by Ralph Robb
Ironically, the best-behaved patrons were the Hell’s Angels. Once we had acknowledged the importance of their ‘colours’ they reluctantly submitted to the frisking for weapons that was club policy. No one got in without being searched, even the three off-duty detectives that Don Hamilton took great delight in telling that they were either searched or barred. Bikers’ night was the one on which we had collected most weapons, long bayonets mainly, that were always explained away with the excuse that they were only tools for repairing their motorcycles. Frisking for weapons was not something I did readily on Bikers’ night, after one evening when my fingers ran up and down artificial legs on more than six occasions. The men, who were all around my own age, merely smiled as I drew a sharp intake of breath. “Fell off the bike, mate,” they often said by way of explanation.
I joined Declan Byrne on the pavement outside. “Have you seen Clinton lately?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, “I called on him before I came here.”
“Only, I bumped into him by the shops a few days ago,” he said. “How do you think he’s doing?” Because he was spending more time teaching at the clubs he had set up with Eddie Cox, Declan only got to the YMCA dojo for the Saturday fighting class, and I figured he was just checking up on how the students were progressing. “Great, Clint’s in really good form at the club,” I said, “and he’s training very hard for the national championships.”
“I don’t mean that sort of form.” Declan hesitated and then went on, “He wasn’t feeling too well a while back, I was just wondering if that problem has cleared up.”
“You know Clinton, he can be a little weird at times, but as I said he’s just fine.” I answered. I wanted to ask Declan about what had brought on his line of questioning but I had pressing questions of my own that I needed resolving.
“How’s Hilda and the baby?” he asked, as he stepped out onto the pavement again.
“They’re both fine,” I said. “When is yours due?”
“Any day now,” Declan said, guiltily. “This will be my last shift for a while, so if you want to earn some extra money you can take mine on.” Declan had got married the previous year to a tall and very attractive Jamaican woman and had made it clear that he would rather spend his evenings with his pregnant wife and was only working as a doorman as a favour to Eddie Cox. He did not like the job, the club, or the customers, and did little to hide his feelings.
“Sure,” I said, immediately aware that Hilda would not be happy about me spending more nights away from home, “I’ll cover for you. Declan, can I ask you a personal question? Well, I’m looking more for advice than anything else.”
“Fire away. You look like a man with a lot on his mind.”
When I had mentioned my plan for visiting retribution upon the skinheads to Chester Morrison, one of the senior black belts, his silence spoke volumes. Needing a more enthusiastic response, I then thought about going over my plan with Declan. “It’s about these National Front skinheads who stole and burned out my car. I was talking to Chester about how I’m going to put things right.”
“And what do you think Chester was trying to tell you?”
I picked up, by his tone, that the two men had talked about my plan for revenge. Immediately less sure of its soundness, I said, “Well, he pointed out a few flaws in the plan. … Which I took on board. I mean, I’m not going to ask for advice and then take no notice of it.”
Declan shook his head. “I was going to have a word with you about that. According to Chester, that’s exactly what happened. He told me he was pointing out how crazy this thing is that you’ve got in mind and you were just nodding your head as if he were advising you on a different way of doing something it instead of forgetting all about it. It’s stuff that can spiral out of hand, Ralph, and for what, a piece of junk that was only good for the scrap yard?” I scratched my scalp but before I could formulate a response he continued, “Besides a hunch, what makes you think that the skinheads stole that heap of scrap? You say it’s these fellas but how do you know that? All this for a car, that from what I saw of it, wasn’t even worth a tenner. It sounds as though someone did you a favour, at least you didn’t have to pay anyone to come and tow it away. Ralph, if someone had damaged your child or your missus, it would be different. I mean, they are the most important things in your life, right?”
His words had come like a stinging slap across my face. I had so badly wanted the skinheads to be responsible for stealing my car that a trivial matter like proof was something that I was prepared to overlook. An old phrase came back to me: An eye for an eye – and we all end up blind. Maybe it was my own blind prejudice that had led me to the point of considering violence against the skinheads. I took a deep breath, hoping that a few words would come to me to counter his argument. When nothing came, I said to Declan, “Yeah, you’re right.” My tongue dabbed the corners of my mouth as if the words had left a bad taste, and I said, “Thanks for the chat.”
Half an hour before closing time, I wandered back outside to escape the stench of smoke and body odour billowing up the stairway from the bar and dance floor. Getting the punters to go home after a night of drinking was often troublesome, and I thought it best if I took in some fresh air to make myself fully alert. I stepped out in time to see Declan turning away three drunk young men. “Sorry, lads,” he said, “we’re closing in a few minutes.”
“We only want one drink,” one of them said.
“You’ve had plenty. Come back another night.”
A police van pulled up across the road. “Everything all right?” a cop called to us.
“No problem,” Declan called back.
The police van moved on; it was not unusual for them to slowly patrol the streets as the clubs began to close. The three drunk men, all in their early twenties, took themselves a few yards down the road and we watched them as they stood talking to each other for a few minutes after a final request for a drink was met with a curt shake of Declan’s head. He was about to say something to me when the police van reappeared and stopped directly opposite the club. A sergeant got out; there was a menacing look on his face as he pulled a soft leather glove over his hand and balled it into a fist. Four other cops exited from the rear and walked towards us. I sensed violence and adrenalin immediately shot through my veins. I fixed my eyes on the sergeant who was leading the group. His eyes met mine as his smile twisted in a contemptuous way – just as he started to veer in the direction of the three drunks. The cops surrounded the young men before they bundling into an alleyway and out of my sight. But still I heard the smack of leather against flesh, I heard the dull thuds of booted feet striking bodies, I heard the screams of pain and terror echo along the high brick walls. Moments later, the bloodied men were dragged to the rear of the police van and pushed inside. The sergeant got in the front, and turning his face in my direction, he ran his tongue over his teeth and the menacing look returned. I stood motionless, trying to figure out what the young men could have done to deserve such treatment. Their reaction when refused admission to the club had been good-natured enough, and to me it seemed that their only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Declan snarled as the van moved away.
“I suppose they might’ve made trouble elsewhere and the cops were looking for them,” I said.
“You know,” said Declan, “they wouldn’t have done that to those blokes if it looked as their though daddy was a solicitor or a doctor, or something.”
“Does everything have a political connotation with you?”
“Yep,” he laughed, “so let’s go and clear this gin joint of the great unwashed and send them back to their hovels.”
On the way home, my mind was full of the images of that evening. When the police had beaten the three men, Declan had looked on impassively and had not displayed any inclination to intervene: he knew nothing about them and as they did not share his skin colour they meant nothing to him. Yet, I asked myself, if they had been three young black guys wou
ld I have simply stood by, or would I have intervened because of a misplaced allegiance to the colour of a skin? Did the three men’s white skins make what I had witnessed anything less of an injustice?
When the young white men at work had told me that they had also been subjected to police harassment I did not disbelieve them, I simply thought that whatever they were exposed to could not come close to the treatment that black people endured at the hands of the police. But after witnessing the brutality meted out to those three young men I began to wonder about how much of what I thought was a ‘black’ experience, especially when encountering the police, was also something to do with social status, with what the British call ‘class’. I thought back to that Sunday morning walk with Mr Kovac and understood just a little more of what he had said to me.
– Chapter Sixteen –
They speak of this dojo and that dojo; they are looking for profit.
Miyamoto Musashi – The Ground Book
THERE WAS A strangely subdued atmosphere about the 1982 Wado Ryu championships at Crystal Palace in London. As Mick Davies had predicted, the death of the Grand Master Hironori Ohtsuka had turned out to be something of a calamity for the school of karate he had left as his legacy. For years, it had been reported that Tatsuo Suzuki, eighth dan Hanshi, would inherit the title of kancho – but while the prince and ‘heir presumptive’ had been away from court, there had been attempts to usurp his position.
It was only on the few occasions that I had received a trophy from him that I had exchanged a few words with Suzuki, the man known as ‘The Professor’ in our dojo; ‘professor’ being an honorific title bestowed on an elite of karate masters. I had always thought of him as a slightly aloof figure, but Eddie Cox, who had once brought him along to a wedding reception, said that with a few drinks inside him he revealed himself to be a warmer man with a dry sense of humour.
Black belts huddled in groups around the arena and discussed the dramatic events and machinations that had taken place both before and after Ohtsuka’s death. In between the elimination rounds, they swapped conjecture and rumours about why it was Ohtsuka’s son Jiro, and not his most famous student, who had become the head of the Wado Ryu style of karate. It turned out that almost a full year before the old man’s death there had been moves by several claimants to Ohtsuka’s title of kancho.
It had been kept from most Wado Ryu students in Europe that Hironori Ohtsuka had been in conflict with Eiichi Eriguchi, the man who had coined the name ‘Wado Ryu’, and nine months before his death Ohtsuka had founded an organisation called Wado Ryu Karatedo Renmei. After only a few months, as his health failed, he installed at its head his son Jiro. There was another story that Tatsuo Suzuki had been offered the post but had turned it down in favour of Ohtsuka’s son, but regardless of whether that was true or not, few believed it. The theory that seemed to be gaining most credence amid the hubbub in Crystal Palace was that the seeds of Tatsuo Suzuki’s destruction had been sown several years before, during Hironori Ohtsuka’s visit to Britain in 1975. It was rumoured that Ohtsuka was not greatly impressed by the performances of Tatsuo Suzuki’s British students and he had found the style of karate they were practising differed greatly from his own.
Without doubt, karate had altered once it had left Japan, and Wado Ryu in Europe had undergone many changes and modifications since Tatsuo Suzuki had left his homeland. It was said that members of Ohtsuka’s entourage had thought that Suzuki’s style of Wado Ryu had become too rigid, too similar to Shotokan, and that much of its jujitsu roots had been discarded. The counter-theory to that was that Suzuki had developed a much more successful style, and that criticisms of it were down to little more than jealousy. Wherever the truth lay, the end product was three separate governing bodies of Wado Ryu: one led by Suzuki, another by Eriguchi and one led by Jiro Ohtsuka, who would later change his name to Hironori Ohtsuka II. Personally, none of it affected me, or my karate, but I did think that for an art that was supposed to enable its practitioners to become more rounded people, it all made for an unedifying spectacle.
The Wado Ryu championships still did not include the weight categories that featured in national all-styles events. The major governing body for the Wado Ryu style in Britain was the United Kingdom Wado Kai (UKKW). It was an organization that had produced not only a team which had dominated British karate for four years, but had also yielded the only British-based fighters who were to win the heavyweight all-styles world championship during the twentieth century. Jerome Atkinson, Vic Charles and Jeoff Thompson were not only big men who shared an African-Caribbean heritage, but through their athleticism, they had taken the level of competition technique to new heights during the 1980s.
The Japanese instructors were quick to claim every bit of credit they could for the success of Wado Ryu students in all-styles events, but in reality they had played only a minor part. As a group, they were reluctant to compromise on the few remaining vestiges of what they saw as the budo (martial) aspect of competition karate, and consequently the scoring criteria at Wado Ryu tournaments differed somewhat to that of other competitions in that the scoring techniques were allowed to be delivered with a lot more power. While this view was endorsed, to some extent, by the YMCA’s instructors, it also meant that smaller karateka were always going to be at a disadvantage if they came up against a fighter who could match them for speed and skill but also had thirty or forty pounds more bone and muscle to put behind a kick or a punch.
Vic Charles had left the UKKW some years before, and international fighters like Jerome Atkinson, Jeoff Thompson, Neiman Prince and my cousin Ewart no longer bothered entering the individual event. Single style titles really had a ring of ‘big fish in a small pond’ about them. The titles that counted the most were the ones in which a fighter was pitched against the very best from other schools of karate, and the top competitors’ lack of interest in the Wado Ryu title devalued it somewhat. It was akin to Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool not bothering to play in the FA Cup. However, it did mean that fighters of my standard benefited and I fought my way through the elimination rounds until I found myself facing Clinton in the final.
Clinton had fought brilliantly all day and replicated the form he had shown when he had humbled a leading competitor from London in a regional final a month before. Clinton had been so superior that his renowned opponent, who led his own style and association, was reduced to falling to the mat and feigning injury in order to secure a very hollow victory. In between my own bouts, I had watched Clinton as he triumphed over every opponent with ease. He had recovered his speed, a sense of balance that never faltered and a range of techniques that I doubted I could ever attain, no matter how hard I trained. The only advantage I had over him was size. The fight for the Wado Ryu title would be a difficult one for me to win, not only because I had always thought of him as far more naturally talented, but also because of the problem I had of thinking of him as an opponent that I badly wanted to beat.
It was late into the evening when we stepped onto our lines to face each other. Our names were announced to the crowd, and as their polite applause faded I was still unsure of my tactics as I did not feel that I could go all out against my cousin with my usual aggressive style. Clinton and I had spent most of the evening chatting as though we were at a training session at our own dojo. That we were about to fight each other for the most prestigious title either of us had competed for so far, in our short competitive careers, had hardly registered. I heard Tatsuo Suzuki, who oversaw the evening’s proceedings, call ‘hajime’, the initial cheers of the crowd and then there was nothing except for Clinton and me. I had never felt like this in a fight before. We moved around, testing each other out and watching each other’s eyes, oblivious to anyone or anything else. There was a strange harmony about our movements: we knew each other so well and had trained together for so long that we effortlessly anticipated one another’s next move. Feeling relaxed, because I was not bothered about which one of us won, I attacked with a
combination of punches that I anticipated Clinton would avoid before I tried to catch him with a kick to the stomach. I punched with my front hand and pushing forward I followed it up with a gyakuzuki to his face before I launched my kick. But Clinton had not evaded my attack and my second punch caught him squarely on the jaw. On this occasion I was glad that I was not wearing hand pads as the muscles in my arm tightened the instant my knuckles touched his flesh and I managed to pull back the punch before it was delivered with full force. Clinton’s head snapped back. It was as if his feet were cemented to the floor as his spine arched backwards. I heard ‘Yame!’ and stopped immediately. I looked to Clinton and saw that strange look in his eyes again. I did not know if he was asking me whether I really wanted the title so badly that I would hurt my best friend, or if he was asking himself what was he doing there. I had seen him do this sort of thing before – though never during a contest – when his mind seemed to wander off to somewhere very far away with a disconcerting suddenness and I kept looking at him for some indication that he was aware of what was going on.
Tatsuo Suzuki’s hand shot in my direction and indicated that I had been awarded a point, but at that moment I almost asked him to take it back; I did not want it. Clinton gave me a thin smile and his eyes looked clear again. He attacked me with a rapid kick, which jolted me back into fighting mode, and the rest of the bout was far more frenetic. To most of the onlookers it may have looked as though we were fighting in earnest, but the contest became something of a sparring session in which none of the techniques were thrown with any real venom. When the final bell rang I was the champion. Clinton congratulated me with an embrace, and although I knew it was a genuine expression of how he felt, at that moment I did not think there was a title that meant less to me.