M.M.A. Fighter’s Pummeling of Tai Chi Master Rattles China
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> An article by Xinhua, the state news agency, called Mr. Xu a “crazy guy,” saying that the fight had caused people to question whether Chinese martial arts were of any use and even to ask, “What exactly are traditional Chinese martial arts?”
Is a complete misinterpretation of the original sentence cited in the article:
> 综合格斗狂人徐晓冬和太极人士雷雷的视频引发了人们对中国武术的好奇和关注，中国武术到底是什么？有实战性吗？中国武术应该如何更好地推广普及？
1. "狂人" is literally "crazy guy", but mostly used as a compliment to say someone is extremely good, hardworking or dedicated in something, in this case M.M.A.
2 "What exactly are traditional Chinese martial arts?" is also taken out of context, it is used in the introduction paragraph to guide the readers to the detailed descriptions below, and has nothing to do with the existential crisis of martial arts whatsoever.
NYT employees, if you are reading this, please get someone better in Chinese to handle the translation and interpretation.
Edit:
And this, is not how you cite your sources from weibo:
> <a href="http://weibo.com/login.php">message circulating online</a>
/s
From that point of view, a martial arts instructor can be very competent at his job while not producing effective sport fighters. For example, many kids karate schools are very effective daycares. A seniors tai qi club may be an excellent way to get people moving and prevent injuries from falling. An MMA gym is a great place for young men to work through their testosterone driven haze. Why can't a martial arts school be treated like a Go studio or a chess club?
And if you depart from fitness for purpose, then you have problems. SEAL sentry removal techniques taught at an MMA gym or a kids karate school would be a disaster. A sport fighter teaching MMA at a seniors tai qi club is going to find a very uninterested audience. It goes the other way, too. A sport fighter training police is a problem because he is probably unaware of the laws governing use of force.
So what Xu has done is the equivalent of a kid from the boxing club going and beating up the chess club.
The part you're missing is that this whole thing kicked off because kids from the chess club where going around claiming that chess was a better basis for fighting than boxing.
Search Youtube for tai chi to see other hilarious examples, including some guy who claimed he could stop a train.
You'll notice when they first engage, the TCP does a pretty good job blocking the incoming strikes. He doesn't appear to get hit right-out and, as expected with Tai Chi, yields to the attack (backing up). The problem is the attacker doesn't let up, a concept called 'Holding down the pillow'.
I think the reason he didn't handle that MMA style of charging attack is because (in my experience) Tai Chi isn't taught that way. Applications are taught as part of a 1/2/3 strike combination, then resetting. Rare is the case where you defend against 3+ attacks. There's a number of reasons for this, but suffice to say its something that probably should be incorporated into their training.
As a final note, the problem of 'McDojos' has long been known. But I would say there's an equal problem of MMA schools where it's more about dominating new students than teaching. Martial arts is really quite hard, and some people want to learn how to look cool/graceful/powerful than actually learn how to defend oneself.
Rendering it useless as an effective fighting technique.
You haven't given me much to work with in terms expressing your point of view beyond trolling, next time try to express yourself a bit better.
Having gotten that out of the way, it depends on why you practice any kind of Martial Art. If you are a "keep fit/sports/internal balance" practitioner, your position has some limited merit. If you are the "self-defense/offence" practitioner, your position is vapid bullshit as the only things that counts is self preservation and winning the fight, in that order of importance. Yours is the type of argument that would go down well in a dark alley (or a ring, see the linked video): "VICTIM: "Oh, you can't do that to me - I didn't practice that!" ATTACKER: "Apologies good sir, which method of defense did you practice?"
Given the video above was mostly about a Tai Chi Master saying "I can deal with your uppity MMA" and him subsequently being swiftly and brutally proven wrong, I'd say my original posts has ample merit. Further explanation should only be required for the dense and the trolls.
There, did I express myself to your obviously exacting standards? :)
Also, this article really makes MMA sound like a brutal no holds barred sport, which is just incorrect. MMA is as beautiful as all the other previous martial arts (I know, I know, MMA is a conglomerate of all of them). People have spent the last 20 years trying to say MMA is a blood sport. This is just another attempt to pose it as such.
As you learn to control your opponent the sport actually becomes very safe - far safer than snowboarding, mountain biking, etc.
I haven't taken any serious blows in years.
I can enjoy an MMA fight, but you can't pretend it's not brutal and bloody...it is.
In soccer you don't score a goal because you said so. In most martial arts you use dedicated forms and styles which impose constraints on how the match evolves. In Chess you have limited movements.. etc etc
MMA has plenty of constraints. First of all there a bunch of techniques that are illegal (details differ slightly between organisations). Secondly you are fighting in an enclosed space (again details differ) so you have to know how to use that to your advantage. Thirdly there are time limits and round limits so you have to know how to manage you time and energy. Finally there is a scoring system that you have to understand so you know how to score points in the case that no one finishes the fight in the allotted time.
Also if you're going to do MMA for living you have to take into account that being entertaining is just as important as winning for your bottom line.
> Arts and sports have constraints, MMA has none right ?
and now you're using its classification as a sport to minimize the effectiveness of the response that shows it is a sport with constraints?
> Which fighting sport doesn't have spatial constraints ?
I'm having trouble tracking what point you're trying to make.
MMA limitations seems to be, do not attack sensitive parts and do not kill the opponent. There's nothing to master other than survival. Every people trying to use one genre/style, ended up smashed by the people that went purely for pragmatics (put the guy down, smash his face until submission). My (own personal subjective perceptional) definition of art cannot accept this. See for instance dancing has some innate aesthetics, moving is not enough to be dance. Random noise is mostly not music.
Perhaps not, but a set of victory conditions that includes a point scoring system seems pretty clearly to make an athletic competition a sport (or any competition, athletic or not, a game), even when there a game-ending, victory-granting conditions which bypass scoring.
> MMA limitations seems to be, do not attack sensitive parts and do not kill the opponent. There's nothing to master other than survival.
Perhaps you would like to see this list of MMA rules[1]? It seems there are quite a few rules other than what you listed, and there are a few ways to end the fight. There are, for example, technical knock-outs, and doctors can call the fight.
> Every people trying to use one genre/style, ended up smashed by the people that went purely for pragmatics (put the guy down, smash his face until submission).
That isn't what I remember seeing every time when UFC first started. What I remember is that certain styles were immediately shown to be more practical when the setting is one-on-one and with less constraints that are purely to enforce a style. Grappling quickly showed its strength, and those people that had no answer for that found themselves at a severe disadvantage. Striking is useful, but has a very specific useful range, and it generally does not include "on top of me". The sport relatively quickly moved towards submission and/or maneuvering your opponent such that you can strike but not be grappled.
Just as in boxing, where a single opening can lead to one or two devastating hits that can decide or at least greatly influence a fight, in MMA the same can happen. Much of the fight is about the strategy and tactics of maneuvering into that position.
> My (own personal subjective perceptional) definition of art cannot accept this.
I don't think you need to reassess your definition, but I think it's possible you are making assertions without enough knowledge to know how true they are. I rarely watch MMA or Boxing, maybe once a year, but still I can see that quite a bit of skill, strategy and tactics goes into what the fighters are attempting. To the degree that some fighters undoubtedly train and incorporate more specific techniques into their current moves based on their opponents strengths and weaknesses.
1: http://www.dummies.com/sports/mixed-martial-arts/rules-of-mi...
Grappling is more like chess, you need to make the proper position and holds to execute the next move. At the same time, you must avoid opening yourself to critical locks: kneebar, choke, kimura lock etc. A smart fighter, for example, can render a stronger opponent to submission if he has him on a "kneebar".
One of my favorite fighter is Sakuraba who fights smartly (He comes up with counter-attacks on-the-fly). His fights are entertaining and full of sportsmanship. If you're into it, google Sakuraba vs Gracie family.
I think that's a bit unfair. I don't watch MMA much, but it's interesting when I do, and I don't watch to see someone get hurt or to see a lot of blood. If I want to see that, I can go back and look at any of the first few UFCs. Just as with boxing, there's a lot of skill involved in MMA fights. Some people tune in for the technical display, some people tune in for the sport of it, some people tune in because they want to see a fight, and that might include someone getting hurt. There are many reasons to watch.
Because it is. In MMA when you are bleeding, the fight pretty much continues. In nearly every other organized form of martial art, blood stops the match. If you can't stop bleeding, you forfeit. This has been seen as a good idea in terms of sanitation and infection since the original Olympics in Athens. MMA is a lot of things, and uses the techniques from a lot of martial arts; if you like it, that's your call, no judgement. But MMA itself is not a martial art, its human cock fighting, it is a blood sport.
Apparently the powers that be have decided to take down the MMA 'threat' to China's classical martial arts.
There was a report on Jack Ma supporting the Tai Chi "side" but I cant' find it now.
EDIT: Here it is titled "Kung fu fan Jack Ma weighs in on tai chi vs. MMA fight"
Delusions are painful to see through especially when they're propping up the ego. Collective delusion even more so.
What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems
What if all the world you used to know
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection
Is that all you want it to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks
Would you find yourself—find yourself afraid to see?"
- Trent ReznorDo you train?
There are a dozen better ways to subdue someone who's in a prone position. As a Jiujitsu student that part made me feel ashamed.
I've been there. 20 years ago I had a black belt in karate, a brown belt in Japanese Jujitsu, and hundreds of hours of Aikido - the first time I faced a college wrestler, I got completely destroyed and had to struggle with the destruction of my precious delusions.
I'm not sure why what you are saying seems to be contentious or arrogant. It's just reality. Want to get good at fighting? You're going to need to actually fight. A lot.
The martial arts that consistently spar live against a resisting opponent, especially wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, jiu jitsu, and (sometimes) Judo, are legit combative arts.
The grappling arts are unique in their ability to subdue an opponent while dictating the level of violent damage that occurs.
Jiu jitsu is unique among grappling arts in its emphasis on leverage and energy management to subdue bigger, larger, more athletic people while minimizing damage to both parties.
Yes, if you forbid chokes and joint manipulation, you get kickboxing or muaythai, but that is not the point of MMA which tries to get rid of arbitrary rules.
The most instructive study for this kind of thing I know is the progression of rules in western boxing, which used to involve kicks, wrestling, throws, and weapons. It was steadily narrowed down for safety reasons.
Then for fun, go contrast the rulesets and techniques adapted to them with, say, Fairbain and Sykes or Rex Applegate's combatives.
Traditional Japanese martial arts frequently descend from Edo-period traditions re-organized in the Meiji era, and often focus on weapons training. Kendou for example, still focuses on heavily-armored warriors fighting with swords. I don't think that many people think this is preparation for a realistic contemporary combat situation so much as it is lived respect for tradition and knowledge. Traditional martial arts frequently have other goals, as with Morihei Ueshiba and aikido.
MMA tends to market itself as "real fighting", but it carries its own assumptions about the conditions of fighting. It would be as ridiculous to pit an MMA fighter against an armed and armored Japanese kendoist as against a WWII-era GI with a Tommy gun.
Sports and games are organized by their rules, and combat sports are no different. No one should think that sumo is good combat training—the loser is the first to step outside the ring or touch the ground with any part of their body other than the foot. But it is a great sport that requires very specialized training, with some exceptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takanoyama_Shuntar%C5%8D
But this means that, if practitioners claim that these are skills that can increase one's personal safety, it's important to test these conditions and assumptions. MMA fighters specialize to win MMA-style fights...but what about outside of those assumptions?
“It’s not about really hurting. It’s about giving your opponent ‘face.’"
Why did Wei Lei agree to this bout in the first place?
Why does Mr. Xu now have to go into hiding and be ashamed of himself?
Sometimes this world makes no sense.
What you are alluding to is the idea that he could beat him with a hand behind his back so to speak. (Which might be true) but could be perceived as even more disrespectful imo.
Joking aside, I don't know what's to be gained by smashing a clearly weaker opponent unless you are a sadist.
> “The key difference between what Mr. Xu does and martial arts is that martial arts isn’t a competitive sport,’’ he said. “It’s not about really hurting. It’s about giving your opponent ‘face.’ And Mr. Xu’s style is about beating your opponent to near death.”
What does that person think the "martial" in martial arts means?
I'm sure they're fully aware of what "martial" means, as well as "arts". Combining the two gets you combat-inspired art. Just as an opera singer might not actually be great at fighting demons, a martial artist isn't necessarily all that great at combat.
I'd suppose the admiration that people took in what the 'artmen'/'craftsmen' discovered and became capable of doing spawned, in turn, what is commonly tried to be pinned down as 'art', today.
My thesis on the OP is just that tradition and 'show' took over the chinese martial arts, then they got practiced and studied as something on the sky instead of practical art, and so it now loses to the more pragmatic martial art of today(that is, ignoring the spiritual aspect of it). But imagine centuries ago how much someone with training on the traditional martial arts could kick way more ass and protect his ground compared to a nobody. Even today someone without any training will most certainly have very little chance against a one trained in 'traditional martial arts', it's just not so specialized.
Interesting to note that Bruce Lee on his later years was making his own martial art that was meant to be practical and raw, there's various quotes of him talking about that, maybe the guys could pick that up.
And it seemed like a reasonably honorable fight to me. He didn't sucker punch him - far from it. They agreed to terms of a contest. They met, fought, and stopped when the ref declared a winner.
Did he embarass the other man? Maybe, but the other man stepped up and did his best. Good for them both.
The MMA fighter wanted to stop what he considers fraudsters. Good for him! You don't get to have your feelings spared just because you invent some sense of honor which you think others must adhere to. Turn down the offer to spar if you think the outcome won't be to your liking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAeqVGP-GPM Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Direct link to actual fight.
MMA is a style that takes all the deadliest aspects of multiple martial art styles and brutally hones them to kill the opponent fast. It's very effective.
I vaguely remember outrage when an artist made art by cutting up other artists paintings. I see similarities here.
or they're just con men tricking people into following their useless bullshit
Absolutely nothing. It's great. The problem is that far too many McDojos are offering exercise while claiming to teach deadly fighting techniques. The problem is not the art, it's the delusion.
Of course, we can always go back to pre-civilized societies to justify barbaric behavior.
Pretty much everywhere, during every war.
I'm exaggerating, but only a little :)
MMA or Krav Maga basically represent applying the scientific method to brawling. In many respects they are a testimony of our times... as they're efficient and in many respects cleaner than the fights of old: an experienced MMA fighter can take out an opponent while causing him minimal lasting damage. If he wants to :)
Spirituality and mysticism aren't part of this any more than they are part of trying to run 100 meters as quickly as possible.
That statement simply shows your complete lack of knowledge about martial arts.
MMA, and Krav Maga and Systema, are martial practices. But they are certainly not art forms.
There is nothing wrong with practicing ancient martial arts, it's just outdated for combat with practitioners of more evolved combat techniques.
There's been Karate+Judo fighters in MMA, and various boxing and wrestling style fighters as well. The only judgement for MMA fighters is that in the ring.
It's silly to say traditional martial art is in some way morally superior, they are just combat techniques. Techniques for violently oppressing an opponent. As evidenced by this Tai Chi master accepting the challenge to a fight.
Its often the same for INFOSEC researchers and hobbyists. Change is resisted everywhere.
The article talks about judo, karate etc in the same breath. Most commercialized/popularized martial arts face the same issue: they are tightly regulated and "exhibition" driven.
The rules of judo competition, for instance, disallow large parts of the judo curriculum. As a result those parts are rarely taught, and only taught to very high ranking folks. This causes judo to lose part of what makes it a martial art. Given enough time, it might (d?)evolve into something akin to Tai Chi.
This is not really true ...
You are correct that all Tai Chi that you see being practiced and essentially all Tai Chi practitioners are basically doing standing yoga exercises.
However, there are people studying Tai Chi stances and movements and their application to "real" fighting.
I am very, very much opposed to the bullshit in martial arts and I am happy to see frauds exposed ... but as a mixed martial arts and BJJ player, I do find value in Tai Chi movements and practice - and not solely for relaxation and meditation.
"China" has always known that wushu is just for show and that Tai Chi is more like yoga rather than a fighting style.
Besides, Bruce Lee already dispelled all the myths surrounding "traditional kung fu" a long time ago. This isn't some new concept that was introduced by MMA.
Edit: Ah, there it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDaCIDvj6I Not exactly the same thing, but the same principle :)
The actual video (it's on YouTube) is really quite sad. It opens with a clip of him 'sparring' with his students and it just the most compliant thing you have ever seem. His students are literally throwing themselves onto the ground as soon as he gets close to them, clearly feeding his delusion.
Then the real fight happens and the 'master' just looks so lost and confused when he realizes his techniques have absolutely no effect. At the end of the day it's just a video of a very delusional old man getting punched in the face and having no idea what just happened.
Xu is right, if you're presenting your "craft" as something you do for health reasons, great. If you're presenting it as something which should save your life in a dangerous situation... then that's a problem.
It's basically the same thing (in Japan) and has been making the rounds on and off for the past several years
The traditional martial arts that are actually effective have already been incorporated into MMA. Jujitsu, Muay Thai, Wrestling, even some Tae Kwon Doe, Karate, these have all made inroads. But nobody makes it far these days in MMA knowing only one form.
Even if the best tai chi guy could hold his own on the feet, the MMA fighter would just go for a takedown or pull guard and the tai chi guy would not have the tools to defend.
There is not a single person who practices Tai Chi who has anywhere close to the breadth of martial arts mastery that someone like Demetrious Johnson has.
I do and I've met serious people who can do some incredible things. These people are serious and don't go into the ring with some self promoting idiot.
To be fair most MMA champions don't even have the breadth of martial arts mastery that someone like Demetrious Johnson has.
I believe that's called religion.
I'd love to see that video.
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