In the early 90s, I was appointed head coach for the USA Karate Team’s participation in the Olympic Sports Festival in San Jose, Costa Rica. As the team was composed of athletes from all over the country, everyone was to meet up with Hanshi Anderson at the Miami airport for the flight to Costa Rica. After a layover in Dallas, me and Ron Vick, one of my students on the team, boarded a 747 for our connecting flight to Miami. The huge plane was almost empty. Only a handful of other people were scattered around the aircraft, one of them a guy in the row just ahead of ours.
Turned out he was former World Boxing Champion Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. He was a nice guy and we spoke all the way to Miami. Like the guy I met at Soledad Prison, Mancini was involved in a fight that resulted in the death of his opponent, South Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim. But unlike the Soledad man, who stopped his opponent’s heart with a punch to the chest, Mancini’s opponent died five days after the match from brain damage resulting from punches to the head.
Deaths from punches certainly aren’t restricted to massive guys or professional fighters. We’ve had two local deaths that I know of, where untrained people got into arguments on the street and killed their opponents with a single punch to the head.
Martial artists have known all of this for centuries and why it was included among the kyusho (vital points) attacks that are incorporated within our kata. These also include vital points that require far less power – like the eyes, ears, throat, groin, etc. – where little force is necessary to do serious damage. One such technique, for example, is included in Heian Nidan (Pinan Shodan) kata, where an opponent’s punch (by one definition) is pressed down and the eyes or throat attacked with a spearhand. (An earlier version attacked with the tips of two fingers rather than all of them.)
The rub, of course, is that a result can hinge on individual variables – differences in how each of us is constructed. A punch that would kill one person may do little to another. Professional boxers hammer each other without doing the kind of damage such punches would surely do to most people. An old friend, Ralph Castellanos, who trained with me for a while in the 70s, was once attacked by a guy in San Francisco. Ralph kicked him so hard it lifted the guy off the ground. (And Ralph weighed over 200 lbs. and defeated Joe Lewis twice – no mean feat.) The guy he kicked didn’t react to the kick or even appear to notice it. He kept on fighting with equal strength. Fortunately, his jaw was far less steel-like than his lower anatomy. One punch from Ralph knocked him out.
Kyusho (vital points of the body) includes a wide variety of targets and attack methods. The ones discussed above are direct attacks to internal and external organs. And they are generally accepted with little argument. However, there are some targets and attack methodologies that are highly controversial. I’ll share my thoughts on these in a coming post.
Thanks again for bearing with me and your continued support.
No comments:
Post a Comment