Legacy

What I Hope To Leave For My Kids And Students

I don’t know if it’s like this so much anymore, but I got into martial arts because of two of my onscreen heroes:  Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.  If you grew up in the 70s, you wanted to be Bruce Lee.  And after seeing The Octagon, a Chuck Norris film about ninjas, I wanted to be him  as well.  Two dudes whom you would think never had to worry about walking down a dark alley or into a biker bar.  Crazy, almost mythical martial arts skills and the physicality to back it up.  Of course, looking at some of those famous films now, a lot of the dialog is kind of corny and the action scenes are a bit unrealistic by today’s standards, but it was cool and believable back then.

Like so many young kung fu students in those days, I more or less idolized Bruce Lee.  Saw all of the movies, read all of the books and bought into all of the philosophy. Let me give you a synopsis of Lee’s opinion on martial arts training:  "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”  This has become the mantra of a lot folks, especially those in MMA.  Lee’s experiences in traditional kung fu lead him to believe that forms (kata) are useless as are a lot of other time-honored practices in favor of creating one’s own martial art based on his or her preferences, body type, etc.  Indeed, his book, The Tao Of Jeet Kun Do, references many different forms of hand-to-hand combat that made up his system, including wing chun, western boxing, savate (French kick boxing), judo, etc.  He even references aikido, which makes me smile a bit.  Sounds cool and it works for a lot people.  I was on a similar path until I lived and trained in Japan and found out that Japanese martial artists were far more capable and far less buffoonish than the ones depicted in Lee’s movies.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of making negative comments about Bruce Lee; all I’m saying is a fresh prospective, like living in another country and learning from people who are truly dedicated to their art and culture was an eye-opening experience.  For example, I never really had an appreciation for what a dojo actually was, the origin and purpose of the kekogi (uniform), the significance of bowing to partners, that sort of thing.  Most importantly for me, I developed the discipline of patience as well as faith in my teachers. It helped that they were all older Japanese men still active or recently retired from the Japanese military and that our head aikido instructor came from a samurai family.  But simple things that seem totally unassociated with martial skill, “useless” things like how to fold a hakama, the pleated, flowing pants worn in several traditional Japanese martial arts, took on an entirely different meaning.  Experiences like these changed, enriched and formed the basis for my own martial ethos.

I consider myself to be a “traditional” mixed martial artist.  Dare I say, like Bruce Lee, I have incorporated several forms of combat into our curriculum, including boxing, grappling, jujutsu, aikido and karate.  After joining the military in 1985, I had the benefit of being exposed to many different forms of hand-to-hand combat and I too, have tried to incorporate what is useful.  And as all of my long-time students know, our “system” has gone through lots of changes over the years.  There were long periods of time where we focused solely on aikido and jujutsu as the basis for training.  Then, we’d switch gears and hone in on bare bones karate.  There was a very brief period when we didn’t wear uniforms and focused mostly on street fighting.  What my students and my kids didn’t know at the time was that this was all by design.  You see, I wanted to expose people to different forms of training, much like I had, so they could make their own choice, their own path to follow.  Despite all of the different iterations of what we do, that has and always will be the constant.

I never expected my kids to share my political views, nor have I expected them to follow the faith in which they were raised.  That’s not faith, by the way; that’s compliance.  All I ask is a prayer before we eat dinner at the house.  This is the same way I view martial arts training at our dojo.  For example, all I ask is that people know six basic kata.  Not the entire book, just the Cliff Notes.  And while we have two separate curriculums now, one for karate and one for aikido, there’s still room for exploration, as there should be.  But my hope is that I leave them and all of our students past and present with a construct from which to build their own way.  And you can still do that within the confines of a given style.  My aikido and karate, while similar in some ways, is nothing like my teachers’.   My practice is based on my own mental, spiritual journey and my physical strengths and limitations.  But I didn’t just piece things together as I did in my youth.  I took the time to learn as much as I could from a few very knowledgeable and formidable men, practiced and studied for a long time, then made some conclusions.  You can’t Youtube this stuff.

You can build many different types of houses using the exact same foundation and framing.  But you need a foundation, a structure and philosophy.  Without those things, you don’t have a martial art; you have martial soup, “formless and shapeless, like water.”  That’s not how you build a house and it’s not how you build a legacy.

Dave Magliano

Tatsu Dojo

Jissenkan Budo

Dojo Cho