of Salt and Sauce, was published in 2008.

Jamie is married with a daughter, a stepdaughter and a stepson, and lives on his parents’ zoo in the Cotswolds.

Introduction

Warriors are not born and they are not made…Warriors create themselves through trial and error, pain and suffering, and their ability to conquer their own faults.

Anonymous

The life journey of an individual is often told as if it were a straight line. The person in question starts off with an objective, learns some very early lessons and then continues on a gradual upward journey to where they are today. On the way there are setbacks and plenty of perilous challenges, but what tends to come across is that the various anecdotes reinforce their early beliefs. In short, they were always right and always headed in the right direction. This type of consistency is reassuring, as we are naturally suspicious of uncertainty. The more an individual questions himself the weaker he appears. As one might imagine, showing a perceived weakness is not the sort of trait one associates with a martial arts writer. And yet when I look back at the martial arts articles I have written over the years the journey rarely seemed straight.

This book is divided up into sections that follow a type of rough chronology, beginning with my early thoughts and finishing with my current conclusions. However, there are more recent articles (rewritten as chapters here) contained in earlier sections and older works that appear later. I have had several destinations at different times of my life. Different influences and experiences in my life have caused me to take abrupt turns on my journey.

I began my life on a travelling circus, which became a business that trained and supplied wild animals for the media industry. From the age of seven, I settled down into steady schooling and lived in the heart of the beautiful, if isolated, English countryside. However, my heart always remained with the circus and when I hit adolescence all I wanted to do was to go back to that world. Around the same time my lifelong love of comic books had provided me with the romance of the ninja in the form of G.I. Joe’s Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. My goal became to create a martial arts themed act for the circus. It grew into a production that eventually found its home in the UK’s first extreme professional wrestling promotion that I co-founded and co-ran for five years. My journey to creating this performance was anything but straight. Far from just wanting to become a performer, I wanted my martial arts skills to work for real. It took a bloody nose and the experience of having my kicking leg caught before being unceremoniously dumped on my back outside of my usual martial arts training environment for me to reappraise my formal training. My rather abrupt wake-up call occurred when I had already gained my first black belt in one martial art and busily making my way up the rankings of another. As I wiped the blood off my face, I realized two things. Firstly much of the formal training I was receiving was not only impractical, but was making me more vulnerable than if I had received no training whatsoever. Secondly the tactics I eventually defaulted back to in order to turn the fight in my favour was traceable to the circus environment I had grown up in and around.

Prior to the incident, I was not convinced by the message coming across by the new emerging Reality-Based Self-Defence movement. Now I hungrily digested the articles of Geoff Thompson and wrote to the man. I would meet him 11 years later, and train under him and his coaches. I have Geoff to thank for getting my martial arts writings in print on a regular basis. Back then, I began to pursue full-contact combat sports and then eventually made my way into modern self-protection systems.

I was a ‘90s teenager and our generation of martial artists were to bear witness to a reality check. The traditional martial arts scene had become commercialized and the veneer of the mystical had been lifted. Modern combatives methods and the mixed martial arts scene delivered a telling blow that would cause many of us to totally re-think how we trained. By the end of the decade many martial arts clubs would open their doors to the concept of cross-training in other styles and systems, and modern streetwise systems would begin to occupy the mainstream alongside the white suited warriors of karate and taekwondo. After I left my professional wrestling promotion, I got back heavily into the martial arts, exploring traditional arts, combat sports and the self-protection sector. My love of writing provided me with the opportunity to write interviews with some of my country’s best instructors and I was able to fast-track a lot of my learning. However, it also kept me going as a vagabond warrior and I was exposed to a broad range of approaches at the same time.

When I made my move away from performance I returned to what I felt was the genuine reason most people get involved in martial arts: self-protection. Most martial artists believe self-protection is a by-product of good martial arts training. It isn’t. The more I debated with different people the more I realized that modern self-protection was a system or approach unto itself.

When I first made my decision to teach personal security and self-defence at the core of my martial arts approach, I addressed what I felt was a huge failing in the martial arts world: training children in realistic self-protection methods. It was a decision that attracted controversy and I had critics from the highest places in the martial arts world. Nevertheless, my methods received the approval of anti-bullying experts, a top child psychiatrist and numerous teachers from all over the world. Best of all, the results I received from my students proved my critics wrong. My experiences in training children helped shape my entire approach to coaching. Therefore, it seemed only right that an entire section be dedicated to my ideas and reflections on this area of my teaching.

It struck me that many martial arts clubs wasted a lot of time performing abstract training methods. Having cross-training at the heart of my martial arts training, I made it my business to set some sort of guiding mechanism in place in order to make sense out of my combined experiences. What I often noticed was that many martial arts classes were awkward patchworks of training methods. Time management became my means to rectify these problems. As I write now, terms like sports specific exercise and functional fitness are falling out of favour with a lot of fight coaches. Once more, the idea has become an institution, as the main antagonist in one of my favourite films, The Crow, famously said. Coaches are concerned that fighters might be performing too many exercises that resemble the fight than actually fighting. Likewise, many who profess to be training for function are not asking the question, functional for what? These are valid arguments and I feel they are perfectly in alignment with the message I am trying to convey.

Today I look back at the twisted tree that better resembles my martial arts education than any straight ascending path and remember the vast array of people that have educated me. Some were instructors, others were fellow students and many were those who came to me to be trained. I made a lot of mistakes during my training and teaching, and I still do today. Martial arts were born of struggles. My coach, Mo Teague, often used to say that there cannot be any traction without friction. You cannot move forward progressively without some form of conflict, whether it is an internal struggle or one you have against others. During these conflicts you will make mistakes and you will lose. If that doesn’t happen from time to time then you are not learning. This is why travelling in a straight line isn’t always preferable. Maybe you think you are ascending the straight road, but you are actually walking on a treadmill. This is when I urge you to consider off-roading. When the straight road offers nothing but eternal smooth running he who wishes to explore and learn, takes a detour.

Jamie Clubb, 2014

Part 1 - Martial Mutterings

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

Edward Gibbon –Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776)

Martial Academia

Learn from the experienced, not from the learned

Anonymous

Since at least the 19th century, streets have been patrolled by centrally organised police forces employed to uphold the laws of the land designed to protect the innocent.i Yet the civilised human being is still drawn to combat whether it is as a system of self-protection, a form of stress relief or a way of keeping healthy. There is something appealing about the visceral look and feel of ordered violence. Such a feeling can be seen in our gestures from a celebratory punch in the air to a playful wrestle with a close friend. Even pacifists might find escapism in the fantasy battle world of Tolkien or the martial arts infused science fiction film, The Matrix.

Most people will tell you that what they want out of martial arts is self-defence. In reality, the majority of them want an exciting social activity that will keep them fit and make them feel good. Self-protection is a very straightforward, unsophisticated system that has more to do with self-awareness, common sense and adrenaline control learned through experience than just physical applications. The physical side to it is a short series of crude, basic techniques that would make for a very dull and short pre-arranged form, kata, pattern, hyung or poomse. This is what made up all of the military martial arts in their early days. The systems had to be basic and straightforward in order to train a large amount of people to be combat-ready in a short space of time.

Those who enjoyed learning combat, and wished to expand on their training, did so by formalizing their methods into complete systems. The luxury of not having to fight for their lives, day in and day out, gave the martial artist more time to reflect and work deeper with his students. This is a natural progression for anyone who has an artistic mind. Pragmatism gives way to personal fulfilment. Shakespeare originally wrote his plays to earn a living, but as he became more successful he was able to indulge himself and write from a more intellectual point of view. Likewise, the successful martial artist grew bored with practising the same simple drill year after year – a drill designed with only the lowest intellect’s ability to master it in mind.

Therefore, we can see that martial arts the world over took two paths in the quest for expansion. One path was embraced by the sportsman. In this case, arts weren’t tested on the battlefield, or in response to an ambush, but in an arena where two consenting athletes fought one another. We’ve read about such practices being adopted by nearly every culture going back as far as the earliest days of civilisation. They harden people, build a competitive spirit and have some benefits in teaching a person about controlling stress. They are not, however, a form of self-defence.

Combat sports make several changes to the art from which they are derived. The most obvious change is the introduction of rules (although it should be pointed out that strictly enforced rules in combat sports do not have a very long history). Unlike an average assault scenario, the sportsman has fair warning that he is entering into a fight against another person - a fight that will begin on a referee’s word and stop on that same authority. This is very different to a fight in a bar or an ambush attack where the defending protagonist has not consented to the fight. Soldiers know they are to fight one another, but they face a far more unpredictable scenario on the battlefield, than they ever would in an organised one-on-one confrontation.

Perhaps the greatest impact sport has had on the development of a martial art is in the tactics developed for the purposes of competition. The combat sportsman develops methods to fight other sportsmen within the confines of their sport. At the turn of the 20th century, Western Boxing lost its grappling applications, which included throws, and began developing its punching (particularly when gloves were introduced). Kodokan judo, as a sport, lost its small-joint locks, most of its strikes, and many of its other techniques, but over the 20th century refined its holistic, gross motor-skills wrestling. The examples of these changes are everywhere including Escrima, which replaced its blade work with rattan canes to make it safer and then developed techniques particular to rattan canes and fighting other cane fighters, and Capoiera, which hid its techniques in dance and games only to later develop more audience appealing techniques to the point that many practitioners don’t know where the dance ends and the fighting begins.

This refinement of techniques within an art’s parameters also forms the basis of another route - one followed by the academics. When it comes to discussing martial academia, the arts that often come to mind are the Japanese do arts. These were supposed to be the philosophical arts that replaced the warlike jutsu systems. The Japanese explained that such martial arts were practised to improve a person’s character rather than to equip him for battle. Such an attitude is not unique to Japan, although they are the only country to make an official distinction (most notably when Japan opened its enterprise to the western world in 1800s and after the country’s defeat in World War II). Many scholars argued that this was merely an attitude and that the arts of karate-jutsu and karate-do have few physical differences. This is quite true. During the transitional period very little was done to actually change techniques, just the philosophy behind them and how they were marketed. However, in the long run this attitude has influenced the further development of martial arts and how they are taught in peacetime.

Aikido is often unjustly thought of as an ineffective abstract system of martial arts embraced by a Bohemian society of poets, hippies, and scholars. Techniques are mostly based around responses to wrist grabs, which are an unlikely method of attack in modern civilian society, and a method of harmonising with the opponent that may sound dubious to the layman. All this seems a little surreal to the cynical 21st century western observer, particularly given that students are also expected to cultivate a mysterious invisible energy in them called ki. In the Chinese martial arts this is known as qi or chi and its development is promoted in another art that also gets a New Age stereotype: Tai Chi Chuan.

Put aside the invisible energy argument for now and return to the basic tangible points of these arts. Aikido’s founder, Ueshiba Morhei, had a reputation for being a harsh instructor. He grew up on a farm and served in the military. We can make an educated guess that his early passion for martial arts did not come from a need to expand his spiritual horizons. Aikido was derived from Daito Ryu ju jutsu, a system taken straight from the Samurai’s final days. In his own writing Ueshiba explained that Aikido, considered a grappling art, was mostly about pragmatic striking. According to Robert Twigger’s book, Angry White Pyjamas, Ueshiba’s school became notorious for the injuries he inflicted on his students and many have argued that it was this brutal method of training that helped make the art more flowing in application. Students became so fearful of their teacher that they made sure they went with the technique he was applying and so the art’s reputation for gentle compliancy took root .

If this is not proof of the system’s early severity, then we have the reputation of the Yoshikan School of Aikido founded, on Ueshiba’s blessing, by one of his top students, Gozo Shioda. This character would often prowl the streets looking for fights to hone his skills. To this day, his school offers an intense year-long training programme undertaken by the Japanese riot Police. So, what gave aikido its undeserved reputation for being a fanciful ritualistic series of two-man exercises for the wishful thinking?

The answer is that modern aikido is a classic example of martial academia. Just as the legendary and amoral samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, laid down his swords to embrace calligraphy, art, craft, philosophy and his own spirituality, so the aging Ueshiba, who had always been very religious, grew weary with breaking bones. He further explored and experimented with his Aikido techniques and looked into other methods to improve them. However, what he did within the confines of the