We all have the image burned into our minds. It is a image burned into our collective consciousness, a muscular guy in a karate suit striking his toughest “pose named for an animal“, his luscious mullet flowing in the wind. If I could go back to the 80’s and tug that guy’s Daniel LaRusso headband off, I’d “sweep the leg, Johnny” and send him packing to New Jersey with his single-mother and adopted Asian grandfather who taught him that “waxing off” is an effective method of training for physical combat. A lot of us can’t shake this idea that martial arts aren’t anything magical. Frustrating as it is to someone as short tempered as I tend to be, there’s not a whole lot mysterious about why many people believe this to be true. Many people are idiots.

That being said, I was once one of those idiots. If someone were to punch at Steven Segal, he would trap their hand then give them the front flip action, then a swift kick to the neck-piece, and the camera pans up to his toughest kung-fu-face and a guitar squeals really hard. Meanwhile, in the neon-soaked streets of Hong Kong- Frank Dux was running from Forest Whitaker on the little Chinese boats, then fought in the Kumite to avenge his biker friend guy, and wins by defeating Bolo with a jump spinning crescent kick. It was SICK. I was on the trampoline doing super jump spinning crescent kicks until it was dark and I’d have to stop every so often to set the sensor light, before returning to my karate class in the sky. This was my reality. If you were a black belt, you had magic powers, you could glow, and if you knew the magic words (HA-DO-KEN!) you could throw a fireball. If I could just get my parents to buy me a karate suit, and maybe those ninja boots, and I’d be set. This was my reality and with the evidence that I had collected through A-Team reruns, Time Cop on VHS, and my friend’s friend’s karate instructor that had to check his hands in with the courthouse security staff, because they were being registered as deadly weapons I was sold on these ideas. So mystical, so magical, so “anime.”

When you wake up to those dreams, you realize the brutal, ugly, truth. Fighting is brutal and ugly, and the uglier the style, the more effective it seems to be. No one was making movies about Muay Thai, well, except that one where Jean Claude Van Damme, or “JC” as I call him went to Thai island to train for some quest, but comes out of training camp and still does kempo karate kicks, even though all he did was kick banana trees all day. The knees, elbows, and the” Not Camera Pleasing” kicks that entail the art of Muay Thai aren’t exactly the most breathtaking movements, but this ain’t a beauty contest. Muay Thai practitioners had to wait until 2005 to get a badass movie made for them, while we’ve been watching karate movies for decades. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not “Hating the Player” -good for karate. I’m proud of “him,” but he’s expired. Someone wondered what would happen when you put these flashy-kickin’-kata practin’-Mortal Kombat watching black belts to fight a skinny Brazilian guy but somehow the “unhandsome” Gracie style (complete with chest hair and pajamas) managed to teabag his opponents to death, even though he won while the other guy was obviously winning, I mean “He had to be winning- he was on the top!”

Well, if you think I’m calling my beloved sport “ugly” well you are wrong. I believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Is Bruce Lee’s jump spinning back-kick beautiful? Yes, absolutely. Is St. Pierre’s transition from the kimura to the arm-lock a thing to behold? Again, absolutely. Remember Ol’ Stevie-Ponytail’s wrist-lock front flip? It is lovely, I mean fricken beautiful but ridiculous to the point of banging your head on the floor with frustration. When you put two resisting, angry meatheads in the cage against each other, battling for cash and prizes, you start trimming the fat and getting rid of what doesn’t work- because you can’t afford to blow it by getting into a deep horse stance, and then getting punted into a coma by a giant shin-bone against your snot-box. When you are educated about actual combat, and the most effective forms of it, then you begin to see through the fog of mysticism that surround the TMA ’s. This clears your misconception formally perpetuated by mass media, that flashy kicks are required for someone to beat someone up. Thanks to You Tube, everyone knows what a real fight looks like, and 9 times out of ten- ( the one clip of the karate kid knocking out the cholo kid excluded) The beautiful methods normally falter to the more contemporary styles of ass-kickery.

Take me for example. I am far from a bronze Adonis, but I have spent enough time in the gym to look like Schwarzenegger, had I been pumping iron. Instead what I have done is spent my time sharpening my skills in the most effective forms of martial arts, which are generally regarded as Wrestling, Brazilian Ju Jitsu, Muay Thai, and Boxing. Just like me, they aren’t the most gorgeous things on earth but they work a hell of a lot more than overgrown muscles stacked on top of muscles. Ronnie Coleman’s physique is quite impressive, with his rippling striated deltoids, but I’ll take Matt Linland’s farmer body, or Fedor’s “stick of melted butter” build in a fight. Strong enough to perform the techniques necessary to win, without the pretty excesses that may get you laid at a pool party.

Back to Mullet-man, standing in a deep horse-stance, in his American-flag parachute pants, and

The beautiful stylist teaches himself, through hours of kata, to use shiny metal weapons bought at the flea market, to battle off attackers from multiple angles. It looks awesome. The problem with traditional martial arts is that they’re like a bikini model with down syndrome they look great at first, but once you get around either for too long, you feel guilty for even being involved. When I was doing my kata’s in the back yard of my family’s government housing, complete with meditation I really believed that my moves would translate to the ghetto kids in my neighborhood. The ugly truth was that the only person that my karate worked on was my little sister, including the time I snap-kicked her in the tooth making her cry and cutting my foot open, my mom walking into quite a scene. I had to graduate high school with a scab on my foot for god’s sake. I kid, of course, the techniques that worked in the constant fistfights that plagued my neighborhood in my elementary school years, were far from the flashy kicks I learned in tae kwon do. Real fighting turned into a wrestling match with punches, and kicks were reserved for when one guy got the other laid out on the playground. My dad taught me the “Miller right” an overhand punch thrown from the waistline, that can go right into a headlock throw. It was ugly as sin, but got me out of, and into a boatload of trouble for many, many years. Much better than the ineffective spin kicks that that man in the ugly para-pants showed me. I feel as if this months article is very effective at conveying a message, I just hope that it isn’t that ugly.

Even by the time I had awakened from my karate-fueled stupor that lasted approximately 16 years, I still fell victim to martial arts mysticism. Even in my first few fights as a professional fighter I still thought there was some type of magical moves I could use to win a fight complete with a musical score permeating the small armory in southern Georgia. Even though most of my fight training at the time consisted of Gracie Ju Jitsu’s floor fighting, I always started the fight with a head kick- an obvious remnant of my grade school Tae Kwon Do classes. Once I got over that particular obsession, I began to think that it would be a better idea to attempt flying triangles or flying arm bars, or jump into a flying guard of some sort. In this day and age of Ultimate Kickboxing, going to your guard is blasphemy, but at the time when JuJitsu still had it’s special cloud of magic dust floating all around it, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

What I did figure out was although there was no secret move choreographed by John Woo that could give me a free pass to stardom, there was just the ugly moves. The ugly hard work of mixed martial arts. Chokes, kicks and punches that are direct and to the point. No frills or ponytails or armless karate gi’s to rely on, just the tenacity of an athlete who devotes his life to honing his skills to perform at the highest level on one loud crazy night in a loud crazy arena to thousands of loud crazy fans. Oh crap. I just figured out the beauty of our ugly sport. The beauty is in the athletes ability to perform real moves under real pressure. The thousands of hours spent kicking a heavy bag, strangling friends, and punching one another, all for one time to shine on a Saturday night. Although there are no secret tournaments to fight for the chance to win a giant golden dragon, what we do have is the beauty of watching the competitor with the best game-plan and best skills becoming champion on high definition television. Now we just need mullets and flying triangles to come back in style, and the whole universe will have come full circle.