Corky, Part Three

If you’re exhausted by this point, imagine how I felt not quite ten years ago: I didn’t really know if there was a place in the world for Corky’s old school brand of Judo, it was getting harder to drum up training partners, and I only had so much interest in what that multiple martial arts dude in Hawaii was up to.  

Yeah, it’s a long, dry, technical story, much like my discovering all those things I didn’t know about strength training long, long ago.

7.  THE GREAT BEYOND

According to the old friend who delivered the news, Corky ‘hadn’t been doing well’ since his wife of 71 years, Mary, died last August.  Their reunion three weeks ago was no doubt epic and joyous as Mary greeted him restored to her tall, auburn, thoroughbred form.   After a certain time, however, a certain restlessness no doubt settled in.  Corky drummed his fingers and drew his breath but stayed on his best behavior.   This would be over coffee in the kitchen; Corky was never without his coffee.  He was perfectly willing to gaze lovingly into Mary’s eyes in the quiet, even if his mind was elsewhere.

‘Oh, go ahead,’ Mary finally said, the way she must have a thousand times back in Kodiak.  

In an instant, he was out the door with the brand new gi that had been waiting for him, wondering only for a second, How did his ratty old black belt get here?

In the Great Dojo in the Sky, heads turned at his arrival.  There they all were, stepping forward to greet him with bows or handshakes: EJ Harrison, Aida, Oda, Koizumi, Mifune, Dominy, those writers he studied so long ago.  

Breathing menacingly, his eyes fierce behind his glasses, came Mikonosuke Kawaishi.  

Corky had all his books.  This was the Kawaishi who after the war finally made his way back from a prison camp in Manchuria, walked into the Kodokan, and promptly demanded, ‘What the Hell is going on here?’

‘This is the Judo the Americans want.’

‘Screw the Americans.’

‘You’re not in keeping with the spirit of the Kodokan.’

‘I’M not in keeping with the spirit of the Kodokan?’  Kawaishi kept right on going, playing a big role in the development of Judo in France, and when that contract ended, he was snapped up by the KGB and East German Stasi.  

Behind Kawaishi and from his same troublemakers’ section of the mat, came Stanford Chai.  The handshake with Corky became a backslapping embrace.  

‘I missed you.’

‘I know.  I’ve been waiting,’ Chai said.  ‘The Judo’s good.  Fishing’s good.’

With a stir in the crowd, a wide space opened beside them on the mat, and there stood none other than Jigoro Kano, founder of Judo.  He and Corky exchanged deep bows.  ‘Welcome, Walter,’ Kano said.  ‘You’re one of the few who got it.’

8.  HAWAII  - продолжение

‘It’s time for another field trip,’ the jack-of-all-martial-arts announced.  ‘A friend of mine is getting his Sambo Academy up and running, and he said to bring a bunch of guys on Saturdays.’  

I was initially skeptical.  From what little Sambo I had seen, I wondered what could be gained from a strangely bent over, twisty, turny style of ungainly throws.  I’ll go once to show the flag, I figured.  I don’t have to go back.

The warm up was a good, rough round of Alpha-Male signaling, with plenty of pushing and pulling each other back and forth, the antithesis of Corky’s light touch, but I made a point of getting into the spirit of the moment.  Our last drill was grasping a partner at the shoulders, right in the folds of jacket fabric between shoulder and pec muscle, and driving each other, stiff-armed, across the mat.

The instructor grabbed someone for a demonstration.  ‘OK, now that you’re there, and your opponent has all this power,’ he began, ‘your left hand lets go, comes in, and grabs his hand at your shoulder.  Your elbow then goes over his arm, toward his chin as you drive in - but then it tucks down and then up, under his armpit.  Do you now see that I’m [crouched] down here, low, my front at his side?’  

He was about to do a sideways drop.  ‘You attack his center of gravity!’ I blurted out.

The entire class looked at me.  The instructor furrowed his brow a second.  ‘Yeah, I guess you can put it that way.’

This was a throw of Nobel Prize brilliance.  With force, leverage, and sheer disregard for doubt or fear, we buckled one of those impenetrable steel beams and got into prime position to launch the guy.  We had solved two of life’s major mysteries in about five seconds.  

Powerful grips could be broken in ways I had never seen any Judo instructor mention.  I learned how to snap a guy’s sleeve back and down to tear his hand off my shoulder, and then trap his arm awkwardly against his body as I hit the most basic of hip throws.   

Sambo emphasizes constantly gaining advantage, as in taking new grips for better leverage.  A bent over defensive player can be defeated as you take out his grip on one side, clear his arm, and loop your own across his back, grabbing his far lat muscle - which is when things begin going very wrong for him.  His center of effort is way out of his center of gravity because he’s so bent over.  Your swinging in underneath for a sacrifice, with your bodyweight and that control of his whole torso, is going to kill him, with way more speed and power than Corky’s re-rolling a guy caught out of position.  

Holy Cow, I thought.  Corky’s Judo . . . is Sambo?  No, he didn’t move like this.  He was far more upright.  Then . . . Sambo is Corky’s Judo?

At one point the instructor and I stood at the edge the mat, surveying the action.  ‘The whole logic is to get to the center,’ I ventured.

He thought for a moment as he watched the group.  ‘Yes.’  He looked at me and then stared.  This was the most emotional reaction he had ever seen to a Sambo class.  

9.  WASHINGTON, DC

A month ago I wrote about the discoveries a few friends and I were making in our combatives workouts, about the kinetics that had to be in play for Judo throws to work, and the overall progression of a fight.  Crashing into a guy with your forearms high is a good way to mitigate the danger of fisticuffs.  You don’t want to hang around in a reciprocal arrangement if the other guy is a better boxer than you are.  

The aim is constantly gaining advantage.  

After a crash, the idea during the scuffle is to move into the next position of advantage, which is to be where you can break a guy’s balance - displacing his center of gravity - while he can’t do the same thing to you.  If you can get behind him (preferably) or beside him in the chaos, that’s good, or if you’ve maintained some control of his head and neck and start throwing knees before he does, his body is going to be a trashed, painful mess.  

This is when throws work instantly.  

This is what Corky meant when he was talking about the Judo of World War Two.

Context is everything.

To define Corky’s legacy, we still have to sort out Judo in the grand scheme of things, either my misunderstanding of it or its misunderstanding of itself.  It occurs to me that despite the warm welcome in the Great Beyond, Jigoro Kano might regard Corky McFarland very warily.  

The Judo Kano introduced to the world was a sophisticated, seemingly complete art of some 67 throws and their numerous variations, designed to handle almost infinite contingencies in the course of a standing grapple between two humans.  For struggles on the ground, Judo had far more than 67 ways to immobilize or incapacitate an opponent.  Judo’s katas are the study of those engineering principles I described before and others even more advanced.

Still, Kano’s legacy is muddled by two major issues:  

I.  If Judo’s techniques and katas so effectively address every challenge an athlete could face, did Kano really not have any tactical solutions for an opponent, through fear or malice, freezing in a death grip?  

II.  If fighting (shiai) is the means of testing one’s ability, why would Kano have a completely separate phase (randori) that serves that same purpose?

Here are the answers as succinctly as I can manage:

(I)  Kano’s writings and the content of his katas indicate that he believed that maximum pliability, or the idea that ‘softness overcomes hardness,’ taken to an extreme was the solution.  This would be flanking or circling around lines of force, a very subtle, difficult skill he acknowledged was known to only a small number of his closest associates.  

His katas for Tachi Waza, or standing techniques, generally involve adding kinetic energy to encounters with an aggressor - a concept we hit upon in our backyard combatives study.  In the katas, the bad guy’s amplified motion is something to be exploited directly or evaded for the sake of gaining position.  It could be done, but would be impractically time consuming to parse through the katas for principles that can be applied to dynamic action.   

The fact is that Kano dropped the ball on how to handle the stiff-armed death grip.  Luckily, we have Sambo.  If you can’t be quick, then you’d better be strong, and if you can’t be strong, then you’d better be smart - and know how to pry apart an opponent’s best defenses.  Maybe that story is true, that Russian Judo players returned from a competition and developed this breaching skill, or maybe Sambo evolved from wrestling traditions across the steppes.  In either case, Sambo solved far more problems than Judo ever has, and it proved that Corky was right all along: go for the center.

(II)  I was cooking up the conspiracy theory that Kano’s original randori, or free play, was a very different modality from Shiai, or free fighting.  Kano’s randori was rigged, I figured, as a means of facilitating learning.  Guys took throws willingly for one another.  Then, of course, as the years went by, this was one of the critical tenets that later generations of Judo leadership mishandled completely.  

This is not the case - though Kano’s writings would indicate that he sort of had it both ways.  Randori was a match where players did try to outfox one another and ‘win,’ - BUT Kano writes of the instructors who specialized in teaching randori (as opposed to kata) which would imply that some amount of guidance and repetition was taking place, a far cry from what I’ve see through the years.  

If Kano hasn’t addressed these problems in the hereafter, then Corky could do it in short order.  

He’d rig the randori.

This would be more dynamic and multidimensional than the singular scenarios we used to do.  Player A would have two or three throws at his disposal, along with an entry technique or two, while Player B would offer some form of resistance  - pushing, pulling, tying up his sleeves - as Player A attempts to execute.  This compels A to adapt and succeed by nailing down his form and timing.  They switch roles - and switch players in a big club.  Athletes agree on the skill set and level of difficulty, and off they go.  This is completely analogous to strength training, adapting and succeeding with increasing levels of difficulty.  As with attempting new max lifts, free fighting contests come few and far between.

In the midst of it all, in the case of any technique he didn’t know, Corky would defer to an expert or read the instructions straight out of the book.  

The resistance in randori would increase to the point that Player B is mustering any and all kinds of interference he can for A to overcome.  Eventually his defense would include a few attacks of his own . . . and maybe this is what Kano was doing in the late 19th Century after all, and he simply found the contradiction of ‘fighting but not fighting’ too difficult to explain.

(Sensible as this sounds, this approach to randori simply cannot be grasped within these Earthly bounds.)

The legacy of Walter ‘Corky’ McFarland is an understanding of the foundation that links the techniques of the policeman and soldier to those of the competitive athlete.  In fact, I would submit that hand to hand combat exists on a continuum.  On the far left are life and death struggles: high speed and highly emotional moments of violent intensity.  To the right is Sport: Judo, Wrestling, Sambo, Jiu Jitsu, where the stakes are low, the choices numerous, and where athletes can attack, retreat, win, and lose.  

Right in the middle is Corky’s Judo.  There’s no fighting, just practice in the fundamentals of human engineering.  

It would serve cops and soldiers well to augment their training with sport play.  Similarly, athletes should understand how their skills can save lives.  It would serve them all well to knock through Corky’s basics from time to time, to understand why they train the way they do.  

There was once a legend who walked the mats in the old Armory in Kodiak, a self-made master with lessons for warriors of all kinds.