Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

by Christopher McDougall

  With a little more practice, the same could be true for throwing. Anatomically, there’s no reason women can’t fire a ball as hard as men. Strength and physique aren’t the issue: when researchers tested Aboriginal Australian girls who grow up hunting alongside boys, they found the difference in top-end throwing velocity was only about 20 percent. Mo’Ne Davis, the thirteen-year-old South Philadelphia schoolgirl who pitched shut-outs against all-boy teams to lead her squad to the Little League World Series, routinely fires 70 mile-per-hour fastballs even though she’s only five feet four inches tall and weighs 111 pounds. Hip rotation is the key: whipping a rock is simple but sequential, so if you don’t practice the link between opening the hips and releasing the arm, you’ll lose the knack or never learn it in the first place. The reason women don’t throw as well as men, it seems, is because they don’t throw as much. But the raw weaponry is still there, and it’s the best weaponry we’ve got.

  That was the Twins’ special talent. For men and women alike, they found a way to turn throwing into fighting.

  —

  What’s the worst fix you can find yourself in? Fairbairn asked Applegate.

  Jumped from behind, Applegate replied. Someone gets the drop on you. Now you’ve got a gun in your back and your hands in the air.

  Fine. Show me.

  Fairbairn offered himself up as a prisoner, turning around and clasping his hands behind his head. Applegate approached warily. He pulled his sidearm, jammed it hard into Fairbairn’s spine, and—

  Fairbairn helped Applegate up off the floor and handed him back his gun. Care to see it again?

  For the second time, Fairbairn turned and put his hands in the air. He spun around more slowly this time, sweeping the gun away with his left hand and grabbing Applegate’s chin with his right, finishing him off with a knee to the groin and a shove to the ground. Even though Fairbairn was moving at demonstration speed, Applegate couldn’t stop him. “Strange as it may seem,” Applegate learned, “the gunman cannot think fast enough to pull the trigger and make a hit before your body is out of the line of fire.”

  Now look right at me, Fairbairn ordered. Applegate stuck the empty pistol in Fairbairn’s belly and curled his finger around the trigger, watching Fairbairn’s eyes for a flicker of intent. Fairbairn twisted and slapped, knocking the gun away before Applegate could click the trigger. He bent back Applegate’s wrist, driving the big man to his knees and yanking away the gun. Fairbairn’s feet never moved. All he did was dip his knees, pivot his hips, and bend his elbow.

  “The body twist is the basis of all disarming,” Applegate realized, but that was just the beginning: for the Twins, the body twist was the basis of everything. In the jungle, body twist is so potent that baboons use it as a white flag of surrender; to avoid a fight, they let their trunk and abdominal muscles sag, indicating their most powerful weapon has been deactivated.

  Humans, Fairbairn demonstrated, come pre-equipped with the same primate power. Fairbairn ran Applegate through a series of gutter-fighting moves—breaking free from a stranglehold; recovering from a knockdown; bringing a bigger man to the ground; and, of course, the “Match-Box Attack.” All Fairbairn’s tactics had three things in common: they were quick, easy, and appalling. “Any individual in combat in which his life is at stake very quickly reverts to the animal,” it dawned on Applegate. “After a few seconds, and especially after he has been hit or jarred by his opponent, the blood lust is so aroused that from then on his combat is instinctive.”

  Take the Match-Box. Once you know it, you can walk down a dodgy street at night or escape from gunpoint in the back of a car with nothing more lethal in your pocket than a cell phone—or, in Fairbairn’s day, a small cardboard box of matches. If you find yourself in an apprehensive situation, stick close to the walls on the right side of the street and casually slip your right hand into your jacket pocket. Wrap your fist around the phone, with the top just below your thumb and index finger. Damn! You were right to be nervous, because here comes trouble. Someone’s moving in fast with—what? a gun? a knife?—in his hand.

  The phone will now save your life, but only because of body twist.

  “Parry the gun away from your body with your left forearm,” Fairbairn instructs. Now bring out the phone; by clenching it in your fist, the bones in your hand compress into a hard block. “Turning your body from the hip, strike your opponent hard on the left side of his face, as near to the jawbone as possible.” You barely need to move your arm; keep your shoulder pinned to your side and come up hard with the forearm, letting your hips do the work. “The odds of knocking your opponent unconscious by this method are at least two to one,” Fairbairn adds. “The fact that this can be accomplished with a match-box is not well-known, and for this reason is not likely to raise your opponent’s suspicion of your movements.”

  Applegate quickly grasped the power of Fairbairn’s discovery. Body twist, like instinctive aim, works for anyone and can be mastered fast: you can pick up the basics in an afternoon and perfect them with just ten minutes or so of daily practice. You don’t need years of training in a dojo and a drawerful of colored belts. What you need most, Applegate realized, is to remember what it’s like to fight for real. In our quest to become more humane, we’ve forgotten that self-defense is a survival skill, not a spectator sport. Fighting has been turned into entertainment and toned down so much, it’s more about what you can’t do than what you can:

  You can only fight guys your size, with padded gloves, under a referee’s supervision and a physician’s care, for three minutes at a time before taking a one-minute break and sitting on your own stool in your own corner of a roped-off ring. You’ve got to keep your feet on the judo tatami and tie back your hair, and you can’t lock your fingers together or kick your way out of a grip. Even in the Wild West of Ultimate Fighting, it’s forbidden to bite, spit, curse, claw, pinch, throat-strike, head-butt, flesh-twist, eye-gouge, hair-pull, fishhook, groin-grab, heel-kick a kidney, head-kick a grounded opponent, or fake an injury. You must wear officially sanctioned shorts and “be clean and present a tidy appearance.”

  Clean and tidy? We’ve become so civilized over the past hundred years, we’re denying what it was like for the previous two million. Worst of all, we’ve mothballed our deadliest weapon and taken our fascia out of the fight.

  Except, as Fairbairn discovered long ago, when the sun went down on a certain Chinese waterfront.

  —

  Fairbairn first heard about Wing Chun while recovering from the beating he suffered when he first arrived in Shanghai as a new policeman in 1907. The name means “humming a song in the springtime,” and it nicely captures Wing Chun’s ease and apparent languor. Your stance is barely recognizable as a stance. You don’t put up your dukes to protect your head or clench your hands into tiger claws. Your hands are so loose and open, you could be playing patty-cake. But beneath that effortless appearance is a shrewd insight into the science of elastic energy.

  If you’ve heard of Wing Chun, it’s probably thanks to Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr., who credits it with saving his life. Downey was one of the most promising young actors of the 1980s, but by 1996 he’d become a toxic menace. He was arrested for cocaine; for heroin; for crack; for carrying a concealed Magnum pistol; for breaking out of court-ordered rehab. One day he was arraigned on drug charges, then arrested again hours later for stumbling into a neighbor’s home in an apparent heroin stupor and passing out in his underwear in one of the children’s bedrooms. “It’s like I have a loaded gun in my mouth and my finger’s on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gunmetal,” Downey said shortly before he was sentenced to a year in prison and led off with his hands shackled to his waist. After he was released, Downey discovered Wing Chun and began training for hours at a time, often five days a week. Something about Wing Chun made him feel balanced and alive. It wasn’t the discipline; it was the sense that his body was finally doing what it was supposed to.

  “Wing Chun teaches you what t
o concentrate on, whether you’re here or out in the world dealing with problems,” the actor explained once when a reporter joined him for a workout. “It’s second nature for me now. I don’t even get to the point where there’s a problem.”

  “You don’t want to fight the truck,” Downey’s instructor added. “You want to step out of the way.”

  Legend has it that Wing Chun is the only martial art invented by a woman. Ng Mui, it’s said, was studying at the Shaolin Temple when it was attacked by Qing dynasty soldiers. The temple was destroyed and monks were slaughtered, but the Five Elders—including Ng Mui—managed to escape. While Ng Mui was hiding in the forest, she saw a crane being ambushed by a wildcat at the side of a stream. There was no way the crane, with its two awkward legs, could survive the cat’s fangs, razor claws, and four-legged athleticism—yet it did, pivoting and twisting its wings until the cat was defeated by its own ferocity. The parallels to Ng Mui’s own situation were unmistakable, and she began transforming the lesson into a fighting style that would make her as formidable as any man. That meant solving the toughest puzzle of any martial art: surviving inside the “trapping zone.”

  Whenever your opponent is close enough to grab you, you’ve entered his trapping zone. Boxers depend on the length of their jab and the quickness of their feet to escape the trapping zone, while karate and tae kwon do teach long, snapping kicks; the goal is to pop your opponent from a distance and keep as far from his hands as possible. The trapping zone rewards bulk and brute force; it neutralizes speed and skill. It’s the big man’s friend and the little guy’s nightmare—yet oddly, it’s where the feminine style of Wing Chun works best.

  Wing Chun tells you to step right into the trap and make yourself at home. Don’t bob and weave or even turn sideways to offer a smaller target: just face your attacker, square up your feet, and wait for him to do his worst. But first, make sure to “mark your centerline.” The essence of Wing Chun is the belief that human power is strongest when it spirals up from your feet through the center of your body. You can access that centerline energy by following these four steps:

  1. Slide your feet out to shoulder width.

  2. Sink your thighs into the slightest of squats.

  3. Cross your open hands in front of your crotch.

  4. Then raise them chest high in that most instinctive of defensive positions—an X.

  Now you’re ready for Sticky Hands to turn your opponent’s trapping zone into your own.

  Sticky Hands is next-level wobble power. It takes your attacker’s force, merges it with your own, and slams the doubled-up energy right back at him. The key is body connection; as soon as he starts throwing punches, you lightly “stick” your hands to his, deflecting the blows rather than blocking them. When he cracks a hard right at your eye, you divert it with your left wrist and use his force to pivot you like a wheel around an axle. Now it’s your turn to hit, using the momentum of his push to power your right arm. He’s belting himself in the face with your fist.

  “The hands are swinging doors, built on the fortress of legs,” the great Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man liked to tell his students. “Ip Man did not move a great deal,” one of his followers observed. “When someone punched at him, he moved just enough to avoid it, but when he attacked he went straight for his opponent’s center, either striking him or making him lose his balance.” Ip Man was just as stingy with his feet. The higher your foot, the more compromised your balance, so Ip Man only kicked low; never those big, crowd-pleasing head shots you see in tournaments, only short bug-stompers aimed at your knee, crotch, shin, or ankle. Wing Chun isn’t a spectator sport; it’s a science of crippling force, designed to end fights fast by hitting quickest where it hurts the most.

  William Fairbairn was exactly the kind of guy who wasn’t supposed to be learning Wing Chun. China was suspicious of outsiders even when times were good, and the early 1900s were anything but. Chinese fighting secrets were for Chinese only, not to be shared with foreigners who could use the arts against them. But even though he was a blue-eyed Brit who’d been in Shanghai only a few months, Fairbairn had a chip to play. One of the duties of the empress’s security-and-intelligence force was to recover royal antiquities pillaged during the Boxer Rebellion, that disastrous uprising by Chinese militants against foreign influence in 1899. Fairbairn was a great resource for finding lost booty; between his raids on underworld dens, his contacts in the British military, and his relationship with the European nationals he helped protect, he could get leads on lost treasures the empress’s men had no hope of finding. In return, Fairbairn was allowed to train with Cui Jindong, the Wing Chun master who taught the empress dowager’s bodyguards.

  Under Cui Jindong’s tutelage, Fairbairn learned something surprising: violence has a pretty thin encyclopedia. Every way you can think of to punch a windpipe or knee a groin, someone else figured it out ten thousand years ago. For self-defense, that was great news: if Fairbairn could master Sticky Hands, he could download every conceivable attack into his fascia memory and turn his body into an Automatic Response System. Like instinctive aim, Sticky Hands takes your higher brain out of the fight and activates your animal self. When an attacker grabs your wrist, up comes your elbow; if he tries to tackle you around the waist, your foot takes out his knee before he gets there. You don’t need to think or even see—just react.

  For the Shanghai police, often facing long odds in dark basements, fascia-powered fighting was a lifesaver. And when Fairbairn and Sykes brought it back with them to Britain, they found it was just as effective for the women and poets and professors about to be dropped behind German lines on sabotage missions. “Sykes was the instructor who taught me silent killing,” recalled Nancy Wake, the Australian party girl who became one of the SOE’s best agents. Nancy’s specialties were strolling past Gestapo offices in France to chuck grenades through the door and rescuing downed Allied fighter pilots by using her sex appeal and ice-cold nerve to distract checkpoint guards.

  “I’d slink right up and purr, ‘Do you want to search me?’ ” Nancy would recall. “God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was.” The Gestapo nicknamed the mystery woman the White Mouse and put her at the top of its Most Wanted list, but Nancy was uncatchable. Seventeen times, she successfully led British fighters all the way across the Pyrenees to freedom. “If a German came at me I’d kick him in the ‘three-piece service’ and chop him in the side of the neck.” Once, when her Resistance band was surrounded, Nancy shot her way out and stole a bike, pedaling more than 125 miles through the night to safety. When a German sentry blocked her escape during an arms plant raid, the Mouse’s hands came up just the way Sykes had taught her. “Whack,” recalled Nancy. “It killed him, all right.”

  Miraculously, Nancy Wake survived the war and lived to a fiery age ninety-eight. During a postwar dinner in France, she heard the waiter mutter under his breath that he preferred Germans to “the rotten English.” Nancy followed him to the kitchen, hit him Sykes style, and knocked him cold. When the manager rushed over, Nancy’s dinner companion advised him to walk away or she’d drop him next. “There had been nothing violent about my nature before the war,” Nancy shrugged. “The enemy made me tough.”

  A Mouse who thrives inside the trapping zone: what a perfect bookend for Ng Mui, the battling abbess who three hundred years earlier proved that women could fight as well as men. Except the origins of Wing Chun, it turns out, are a little more complicated. And a lot more Greek.

  —

  Deep within the Labyrinth on the island of Crete, Theseus felt his way through the dark stone maze, nudging his feet past the gnawed corpses of men and women who’d come before. He was just a teenager, with no help or weapons. Turning a corner, he came face-to-face with the Minotaur: half man, half bull, and hungry for human blood. A new art was about to be born.

  “Much weaker in strength than the Minotaur, Theseus fought with him and won using pankration, as he had no knife,” goes the legend from Pindar’s Fifth Nemean O
de. Pankration basically means “total power and knowledge,” but the word resonates deeper than the definition: it’s associated with gods and heroes, with those who conquer by tapping every talent. Pankration is a fighting style that not only combines boxing and wrestling, but exceeds them, with a savvy of its own. Some pankration techniques, like the gastrizein heel kick, have never been surpassed. “It’s one of the most powerful offensive moves we’ve ever seen,” a modern martial-arts expert marveled after watching a demonstration. “The attacker’s knee and foot are chambered like a piston and then stomped into the opponent’s stomach, genitals, or thighs. It channels some 2000 pounds of force into the opponent, more than enough to break a baseball bat.”

  The scariest thing about pankration is when it’s not scary at all. The ready position is so nonchalant and relaxed, you could be a blink away from taking a gastrizein to the knee and never suspect the person across from you is poised to attack. If you’re set to play catch with a toddler, you’re set to fight pankration: just face forward, dip your knees, and raise your open hands. It looks less like art and more like an accident, which speaks to pankration’s ancestral authority: it feels so natural because it is. Pankration refines raw impulse, chucking out everything that doesn’t help and focusing on the three things that do: ease, surprise, and stopping power. You activate without thinking. Attack without signaling. And strike, like any other animal in a fight for its life, without mercy.

  Pankration is so frighteningly true to real violence that for years it wasn’t included in the original Olympics. “To get his opponent down and by throttling, pummeling, biting, kicking reduce him to submission is the natural instinct of the savage or the child,” explained E. Norman Gardiner, D. Litt., the Oxfordian ancient sport specialist. “But this rough and tumble is not suitable for athletic competition; it is too dangerous and undisciplined.” Pankration finally made it into the 33rd Olympic Games, in 648 B.C., with two rules: no biting, no eye gouging. Otherwise, it was anything goes; the entire range of human cruelty and creativity were at your disposal. The Spartans still grumbled and refused to participate: if you can’t blind your opponent and chomp his nose, then what’s the point?