Walk as a Warrior^® for all your days

The Dog Brothers are a band of sweaty, smelly, psychopaths with sticks. DBIMA is the corporation founded by Marc “Crafty Dog” Denny. It is the vehicle through which the “Gatherings of the Pack” are hosted and through which Guro Crafty teaches. In addition to its business purposes (e.g. video production) it serves to protect Marc from personal liability. DBMA is “the system of many styles” which has evolved out of the interplay of what we have been taught and our experience. Except for Guro Crafty, all DBMA instructors are NOT employees, agents, etc. of DBIMA.

It comes from the interplay of a couple of serendipitous events. At “the Rumble at Ramblas” (5/88) we had three fighters named Marc/Mark (Denny, Balluff, and Sanden), and there was also Mark Lawson, who was part of things but wasn’t at the RAR. Naturally, to minimize confusion the search for nicknames was on. Something happened that led to someone calling me a “crafty dog”, and Mark Balluff spoke very well in his interview about how the experience led to a feeling of brotherhood (see the end of DB #1). That week I was reading a Conan the Barbarian comic book wherein Conan is leading a band of warriors into battle saying, “Come on you dog-brothers!!!” and it hit me. Since then the name has revealed itself to be a more fortuitous metaphor than we knew at the time.

Although many of the Dog Brothers have come out of DBIMA or DBMA instructors, this is NOT necessary in order to become a Dog Brother. If you wish to become one, fight at some of the Gatherings, let the Brothers get to know you, and find someone in the group to present your name to Marc “Crafty Dog” Denny or Benjamin “Lonely Dog” Rittiner, and he will take it from there.

The first level is “Dog”: one is accepted into the tribe. The next level is “Candidate Dog Brother”. At this point one is showing the level of realization in fighting that we expect of a “Dog Brother”. A name is tentatively given. Typically we look for this level to be maintained for at least three Gatherings. Then one reaches the grand exalted status of “Dog Brother”.

At the beginning of a “Gathering of the Pack”, a passage in the magic words that begin the day goes, “No judges, no referees, no trophies. One rule only: Be friends at the end of the day. This means no one should spend the night in the hospital, and everyone should leave with the IQ that they came with.”

There are too many ways that human ingenuity can come up with to damage someone else irreparably, especially with a stick, for us to think up and be able to enforce rules against all of them. The spirit of the fights is that of members of the same tribe helping each other prepare to defend the land, women, and children of the tribe. Both going too hard and going too soft are counterproductive. It is a sign of respect for your “opponent” to really go after him; you are saying you respect and believe in his skill and spirit to deal with it, yet at the same time, even in the adrenaline of the moment, you are looking out for his welfare so as to not damage him and thus weaken the tribe.

A stickfight is an intense adrenal experience, and the learning that takes place in this altered state is of an entirely different order. The greater the intensity of the fight, the greater the need to simultaneously tap into a centered awareness that keeps you from taking the shot that would be too much. The cultivation of this duality is what we mean by the full credo: “The greater the dichotomy, the profounder the transformation. Higher Consciousness through Harder Contact.”

To do this all the time is something we haven’t done since we were much younger. Ajarn Salty Dog makes a good point when he says it is probably a good thing to have a phase in one’s evolution where one does do this a lot, so as to step through a certain door. For many of us this was the significance of the “Rumble at Ramblas”: we averaged 20 fights each over three days. To go out on the field again and again is a transformational experience. We come to see our fears as no different than a dog’s fear of a vacuum cleaner.

What we do now is have two “Gatherings of the Pack” a year: the first Saturday of May, and the Saturday of September closest to the autumnal equinox. We also usually hold one or two “Closed Door Gatherings” between them, open only to members of the tribe.

This can vary wildly. Most people require a couple to several years of training to prepare to fight at a “Gathering of the Pack”. The panoply of skills called for is quite broad. Some people prefer to specialize in their natural strengths, others to develop as broad a range of skills as possible. We believe our curriculum offers a sound basis for DBMA’s mission of “helping good people learn to fight well for real.”

The ultimate goal is to have real skills throughout the entirety of one’s life, not just when one is young and competitive. The core training philosophy of DBMA is JKDC (Jeet Kune Do Concepts). Bruce Lee said, “Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful. Reject what is useless. Add what is specifically your own.” We think this is right.

In our opinion you always DO have a stick, actually two. They are called your forearms. We believe the claim of the FMA that empty hand strikes, parries, traps, and blocks are like the stick/blade is correct. Indeed, until you can really clock someone with a stick it is dubious that you can use the full empty-handed array of options of the FMA.

Exactly! RCSF may be what we are known for, but DBMA sees it as just a vehicle for a thorough testing and cultivation of all skills, empty hand included, particularly in conjunction with the rest of our program.

We have a curriculum, and the day it ceases to evolve, it begins to die. Like our fighters, each with his own style, our curriculum is a “system of many styles”: not a random hodge-podge, but a SYSTEM.

Filipino Martial Arts form the core (Inosanto Blend, Pekiti Tirsia, Lameco), alongside DB Grappling (BJJ), Dog Brother Stickgrappling, Krabi Krabong and Dog Brother Vale Tudo, our empty-handed system.