A Martial Art and a Hells Angel

I had studied Chinese Kenpo Karate for two years. I was an instructor, and I had written the training manual for my school.Then I ran into a Hells Angel.

The story actually started when the restaurant I was working at hired a geeky looking kid. I didn’t like him much, but then one day I saw him kick a wall. The wall shook like the 1906 earthquake, and I knew that he knew something I didn’t.

So I got to know him, and he said he studied Kang Duk Won Korean Karate. He said he didn’t know it well, which I found hard to believe because I had seen him kick a wall harder than a donkey kicks a pervert. He said, however, that his brother knew a lot more than him, and let’s go talk to him.

So that night we drove to Sunnyvale to meet his brother. As we pulled up Alex turned to me and said, “I should tell you that my brother is a Hells Angel.” I blinked, but, heck…I knew Chinese Kenpo Karate, right?

His brother was just under six feet tall, a little shorter than me, but he had the outlaw look in his piercing eyes. We talked about Karate for a while, and then he stated, “Your Martial Art doesn’t work.” He twisted two of the gnarliest fists I had ever seen into my shirt and told me to work my best technique on him.

I went into action. I locked his fists with one hand and brought my other hand up to break his elbows, I struck his wrists with my radial paralyzing downward chop, and when I went to chop him in the throat he threw me through a wall. Yep, all the way through a wall.

He laughed and gave me a hand up, and then he told me to grab his shirt front. I did, and he showed me the self defense technique that he learned at the Kang Duk Won. He reached over and popped a fist into my chest so hard that…that’s right, I went through the wall.

This is a true story, and being tossed through a wall twice changed my life, definitely changed the way I was learning martial arts, and prompted me down the road to other martial arts and how to really make them work. I spent over a half dozen years at the Kang Duk Won Korean Karate school, worked alongside all manner of people, including hells angels and other outlaw bikers. Included in my education was why a martial art doesn’t work.

The things that martial arts instructors add to their martial art, the slant towards tournaments and making money, there’s no end to the gimmicks that have messed up the art. That’s why I came up with Matrixing, so martial arts instructors could fix all that kind of stuff. Click to Monster Martial Arts and see what I came up with.