How to Win a Street Brawl in One Easy Step

Yesterday my school hosted a somewhat impromptu non-competitive tournament and invited a few other schools to bring their students, in order for all involved to have experience fighting people they have never fought before. There were no points, nor winners and losers; it was more of a proof-of-concept night, to show that it works to loosely gather together different schools to organize a night of sparring rounds. This now enables us to circulate word that schools have been meeting for a night of training-by-fighting and why don't the rest of them come out and join us?

This is also a great way to meet other people in the Taekwondo community, and perhaps the martial arts community as a whole. Ellen and I happened to choose a school with very few people in our age group. We train with about 6 other regulars, including instructors. This is good for its own reasons, but sometimes, as in the case of last night, it's just exhilarating to walk back into the dojang after a water break and see a hundred people stacked in lines, doing practice and warm-up drills, or to see a hundred people sitting around the perimeter watching the fights being refereed in the center.

It was also the hardest and most brutal class I've participated in so far. After my first round was done I felt like throwing up for a good half hour, forcing myself to push on regardless. I had a great time, all things considered. I think I'll find myself loving these nights where we have a commingling of different faces, different styles, and no pressure to bring home first place prize. I can't see myself ever caring about "winning." It's not the reason I started this endeavour to begin with, and hasn't become one. I don't really see the point in trying to show you're better than somebody; among the many other good reasons for studying a martial art, it instills in you a respect for physical confrontation, the perils of it, and the necessity to avoid it at all costs, only using it as a last resort.

Which reminds me: Daniel, Jordan, Jonathan, Jasmine, Matthew and I went to the cinema on Tuesday night to catch Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, which by the way is an amazing movie (for a male ego, anyway, heh) and one I would recommend to all fighting-movie fans. We watched this movie, heavy in martial arts violence, and afterwards went to the arcade room to play Street Fighter, Tekken, etc, all that ridiculously fun fighting game stuff. Pumped up on adrenaline and aggression, the six of us left the theatre and were walking away, towards the van, when we were promptly accosted verbally by three guys obviously looking for a fight. Jordan (who has years of various martial arts experience in his past) turned back a couple times to engage them verbally, but by and large we continued to walk away. It took a bit of prodding on my part to get us all to the van safely; Jordan has a tendency to get into fights wherever he goes, and the odds are usually stacked against him. Tonight would have been great redemption time for him even though it would have drawn Daniel and I into the melee in order to prevent Jordan from getting himself into a three-on-one. (Matthew, Jasmine, and Jonathon probably wouldn't have bothered taking part at all, to their credit.)

We got into the van and left, cursing among ourselves at this certain ethnic population in Ottawa that seems to think their skin color can be used to intimidate the majority of the other people they come into contact with. From a certain angle it's perceivable that they would have deserved it, that they had it coming to them because of their inability to just let people go about their businesses in public without intruding—not to mention their ridiculous inability to weigh odds (five guys against three??). And in fact, assuming they weren't armed in any way, because of their size we would have easily "won" the fight—no question about it. But it would have been a loss for Jordan and I as martial artists to waste our time fighting with people who were being mere nuisances and no tangible physical threat to our persons. As much as I spent the rest of the van ride home wishing we'd taken the opportunity to send a message in their direction, I'm quite glad that at the time of the actual confrontation I was thinking more clearly than that. In the last six months of training I have gone from being too scared to get into a fight to being too smart to.