Woof All:
Just a quick reminder that the Fifth Annual Dog Brothers Martial Arts Camp rapidly approaches.
see
www.dogbrothers.com for details and how to sign up.
Though the Camp itself is June 7-9, the evening before Guro Guard Dog Ryan Gruhn and I will be teaching his BJJ class a special session on the DBMA approach to grappling against weapons (stick and knife).
For the Camp itself teaching this year are the legend himself, Guro Dogzilla Michael Tibbitts, Lloyd de Jongh of South Africa’s “Piper-Tripwire”, and yours truly.
Original Dog Brother Dogzillla heads the Hawaii Clan of the Dog Brothers. He will be teaching Dog Brothers Real Contact Stick Fighting and sharing with us the distinctive training and thinking that he has developed in Hawaii to take a goodly number of people to Full Dog Brother.
Being in the presence of this man is an experience not to be missed!
The other two instructors will be Lloyd de Jongh of Piper Tripwire of South Africa and yours truly. Lloyd and I will be working together to introduce our “Rapid Transients Weaponcraft” knife system. We have been working together on this for some years now and are excited to unveil it to the world.
A bit of overview about RTW: In the DBMA analytical framework, the first question presented with any system the question presented is “What is the problem being solved?” With most knife systems, the problem being solved is typically some variation of knife vs. knife or empty hand defending against knife.
RTW is neither of these.
Instead it is knife vs. empty hand.
The question presented is obvious—What good reason can there be to develop such skills?!?
Let me begin the answer with a story. Some of you may know my story of a big (280 pounds?) muscular Samoan “bill collector” covered with prison tattoos who showed up at my door looking for a particular debtor thinking I might be that debtor.
It turned out that the debtor was the brother of a woman who had lived in the unit in back a few years prior. Fortunately I was able to figure this out and communicate it to the bill collector, but I have used my memory of this man as a training aid—asking “What if I had not been able to clarify things and had to actually fight him?”
I think of Don Pentecost of “Knife Fighting Techniques from Folsom Prison” fame telling me his technique was “I pump him until he is dead and then I bind my wounds.”
How to stop such men? A man with their apparent life experiences is not going to be intimidated by your three inch blade EDC pocket knife! Indeed it is quite possible that he simply will be angered by your having had the temerity to pull the knife at all!
In the real world there are no age, weight, or gender divisions. You may be dealing with extreme size, age, and strength disparity—amplified by speed, violence, and surprise. In such circumstances his punch may well have more immediate stopping power than the 3” blade of your pocket folder.
Seen this way, we begin to see the need for knife vs. empty hand skills.
Fleshing this out, RTW is for dealing with the following problems:
a) Someone younger, bigger, stronger, meaner, and crazier than you with bad intention—and in his emotionally disturbed state he may not even realize or care that you have a knife;
b) you are surrounded by a cranky crowd of scurrilous scum. They may not be committed to bringing you down, but will do so if they think they can; or
c) a pack of jackals committed to bringing you down.
To that end, RTW is a blend of my Chupacabra system and Lloyd de Jongh’s Piper-Tripwire system.
The Piper system of South Africa has excited much interest in the knife martial arts world in the last couple of years. Primarily a point driven ice pick knife grip thug/prison system (edge in or out) derived from the movements of Nguni stick fighting and Dutch-Indo Silat, its’ movement is unlike other systems. It is EXTREMELY deceptive and in RTW it is the movement that we look to extract from Piper’s criminal predatory logic.
Lloyd’s movement is so exceptional that I introduced him to Guro Inosanto who had him demonstrate to his Kali class at the Inosanto Academy. Guro Inosanto himself was so impressed that he took a private from Lloyd and legendary fight choreographer and movie bad guy Jeff Imada (those great fights in the Bourne Movies and too many more to list were choreographed by Jeff) came over to my house to explore things further with Lloyd.
The building blocks of RTW that Lloyd and I will be teaching are:
a) Lloyd’s mobility exercises. These had people raving at the seminar I hosted of Lloyd last year in LA. You WILL be moving better!
b) The “Chupa Blitz”: DO THIS when you have to blast your way through a cranky crowd of scurrilous scum or when you have to go at someone younger, bigger, stronger, meaner, crazier than you RIGHT NOW;
c) The Chupacabra follow ups for when you close;
d) The “Full Metal Elbows” modality for when you close. Lloyd first showed me this as an empty hand modality for when a pack of jackals is looking to bring you down. Simply put, it blew me away. And when we put a knife into it, it is truly formidable.
Everything in RTW is based upon the theories of John Boyd (of OODA Loop fame), particularly the ability to change height, speed, and direction. Boyd started out in aerial dogfights in the Korean War and went on to teach the “Top Gun” school upon which the Tom Cruise movie of that name was based.
Lloyd’s introduction of the deeper levels of Boyd has been a big influence on me and I think it will to you too.
Knife is a dark thing and it is a tricky thing to teach it in a way that does not enable the darkness in bad people or stimulate good people into bad judgment. As such there are things that do not belong in public release, be it download/DVD/youtube/FB etc. that can only be shared in person.
As most of you may know, Dogzilla is now retiring from thirty three years as a Federal Corrections Officer. He is the man you saw demonstrating the Prison Sewing Machine in “Die Less Often” ______________(Bob—put it here please). During those thirty three years he has had extensive real world experience dealing with the darkest of the dark and I eagerly look forward to his interaction with RTW.
Similarly I eagerly look forward to the input of Pekiti Tirisa Mandala Tuhon and Original Dog Brother Sled Dog Philip Gelinas who will be attending the Camp!!!
I’m thinking Lloyd, Dogzilla, Sled Dog and I are going to have some really awesome interactions!
Will you be there to be part of them?
The time to sign up is RIGHT NOW. Go to
www.dogbrothers.comWalking As Warriors For All Our Days,
PG Crafty Dog Marc Denny
