by Bill Carson
I got along with most of the guys and was a popular lad, but there was one fella that I never liked who worked in a big labouring gang. He was a cocky and arrogant sort and he may well have thought the same about me. My old mate Martin and I were having a drink one lunch time in a pub around the corner from the building site when this fella walked in with a couple of his pals. They came straight over to us and gave us the type of stare that could only denote trouble. I didn’t know what his problem was, and I never found out either.
Now I was weighing in at scarcely twelve stone back then, but my ace in the hole was the fact that I was strong and quick and also very good at the old karate. A stand-off ensued and a few words were exchanged and we eventually decided to take it outside. This was how we settled things in those days: man to man, a one on one straightener with honour.
We went outside the pub and stood toe to toe and squared off. Once the preliminaries were over we were both ready to do battle. As he made a move forward to deliver his attack, I smashed my shin bone into his thigh with everything I had in an all-or-nothing thigh kick. The force of it buckled his left leg and it bowed like a palm tree in a hurricane. He dropped to the ground, cracking both elbows and the back of his nut against the pavement. The gamble had paid off because he’d had enough, and the fight – if you can call it that – was over in seconds. The next day it was all forgotten about; it was something that was just accepted back in those days and you simply moved on.
For me, I have found that the build up to these types of altercations can be the most distressing part – much worse than the actual combat itself. It’s the not knowing and the pondering on the unknown that gives you the hebejebes. You have to try and shut it out of your mind and get to it.
Fear is met by courage and destroyed.
Saturday mornings were without a doubt the best karate training session: we called it the animal hour. Only a select few used to turn up, which was good as that meant some close tuition. The lesson would always start in the same way and we would assemble in two lines, standing one directly behind the other.
“Take your Gi tops off front line, turn around and face the person behind,” the instructor said. (The Gi training suit is worn by karate and judo practitioners.) He would then tell us to plant twenty hard punches into our partner’s stomach and then he would return the compliment. The force of the blows would sometimes actually knock me backward into the wall. Once we’d completed the punching, we would be straight down pumping out press-ups, sit -ups and squats, and then we would go for a two-mile run through the streets in bare feet. That was the warm-up out of the way. When we came back from the run, we began practicing some rudimentary karate training which consisted of blocking routines and different striking and kicking methods. After that, the fun would really begin. This was the free sparring, my favourite part. The only protection we were wearing was a groin guard. There were no gloves and no gum shields.
I remember getting changed after one session, and when I took off my groin guard I saw that the plastic protective cup was completely smashed in two. Everything else was intact, thank God. That’s what it was like. The next week I fractured someone’s ribs with a reverse punch; you would come out of there with bruises all over you.
This was the real deal. There was no pissing about. It was tough karate training in the Japanese style, bordering on brutality, and I loved it.
There was this one guy whose name I can’t remember but I nicknamed him Hiza (hiza being the Japanese word for the knee) as the only technique he seemed to possess with any accuracy was the knee strike. He would suddenly get in close and grab hold of you and start smashing you up with knee strikes. It was as if he’d superimposed a bull’s eye over your knackers and then he would commit himself to a full three-minute assault on them. My defence was to step to the side and try to keep moving, and when I got the chance I would punch him unmercifully about the ribs every time he came in close.
The techniques we practised were mainly geared for the ‘knock down’ fighting, which was exactly as it sounds: the idea was to knock your opponent down with full contact blows to the body to win. The training was extremely arduous and was definitely some of the hardest training I have ever experienced. It is not easy turning your body into a dangerous weapon.
After a couple of years of this, I discovered that I no longer had the fear that had once ruled over me.
'Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt.' William Shakespeare.
I had now forged my body and mind in the fires of adversity. I’d gone through all of the tough training and come out the other side a better person. It is, of course, entirely up to you how hard you want to train, but if you put nothing in you’ll get nothing out. I trained with full commitment every time, even when I was injured. I broke my toes and fingers on numerous occasions, but injuries like that were common and they never stopped me from training. I’d just strap them up good and tight and get right to it. I even carried on fighting when someone had shattered some of my teeth with a powerful roundhouse kick.
At traditional Japanese karate schools, hand conditioning is something that is practised regularly as it is part of the curriculum. Some karate schools do very little of this and at others there is no place for it at all. Situated in the narrow gravel alleyway alongside our little karate club were three punching posts set into the ground. Attached to these wooden posts were thick straw punching pads called makiwara. The idea was that as you repeatedly slammed your knuckles into the pad, it would toughen the impact area of the fist.
If you wish to begin makiwara training, you will need to start off by developing the punching techniques first. Correct punching is not easy and it takes a while to be able to punch the makiwara with force and without injuring your wrists. It takes years and years of dedicated unending practice to perfect these karate strikes.
To toughen the knuckles further we also did press-ups on our knuckles on pieces of flat pinewood board. I used to practice on the punching post a great deal. I even put one up in my back garden, and I still have one today outside my little gym. This type of training is only found in the toughest of karate schools. In my school, for your first dan (black belt), for example, you had to have fifty consecutive three-minute fights.
It was full contact and no gloves were worn. Kicking to the groin wasn’t allowed and neither was punching to the head. Thigh kicks were my speciality: they are powerful, painful kicks and if you deliver one in the right spot on your opponent, the fight will be over. I received a kick in the thigh in one match that was so hard the next day the mass of bruising came out on the opposite side of my leg. I was hobbling about like Long John Silver for a week.
Another knock down fight I remember was when I had been struck with a spinning back kick. The guy’s heel had struck me with full power to the side of the head, which dropped me down onto one knee. I didn’t feel any pain as such, but the room and my legs went a bit wobbly for a moment, and then I saw a group of perfectly formed five-pointed three-dimensional little golden stars spinning slowly in front of me. I used to think that was something that you only saw in cartoons. Take it from it me, it actually does happen. I got back up quite quickly, though, and continued to fight on. I was groggy but still managed to get in a few good blows. I had a massive headache afterwards and a black earhole for a couple of weeks.
You have to learn to take it before you can dish it out.
Every winter we were invited to take part in a Japanese-style training course which was held at a private school in Buckinghamshire. The school had vast grounds, where we would all be running around in the mud, rain and snow. Sparring matches were organised in the fields, where we also took part in the roughest game of British bulldog you have ever seen: flying kicks and elbow strikes were traded with equal enthusiasm.
But the best part of the course was saved until the end. In the grounds they had a huge waterfall, and each of us would to go under it to execute fifty karate p
unches with the heavy, steady flow of ice cold water cascading down onto us. Afterwards we were all invited to the local pub where chicken and chips in a basket were laid on, washed down with a couple of well-deserved pints.
I’ll never forget those Saturday morning training sessions with Frank, Tony, Nigel, Kevin, Keith, Eddie, Martin and Bill and everyone else who used to train at that Dojo in the mid-seventies and eighties. Frank was a great teacher and an extremely good-natured man for whom I have the utmost respect. OSU!
Frank was building his empire and unfortunately that meant he had less and less time to give us lessons. The final straw for me came when a guy who had been only been at the club for a couple of years and was taking the lesson decided to omit the usual sparring session. Karate without our usual kumite (sparring)? What was the world coming to? This was becoming a regular occurrence – no Frank, and no sparring. I made the sad decision to leave the karate school as I felt that no one else there could really teach me anything. I had been training there for about eight years and I had become very proficient. I had built up a strong mental and physical toughness that has served me well over the years.
I must admit I did miss the old place. I was going past there recently and had to pop in. I walked down the narrow gravel path and, to my surprise, the door was open. I went inside: the place was quiet and empty. I stood on the threshold of the doorway and thought about all those training sessions and all the people I’d met there. The dojo is still virtually exactly the same as it was the day I left all those years before.
CHAPTER TWO
Fighting Fit
After I left the karate club, I decided to build my own dojo/gym in my back garden, where my friends and I would be free to practice the way we wanted to and do as much sparring as we liked. I contacted a garage manufacturer who built the thing around my own design. Eventually I settled on it being fifteen feet long and ten feet wide. I had to make sure that it was built high enough for the punch bags, which were suspended from the thickest beam I could find – it was more or less a tree trunk. When it was all bolted together it looked absolutely superb.
Now that I had built the dojo, I needed to buy some equipment to put in it. We went to a place along the Fulham Palace Road called Mancini’s, after the owner who was an old time boxing trainer. It’s sadly no longer there now. It was a brilliant little shop and had everything you needed to equip a boxing gym. Andy, a mate of mine, drove Pete and myself down there to get the equipment. The only problem was that Andy had turned up in a green Citroen 2CV. It looked like a cross between a frog and a small green house on wheels.
The car was not exactly built for heavyweights either; we went around one corner on two wheels. I was sure the thing was going over at one point. It got us there and back though… just about. (I took the Tube the next time.)
A typical training session
We soon devised what we thought was a good routine. Here it is:
A ten-minute warm up: stretching, callisthenics.
One thousand jumps on the skipping rope.
Three hundred press-ups in sets of fifty.
Three hundred sit-ups.
Left and right hooks non-stop on the heavy bag. For three rounds of three minutes.
Combination punching on the heavy bag for one minute non-stop. Five times each.
After that we had some sparring matches, and then, to finish off, we practised our unarmed combat techniques.
We trained like that four times a week, every week. I felt that this was enough to get us into top condition: hard training without knocking our pipe out completely. We were now ready for anything.
We had a regular little crew who used to turn up. There was Little Tony, Pete, my old mate from my school big Peter, Andy and John. Tony was the smallest and lightest of the lads, but pound for pound the strongest. He trained like a demon and was as hard as a coffin nail. He could take a tremendous amount of punishment and still keep going forward.
Pete was six two and seventeen and a half stones and always trained hard. After a while he perfected an excellent left jab, one of the best I’ve seen (and felt).
Big Pete was the biggest and the heaviest of us at over eighteen stone and a touch over six two. He presented a formidable opponent. Initially he trained for many years in kung fu but adapted to boxing very well, I think I’ve still got a lump under my chin to prove it.
Andy was the new boy, weighing in at eleven stone and with no previous experience. He had to start from scratch, but was a fast learner and very game. He also never pulled a punch. He would try and knock your teeth out every time, which was good in a way because it kept you on your toes. In one match Andy received a really hard punch from Peter which resulted in a broken rib.
You know a little about my martial arts background, but boxing was something that came naturally to me. I studied a great deal of fight films; the fighters I used to watch most were Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano. Joe Louis was one of the best combination punchers ever and reigned for eleven years as the heavyweight champion of the world. Rocky Marciano has got to be the toughest boxer of all time: with his murderous right hand punch he defeated all comers and he was never beaten. He had forty-nine fights and recorded forty-nine wins with forty-three knockouts. He has remained the only world heavyweight champion in history to retire undefeated. These are the guys I would study to see how they delivered their punches and how they got themselves into position to unleash their devastating attacks.
I also studied a fighter called Jack Dempsey from the 1920s. His fight against the giant Jess Willard for the world heavyweight title was one of the most brutal ever to be shown on film. So with the Joe Louis combinations, Rocky Marciano’s right hander, plus a bit of Jack Dempsey thrown in for good measure, I set about adopting their techniques and incorporating them into our training routines.
We trained hard, still using the training schedule. Press-ups, sit-ups, bag work and skipping were the fundamental building blocks. The sparring at the end of each session was as tough as I could make it. I felt it had to be made as real as possible. Quite a few schools that teach martial arts don’t ever get anywhere near the kind of realism that you need for an actual encounter with someone. The person who has been training at a school that teaches a semi or a non-contact type of sparring is going to get battered big time in the real world. I call it the fantasy island syndrome.
Once a week we decided that one of us would stay up and fight for ten three-minute rounds. This was a great test of stamina, strength and spirit. One sparring match which springs to mind was with Pete. As usual it started off relatively normally and gathered momentum as it continued. Tony was doing the time-keeping. Pete was fighting really hard with absolutely no quarter. At the start of the third round, Pete caught me with a superb left jab, followed by another left into the rib cage, quickly followed by two more left jabs to the head. It put me on the defensive and I started to go backwards, but my training, determination and spirit kept me going: if you get caught in the solar plexus or floating ribs there’s nothing you can do but cover up and weather the storm.
I was in the corner and under attack from Peter’s persistent left jabs. I lured him in and waited for the right moment to counter-attack. I threw a fast left jab then a right cross combined with a hard left uppercut to the jaw, followed by a rib-crunching right hand to the body. It sent Pete crashing through the door of the gym and out into the back garden, where the fighting continued – much to the surprise of the builders who were putting in some double glazing next door. Two of them quickly turned around to see what was going on and almost fell off the scaffolding.
At that point Tony called a halt to the proceedings. Pete commented afterwards that when the upper cut landed on his chin, he thought he saw the sun and the moon rise simultaneously and that it was only sheer bloody mindedness and a refusal to give in that made him carry on. I call it spirit. You’ve got to be able to take it in the gym, because if you can’t you will be in a lot of trouble in a real street fight.
The lads came in all shapes and sizes so you would be fighting someone who was six two, and the next time you would be fighting someone shorter and faster. That was good because in a real fight you can’t pick and choose your opponent.
It was all done with the right kind of attitude and with absolutely no malice: in fact, quite the opposite. We had some right old punch ups in there. Believe it or not, it was all extremely enjoyable; we were all very fit and strong and could take the punishment. It was a great confidence builder as well. You see, I knew what the others didn’t – I had drawn on what I had learned from the knock down fighting and tried to show the other guys that the sparring was intended to remove the fear of fighting. Basically we were not afraid of taking a few shots: if you can remove that fear and accept the fact that you may have to take a clump or two, violent confrontations are slightly easier to handle.