People like quotes. Quotes focus a lot of beliefs and philosophies into easy-to-understand morsels you can show off on your computer background and share at parties to make yourself sound smart. In my training I've also come across a lot of quotes that actually helped me, that stuck with me and inspired me to go further and delve deeper.
So today I’m making a list of quotes that have spoken to me in recent years when it comes to fighting and martial arts. I train Kajukenbo, but if you do any kind of fight training, take a look at these and see if they reach you too.
I’m trying to avoid cliché quotes and quotes that have been beaten into the ground. (“Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend.”)
I'm also avoiding James Mattis quotes because even though they're awesome and I love them, they can also be incriminating.
The following six quotes are quotes that have had an impact on me in my training, and I hope they can have an impact on you too.
6. “Improvise, overcome, adapt.” – THE U.S. MARINES
Originally a marine slogan, I first heard this in the Clint Eastwood movie Heartbreak Ridge. In Kajukenbo, this is how we face challenges. Everyone has their strengths, but sometimes your strong point fails you. Do you give up? Hell no!
You improvise. You do something else. You persevere and you overcome. You adapt to the challenge and keep adapting until you can come out on top. In a fight, this means throwing out what doesn’t work and adapting to the fighter in front of you, the same way Kajukenbo threw out techniques that didn’t work and kept the rest when it was first developed. In life, this means the same thing.
Guess Bruce Lee was right about being water. Damnit.
5. “七転び八起き” – TRADITIONAL JAPANESE SAYING
“Nanakorobi yaoki.” This is a traditional Japanese saying that translates to “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” I’m breaking my “cliché rule” here, but I think a lot of people outside Japan haven’t heard this one. I also haven’t figured out the math in this one yet, and that bugs me, but I still like it.
This saying encapsulates the whole point of the Rocky movies: take the hits and keep going. But there’s another meaning I’ve heard as well: What happened in the past doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do next. There’s a whole essay waiting to be written there about second chances, but for fighting this reminds me of another quote: “It doesn’t matter who hits first. It matters who hits last.”
4. “It depends.” – RYAN HOOVER, APERTURE FIGHT FOCUSED
I’ve often quoted my own instructor Ron Esteller, many times, saying “No technique works 100% of the time on 100% of the people.” There’s also a Japanese saying that goes “jūnin toiro”. It can be simplified to mean “different strokes for different folks” but has been used in advertisement to mean that everyone is an individual. (Weird for Japan, actually.)
More recently, Ryan Hoover of Aperture Fight Focused has combined these ideas in the much more succinct “It depends”. Is a straight cross the best strike to the head? It depends, on a lot of things. It depends on whether or not the guy is wearing a motorcycle helmet at the time, how much boxing experience you both have, if you're still young, healthy, and have an uninjured hand at the time. It all depends. Is it safer to take the guy down and wait him out until police arrive? It depends. Are kicks a waste of time? It depends. As far as I’m concerned, “it depends” is sage advice for everything from choosing a technique to choosing a strategy to choosing your personal workout plan.
Sure, some techniques have a higher success rate - Kajukenbo was founded on the idea of focusing on those techniques – but sometimes life just doesn’t go the way you expect it to. Better learn to improvise, overcome, and adapt. Have backup techniques ready to go.
“It’s something I’ve said for many years,” said Hoover, “and I’m sure I’m not the first, but it stemmed from another quote of mine, which is ‘in a fight, (the words) always and never are lies’. “
3. “Of course you could just hit him in the head with your stick, but I will teach you the art.” – REMY PRESAS
I had a hard time finding the exact words Presas used, and I was never blessed to work with him myself. One quote I found attributed to Presas when showing a technique was “If it were real, you would strike, but I will teach you the Art!”
The first time Presas’ quote impacted me, I heard it from W. “Hock” Hochheim, a military, police, and self-defense instructor who teaches seminars internationally.
Unlike me, Hock has worked with Presas, and in his newsletters and books he’s talked about it.
According to Hock, “Filipino master and veteran stick fighter, Remy Presas use to say that you need just ‘a few favorite fake and strike moves…’. Remy also said, ‘You practice your whole life for a 4 second stick fight.’ And for all the many Filipino Stick techniques FMA systems have, Remy would stop, grin and say, 'Of course, I could just hit him in the head with my stick.’ ”
The unspoken part here continues with the the original quote: "...but I will teach you the art.”
This hits me in Kajukenbo. There are lots of tournaments and competitions out there, and personally, I never liked them. Yes, they're important for your development as a fighter...but in the end I'm not training for trophies. I'm training for physical/mental/spiritual health and for those once-in-a-lifetime situations that actually may or may not happen.
So, why the hell should you study a Kung Fu form 400 years old when fighting has changed in the last 20 years, much less 40, 60, 100 years? Why should you study beyond the small subset of moves necessary to survive a life-or-death situation?
Because it’s art.
Military and police: it's part of your job to focus only on the techniques that work, to study tactics and apply them to the few techniques that are necessary. Don't become a technique collector.
If you consider yourself a martial artist, your job is to master those workable techniques and then study "the Art".
Learn how to win a fight first, and then study how people fought 20, 40, 60, 100, 400 years ago and see how it effects your life. Seek knowledge. You might be pleasantly surprised.
2. “Train hard, be humble, fight dirty.” - SGM Bob Maschmeir
I first heard this quote when it was printed on Sigung Jeff Macalolooy’s T-Shirts. Macalolooy is a Kajukenbo instructor in California who I wish I could be. But on contacting him I found that he took this quote (with blessing) from Senior Grandmaster Bob Maschmeir, a Kajukenbo martial artist who started training in 1962 and to this day continues to teach despite cancer having destroyed his voice box.
For Kajukenbo, let’s break it down.
“Train hard.”
Any fighter can immediately understand the gravity of these two words, more than most people. As Royce Gracie said, “The belt only covers two inches of your ass, you have to cover the rest.”
The color of your belt doesn’t matter. It’s the time you put behind it.
Speaking of time, by the way, it takes an average 7 - 10 years of general martial arts training to get a black belt. If your dojo gives you a black belt with you only having 3 years of martial arts/fighting experience, your dojo sucks.
Contact me if you have an issue and I will gladly explain to you what a black belt is SUPPOSED to mean. “Training hard” isn’t done in 3 years.
“Fight dirty.”
Kajukenbo isn’t about playing fair. We train first to go home safe to our families – competition training comes later. If you and I scrap for real, if my life or my family's lives are in danger, and we're fighting for position in a grapple, don’t be surprised if I hit you with a rock or bite your ear. I didn’t want to be here.
“Be humble.”
I’ve heard gossip over the years of Kajukenbo practitioners who entered mma competitions in the early days and were not allowed to mention Kajukenbo for various reasons.
But for me, the best example of being humble comes from my teachers. They never asked for titles. Some of my teachers hate those titles. And despite the amazing stories they have from their past, they don't talk about themselves.
To hear any of the amazing stuff they've done, you have to ask them directly, and they'll give you a "Yeaaaah, it's true" kind of response, or you just have to hear it by chance from another instructor.
Maschmeier himself created this quote, "train hard, be humble, fight dirty", but according to Pacifica Tribune’s Esther Harris, “when asked what the most important thing (Maschmeier) hopes to pass on to his students is, (he) wrote on a piece of paper ‘be humble’.”
To me, this is largely what separates Kajukenbo from other realistic fighting styles.
1. “I’m a black belt.”
Here’s a quote mentioned by more people than I can count, but the lesson behind it was given to me by my instructor, Grandmaster Ron Esteller. (His title is Grandmaster, but he hates that. Don't tell him I called him that. Sifu, if you're reading this...sorry.)
Here’s the lesson. Lots of people who train in the martial arts quit. Years after they quit training, they say “I was a brown belt.” “I was a yellow belt.” “I was a blue belt”. But when someone achieves a real black belt they stop using the word “was” or “had”. Even if they stop going to the dojo for a decade, or 30 years, they still say “I am a black belt” with well-deserved confidence.
It’s amazing what semantics do. One small change in a sentence, from “I was” to “I am”. Gracie was right. Your belt only covers 2 inches. But “having” a black belt is incredibly different from “being” a black belt. That belt will one day fade away and rot. What are you? How long after your death will people remember you?
I’ve said this in one of my videos before: People should know you’re a black belt without you telling them. Even if they don’t know what a “black belt” is.
This is what separates a martial artist from a “fighter”, and it's the meaning behind the phrase that separates a real martial artist from a fraud. I’ll leave you with one last quote I found attributed to a Shaolin martial artist originally from India named Kanishka Sharma. I honestly don't know if this guy can fight his way out of a paper bag or not, but it doesn't matter. I like this quote. A lot.
“You train to become a warrior, not a fighter. The warrior knows the hell he can let loose, so he chooses the path of peace and respect.”
Just make sure you can unleash hell. After that, choose the path of the warrior.