Book Read Free

Memoirs of a Karate Fighter

Page 14

by Ralph Robb


  Mick had warned me against being too vocal in my opinions as he feared that something would drop on my head from a great height as I walked through the factory, but on passing a queue of men waiting to clock out, I could not resist raising a fist and shouting “Viva Malvinas!” A torrent of abuse came back at me. Mick shook his head and muttered that he wished I had kept my mouth shut and that I was only bringing trouble on myself. I knew he was right, but rather than admit to it, I asked if he were coming to the dojo as planned. “You lot have kept me waiting long enough, and it’s about time someone went down there and showed you some real karate,” he joked.

  *

  Supervised by Eddie Cox, I was putting the beginners’ class through a simple combination technique while rhythmically reciting, “Ichi . . ni . . san . . shi . .” when I peered through a window and caught sight of Mick. He was standing by the wrought iron gates at the front of the building and taking in the sights. I tried not to laugh, but I could see him looking at the scrap of paper I had given him as he scratched his head and looked at the line of women standing across the road. He was greatly relieved to see men turning up in karate gis and tracksuits and followed them inside.

  Mick had been trying to come and train at the YMCA ever since he had started a club of his own. I had cleared his visit with my sensei and made sure to put the word around that a friend of mine would be training with us. Not that Mick was in any great danger: since the club’s second win at the British championships there had been a certain maturing of attitudes. A karateka coming from another club to train with us was now seen as a compliment, rather than someone throwing down a gauntlet that was to be picked up and slapped forcefully across his face. The Saturday fighting class would have been a different matter, but I was sure Mick would find one of the evening sessions challenging and rewarding. Although he practised Shotokan, the fighting aspect is common to nearly all the schools of karate (with the notable exception of Shotokai, which continues to adhere to Funakoshi’s dictate that forbade sparring) and he hoped to pick up a few useful tips to pass on to the members of his club.

  When Mick entered the dojo he fidgeted nervously as he felt himself being scrutinised by curious eyes. I wandered over to him and told him to relax. “I’m trying,” he said. “It’s just so strange being amongst so many… you know.”

  “Good fighters?”

  “No … You know.”

  The skin on Mick’s face had become taut and pale. I hazarded another guess. “Black people?”

  “Keep your voice down,” he replied, looking over his shoulder. “Is this what it feels like when you’re amongst white people?”

  “It’s had its uncomfortable moments, but judging by your face, no, not really.”

  He responded with a nervous smile as the sensei ordered us into lines. At first I did not know whether to admire Mick’s honesty or be irritated with him: he had known of the racial make-up of the club, and I wanted to ask him why it had suddenly become an issue. It was neither the time nor the place for this sort of conversation but it did make me wonder about Declan Byrne’s experiences when he had first entered the YMCA dojo, as, like Mick, he too had grown up in an area that was ninety-nine percent white. Prejudice is not a one-way street, and when Declan first arrived he had been given a hard time by the black patrons of the YMCA who were not even members of the karate club. There had been two occasions when groups of young guys had entered the dojo as he limbered up on his own and challenged him to a fight. A third confrontation never materialized after the first challenger received a broken nose, and the second was knocked out. His continued presence at the YMCA dojo served to confront many preconceptions.

  On the command ‘seiza’ we knelt down. Before the two bows, the sensei called out ‘moksu’ and we dutifully closed our eyes as we supposedly cleared our minds, but all I thought about was Mick: his initial reaction, and the chances that he would get through the session unscathed.

  When the lesson started, I found myself distracted by Mick’s presence. From the corner of my eye I could see that although he was standing a good deal lower than the rest of us, he was coping with the repetitions of combination techniques. But his real test would come after we had finished moving up and down the dojo and started to practise with a partner. I moved to pair off with Mick, but failed to see Trog’s nifty sidestep that put him in front of me. Trog was now a brown belt, and although he was two grades below me he still seemed to believe that (in his head) the positions were reversed and that he was my senior. I guessed that he also wanted to prove that he was Mick’s superior. It was not long before he tried to intimidate the outsider in his usual bumptious way; but Mick was having none of it. He stood his ground and fired back. Luckily for me I was partnering Danny Moore, and he knew that Mick was a friend of mine and that I was not concentrating fully on what we were doing. Despite two warnings from the sensei, Trog continued to dole out heavy blows, but while Mick’s spirit kept him on his feet I was getting very angry. Besides admonishing Trog, Cox sensei was generally encouraging as he paced around the dojo scrutinising his students. “Yame,” he shouted. “Fifty press-ups, fifty sit-ups and then change partners.” Everyone dropped to the ground and we pumped out the press-ups before rolling over onto our backs to complete the sit-ups and then, without skipping a beat, we were back onto our feet, facing our new partner. The pair-work lasted the best part of an hour, and luckily for Mick the two changes of partners enabled him to train with Clinton and me – and during that time he had at least been able to learn more than just the knowledge of his own pain threshold.

  The sensei then told us to put on our pads for the sparring session. As I pulled on mine, I glanced up at Trog and saw him eyeing up Mick as he put on his own leg and instep pads. Trog only had eyes for his quarry as he walked across the dojo and did not see my own nifty footwork until I was in front of him. He had really wanted to step around me to get to Mick but after seeing someone else had got to Mick before him, Trog smirked at me and pushed back his shoulders. “Looks like it’s me and you then,” he said.

  The sensei called out that he wanted us to spar softly as relaxation was the key to good karate. Relaxation was a difficult state to attain, especially in a real fight when either anger or anxiety tightens the sinews. Relaxation was the secret of all the great karate masters. Eddie Cox had trained with Ohtsuka and remarked that there had been no tension in his body as he threw a punch until a microsecond before his fist made contact with its target. I had watched the Shotokan master Hirokazu Kanazawa give a demonstration of tai chi in the 1970s as he too sought to bring a softer element to his style of karate. Sakagami once told us that the more we progressed in karate, the shorter our techniques would become. Relaxation was the secret to effective, close-range fighting, and the short devastating techniques, such as the famous one-inch punch of kung fu masters. It was all about punching softly, rather than punching hard.

  But I knew Trog would not be sparring softly with me. We had exchanged too many insults and he still thought that my position in the first team was rightfully his. From the word ‘hajime’ Trog was throwing heavy and hurtful attacks that rendered the light sparring exercise useless.

  He began by firing a combination of hard punches, some dangerously close to my face. I sidestepped and he charged past me as I attempted – but failed – to counterattack. His aggression was a measure of his resentment. To him, I must have appeared as arrogant as he seemed to me and in reality our bout was nothing more than a clash of youthful and inflated egos. I had purposely stoked the anger he now needed to vent – and I needed to extinguish it before I got badly hurt.

  “Yame!” the sensei shouted angrily, to bring our sparring to an immediate halt. He glared at the two of us and said, “It seems you two don’t want to participate in the class as I’ve instructed.” He told the rest of the class to sit down before he added, “But you two stay on your feet.”

  The rest shuffled backwards and knelt down on the perimeter of the floor to create a fig
hting area. “For those who don’t know,” the sensei continued, addressing everyone but Trog and me, “light sparring means light … a chance to improve your techniques, and improve your timing and distancing without the risk of injury.” To us he said, “Okay, get whatever this is all about out of your systems and then perhaps you’ll obey my instructions. Jiyu kumite, hajime!”

  Trog began by throwing a high and powerful mawashigeri (roundhouse kick) in an attempt to remove my head. Moving backwards, I evaded his kick and felt the rush of wind from his foot as it passed my face. Cursing myself for not immediately capitalising on his attack, I punched him hard on his chest and he staggered back as I tried to drop a kakatogeri (axe kick) on his head. The axe kick was later to be banned from competitions as it became uncontrollable once it began its descent. It had been responsible for seriously injuring several competitors – but I didn’t care; we were going to establish who was the better fighter once and for all. The axe kick missed his head and slid down his ample chest, removing a few hairs by the roots. As if he hadn’t felt a thing, he retaliated with a punch that caught me on the side of my head. I spun to my left and gave myself enough time and space to recover. There were several more hurtful exchanges, mostly to the body, that had both of us sucking in air; but it was a strategy we both employed in order to avoid any chance of the sensei calling a premature halt to the bout. I could see in Trog’s eyes that his fight plan was similar to mine: inflict as much pain as possible to your opponent’s body and then wait for an opening to bring matters to a halt with a single, vicious technique. Trog made his move for victory: he threw a punch to my stomach to get my hands moving downwards before he again attempted a kick to my head. But I was ‘in the zone’ in which there is no conscious thought. I cannot say how I reacted to Trog’s punch to my stomach – only that it did not hit me – and this time I did not step backwards or to the side, I stepped in to deliver a punch to his chin before sweeping his supporting leg from under him. Trog hit the ground, legs and arms sprawled out, as I quickly followed up by stamping on his stomach. The fumikomi technique was controlled, hard enough to hurt, but not enough to injure.

  “Yame!” cried Eddie Cox, with more than a hint of approval in his voice.

  The look on Mick’s face was one of sheer astonishment, and for many years to follow he would often refer back to that fight as the most amazing he had ever witnessed. But he never again trained at the YMCA.

  After the lesson I got changed into the ubiquitous black ‘monkey’ suit of a doorman/bouncer before heading out to my car. Clinton pulled a disapproving face. When he had been offered work on nightclub doors he had laughed and said that unless he was prepared to wear half a dozen sweaters underneath his shirt he would come across as far too scrawny. He also added that he may have been Ewart’s brother but there was no way that he was going to become his employee too.

  “I thought you were only doing weekends,” he said, as we strode across the car park.

  “I’m doing all the shifts I can so we can get out of that flat.”

  Clinton crinkled his lips. “So, what time will you get home?”

  “About two,” I said.

  “And you’re doing all this for Hilda and the baby?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “is there a problem with that?”

  “Nah,” he said airily, “only with the baby due and Hilda being scared stiff at night, I would have thought you’d be better off at home.” He started to walk away. “That’s all I’m saying,” he said.

  – Chapter Fifteen –

  Great and small go together.

  Miyamoto Musashi – The Wind Book

  WHEN I RETURNED from the Sunday morning run and training in the park, I found the flat was empty. Hilda had not left a note but it was not difficult for me to figure out that she had gone to her mother’s. Since the birth of our daughter, life in the flat had been getting her down; it had been getting both of us down.

  It was a beautiful day, and looking out of my window I thought I would have been gladdened by it. But for some reason I felt desensitized, and even the birth of my daughter Nadine had not had the impact I had expected. From somewhere, I was not quite sure where, I had picked up the belief that her arrival would be a life-changing moment for me, but in reality I felt somewhat distanced from the event. I had been there for the birth, yet no great wave of emotion washed over me, and I certainly did not have the bond with the baby that Hilda immediately felt. In those first few days of fatherhood I feared that I was lacking – that somehow I had been left off the list when it came to parental attachment. As I had looked down at this little stranger in our small twelfth-floor home, I tried to link her with the large bulge in Hilda’s abdomen that I had witnessed growing for what seemed an age. For a while I wondered if the absence of a bond with my daughter was due to karate – that perhaps the disengagement with emotions such as anger or fear while training had impaired my ability to feel other, more tender, emotions. To my relief, as the days turned to weeks there was a gradual change within me that I was not really conscious of, until one day, as I gently rocked her, I was suddenly aware that I was experiencing a father’s love for his child. Although she was so small and light, I knew she was the heaviest load I had ever held in my arms.

  I made myself a cup of tea and sat at the small kitchen table, retreating further into my own thoughts. I was searching for justification for what I had planned for the skinheads who lived above me. But as I thought about the consequences of just one reckless act of retribution, my family loomed large. On my way home from training a few days earlier I had seen three of the skinheads loitering on the pavement. Their presence had become an unremitting one in our home as Hilda rarely let a day go by without mentioning that she felt threatened by them. They had cast a pall of gloom over us when Hilda and I should have been at our happiest, and as I drove past them an urge had gone through me to mount the pavement and run them down. These malicious thoughts were a symptom of my growing frustration that I had yet to find another place to live. Feeling the walls were closing in on me, I picked up my car keys and headed for the front door.

  I had driven aimlessly at first, and somehow ended up in Birmingham. While traversing the outskirts, I made up my mind and headed for a cinema in Handsworth that every Sunday showed an all-day programme of kung fu films.

  It was impossible to avoid my cousin Ewart, Pete and the other guys from the YMCA who observed the Sabbath in the dilapidated cinema, as they always occupied the back rows along with a few members of the Temple Karate Centre and the Shukokai club in Birmingham. I greeted a few of them and then took a seat a few rows down. When I was a teenager, kung fu films were enough to distract me from my troubles in the world outside. But today, despite what was happening on the screen, or in the seats around me, I could not divert my mind from all the concerns I had carried into the cinema with me. Maybe it was a sign that I had moved on.

  I was feeling cramped when I stood up to leave halfway through the second film. I’d had enough of it and Clinton’s words about Hilda being on her own began to haunt me. I knew she would be safe, as her brother would give her a lift from their mother’s place, but I felt anxious all the same. From an aisle seat near the exit Pete put out his hand asked me why I was leaving so soon. I told him I had work in the morning. He laughed and whispered, “That never stopped you before.”

  “Things change,” I said.

  I got to the door of my flat without any memory of the journey from Birmingham as ideas about what my reception might be had preoccupied my mind. The first indicator that something was wrong was when my key was unable to turn the lock. I bent down and looked through the letterbox but this time there was no chair wedged under the door handle. Again I tried the key and only then it dawned on me that Hilda’s growing fear about where we lived had caused her to lock me out.

  *

  The nightclub was almost empty. There would be no great influx of customers, or any chance of trouble, until the pubs closed. Trouble came too of
ten at Arches, mostly in the shape of drunken young men who travelled in packs of three or four and without female company. During the few months I had worked on the door, I had begun to think of alcohol as the most dangerous drug in the world. Alcohol made cowardly men brave; the resentful uninhibited in venting their rage; and impotent youths unrestrained when expressing their envy. They were usually most resentful about that ‘someone else’ who had got the well-paid job that they could have done ‘with their eyes shut’; or jealous of the nice ‘bird-pulling’ car that they were only too happy to scratch with the point of a key. When drunk, they exposed their envy of every man who was quite obviously better endowed and who could chat up women without first going to the expense of downing ten pints of beer. Whatever the other, cumulative effects of alcohol on them, it enabled some to either weep openly that some woman or other did not love them, or alternatively to put a beer glass into the face of a man who had let his eyes stray in the wrong direction on overhearing the maudlin rambling. I lurched between loathing and pitying such men.

 

‹ Prev