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Sunday, November 14, 2004
Taneo: Get in the ring
By Paul J. Taneo
Free-for-all
OUR fellow sports columnist John Pages knows of my fascination with the martial arts and gave me a Men’s Journal magazine which features an American adventurer who wasn’t content with swimming with great white sharks, doing construction work in the South Pole and just had to try muay Thai in Thailand.
The American did train for months at the Fairtex Gym for months and even got to fight as a professional. At 6-foot-3 and 185 pounds, the white guy from North America did not find it easy to get a match as at that time there were only two Thais in his weight division and they would have “obliterated” him.
So the promoter imported a Japanese – a former karate champion in his homeland. At 203lb, the Japanese was heavier than the American but shorter.
The Yankee had second thoughts about taking on the karateka but he had always wondered since he was a kid how it felt to get in the ring against a trained fighter.
He got his wish. He got over his initial fears (the Japanese had full-body tattoos and had one finger sliced off – think Yakuza) and after surviving an early knockdown, he knocked out the Japanese who wasn’t really conditioned to go the full five rounds as he gassed out.
I’ve known a few people who have gone up the ring and they recount varying degrees of reaction before and after entering the ring and the reasons they do it. Basically, they just want to experience one-on-one combat with rules or not; on the street or in the ring.
One friend told me he felt strangely calm and unafraid despite taking on someone taller and heavier than him in a mixed-martial-arts fight which he lost by submission in three rounds despite leading on all the scoring judges’ cards in the first two rounds.
It was his first-ever fight in the ring. He laughed later saying that people he beat up in the past in street fights should have been happy seeing him get beaten up for a change.
Another veteran karateka/kickboxer who now referees matches, told me he started studying the martial arts in his early teens because he wanted to beat up on his father, a no-good unemployed drunkard who often mistook his mother for a punching bag.
He said he took a peso everyday from their carinderia cash box so he could pay for karate lessons in the 1970s. He got so good that he became one of the highest-paid kickboxers in Cebu in the 1980s and another karate club even pirated him to fight for them.
He befriended a Chinese kungfu expert who offered to teach him his style but he refused. He told the old man he just wanted to fight and thought he knew enough to defend himself on the streets and in the ring. At around 5-foot-4 and 120 pounds, Edgar said he took on anybody in the ring during his fighting days as there were no weight categories then.
FOOLHARDINESS. He has some broken fingers and nagging pain during cold weather to show for his foolhardiness and bravery.
Another fighting friend said he started MA training at 14 not to beat up on his dad or anybody else but because he just wanted to. His supportive parents enrolled him in a martial arts school.
He became so adept at fighting that he took his show on the road; fighting all over the Visayas and Mindanao and made it to the muay Thai national team. Then as now, martial arts prizefighting didn’t pay much but my friend fought anyone put in front of him. He thought it was the life for him and decided from going to college because martial arts was all he wanted to do. He has a different opinion now and just recently earned a Criminology degree.
My former karate mates in another club had fought in cockpits more than a hundred kilometers from their hometowns because our club had earned a reputation for toughness and superior style that no one would take us on. With the braggadocio of winners, we sometimes even mocked other martial arts schools, especially the ones which were so blatantly commercial and had chief instructors who claimed they had 11th dan black belt ranks. (Karate traditionally only has 10 black-belt levels.)
FAMILIAR STYLE. I’ve always wondered how it is to get in the ring and try to harm someone who has the same intention. I’ve sparred with many club mates but it is almost always friendly and it is easier to fight someone whose style is familiar to you.
The opportunity has never presented itself until now in my early forties when injuries make it less than ideal for me to do it. In my youth, when I got proficient enough in physical combat, I’ve always hoped to get tested on the street; against a lone opponent or multiple opponents, it didn’t matter. I trained for that possibility.
I am probably lucky not to have gotten my wish but in the back of my mind there is that constant what if?
Envious of associates who fought and won in street fights, my confidence is boosted: I am as good or even better than him. If he could do it, why not I?
It is good to be confident, well placed as it may be. But as they say: Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
With experience and wisdom earned in the battlefields of youth and recklessness, I have learned it is better to wish for a Christmas gift than to wish to have someone jump you in a dark alley so you could test your toughness.
Peace!
(sports@sunstar.com.ph)
(November 14, 2004 issue)
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