Corky, Part Two

Don’t worry; I’m among those who find that last line in the entry above worthy of some eye rolling.  Yes, I arrived in 1999, 38 years after Corky McFarland’s close friend and formative influence, Stanford Chai, left their Kodiak, Alaska Judo club.  This was hardly the moment of dramatic significance I might have implied, especially as far as Corky was concerned.  He had become a local institution, training generations of fathers and sons, as well as a handful of mothers and daughters, along with any number of State Troopers, National Guardsmen, Coast Guardsmen, local cops, and Marines that had blown through town over the years.  

It was dramatically significant for me, however, starting with a sobering initiation on my first night in class.  Little did I realize that this would begin a long journey, not unlike Kano’s or Corky’s -  I dare say - to grasp the broadest lessons Judo could offer.  Now, there’s a presumptuous statement - but before you roll your eyes again, you do have to grant that I blundered into an interesting position.  I was indoctrinated into this very, very specific, old fashioned methodology during my three years in Kodiak, after which I was transferred away and could only continue based on my own self reliance.  I get what those guys went through.  

By describing Corky’s influence on my life, I’m trying to share his legacy, which I think would have far reaching effects on the training and popularity of Judo.

3.  TOM - KODIAK

The story of Corky’s schooling me on that first night of class is a little beside the point if you don’t grasp the fundamental concepts in play.  As I wrote to a friend at the time, ‘young Skywalker has met Obi Wan Kenobi and gotten his ass kicked.’  Corky alternately evaded my best throws like a bullfighter, blocked them entirely as he felt like a stump I couldn’t tear from the ground, or flew as light as air, seemingly vanishing in my grasp, and throwing me with my own force.  He was 72 at the time.  I was 34.

‘Everything you’re doing is wrong,’ he informed me.  ‘We can fix this, but you’re going to have to do as I say.’

Despite my having trained with Olympians and world level players in preceding years, these core concepts were news to me:

I.  All movement in a throw, evading one, or even simply moving around the mat must emanate from a person’s center of gravity - or effort, which for most people is halfway from belly button to crotch, halfway from front to back.  Regardless of the direction of a throw, whether it’s across the shoulders, over the hip, or even detached in a hand throw or a sacrifice, the center must be in the axis of movement.  

The easiest way to imagine this is with a hip throw.  If you were to squat a bit, cock your torso to one side and your hips to another, put your ams out as if you’re bringing someone over that hip, you’d see that the best way to throw is that your spine -  with your center - forms an axis of rotation.  One hip goes forward, one goes back, and above them your shoulders move similarly.

That’s another point: as your body moves around that axis, it stays in one piece.  

Simple as that sounds, you’d be surprised by the number of people who violate that rule, grabbing  and pulling in the manner of a lifter trying to curl a power clean when their whole body movement should have boosted the bar.  A generation of baseball pitchers is shredding their elbows and getting Tommy John surgery because their arms are late in the motion.  They kick their legs and step down the mound, but their shoulders lag behind their hips, which places a massive stress on their arms - which they’ve been emphasizing far too much in terms of strength, anyway.   

When my older kid was playing T-Ball, I was pressed into coaching.  I used to tell the little kids, ‘Let the bat fall off your shoulder and swing as you turn your whole body.  Your belly button and the bat get to the ball at the same time, and then just keep going until you stop.’  The kids were roping it.  

Well, hang on, you say.  The kids’ hands and the bat are moving faster than the rest of them.  Baseball pitchers cannot just hold their hands still and move their hips and shoulders.

True, but the motion of a throwing arm must be rooted and proportional to the rest of the body’s motion.  It’s not just their arm.     

In Japan, Judo and Aikido teachers make money on the side coaching golf.  

II.  In the course of a standing grapple, Judo or otherwise, your center of gravity must merge with the center of gravity formed by your combined masses in order to effect a throw.  

If two Judo players lock up by grabbing one another’s jackets, then as they push, pull, and twist, their combined center of gravity exists in the space somewhere between them.  However, if Player A manages to turn in for a hip throw, that would mean he’s spun down in front of Player B, with his hips lower than B’s as though he’s about to give B a piggyback ride.  This closes the gap and brings the centers together.

This is also the most efficient manner of throwing, putting your center in contact with your opponent’s as a point of purchase as well as a means of displacement.  This puts your center in the position of perfect leverage while denying him the chance do do the same.  

It works both ways.  If Player A spins down, gets his hips under Player B’s, and breaks B’s position in  terms of leverage, A gets the throw. 

Suppose, however, B realizes what’s about to happen.  B quickly drops his hips low and jams them forward.  Now, B has matched his center to their combined center of mass, and A is in for a rude surprise.  He’s going to get dumped over backwards.  

III.  Ignore these principles at your peril.  

Suppose you wrap an arm around your partner’s back or neck, and realizing that you’re just so much stronger than they are, owing to your powerful biceps, shoulder, pec, and abs, that you can just sling this guy across your back and hurl him some distance.  That might actually be true based on the force you can generate - but the instant you light up those muscles, engaging them more than any of the others in your body, you have moved your center of effort out of your center of gravity.  It’s gone from your gut up to your shoulder and pec area.  You’re leaning that part of your body out ahead of your feet, way over unsupported space, and your center of gravity is no longer in the axis of rotation.  You can be rolled.  

Your opponent, realizing you’re so strong, knows he’s going to be thrown.  As you start reeling him in, all he has to do is clamp onto that arm of yours that’s going around his back.  His other hand will hang on to whatever he has, a lapel or sleeve, and then like a surfer slightly ahead of the wave, he’ll ride your throw.  For a moment, his bodyweight is going to be hanging off your arm, shoulder, and pec out over that unsupported space.  His center of gravity, not yours, is now occupying the center of your combined masses, and if he just rolls his body outward a little bit, he’ll throw you from midair.  

This is the basis of sacrifice throws, answering overwhelming force from an opponent.  Just go where the guy wants to take you, but zipline it; give him more speed and weight than he bargained for, and he’ll go right over.

This is what Corky did to me on that first night, deny me his center for leverage, either by juking me or hitting our combined center before I did.  That countering motion, the re-rolling a guy was a constant test he’d spring on us if he ever felt undue strength in one body part versus another.  You had to throw from your center and maintain your balance no matter how hard a guy held on.  Getting rolled was a great way to catch flak from everyone on the mat.  

For three years, we explored these concepts as they applied to Judo’s dozens of throws and and the various attacks and forces they were designed to defeat.  When it came time for me to leave in 2002, Corky took me aside and handed me an old typewritten piece of paper, a catalogue page with the heading, ‘Southern California School of Judo and JuJitsu,’ possibly passed along from his first sensei nearly 50 years before.  These were all rare and antique books I had to track down.  ‘I can’t teach you what they can,’ he said.  ‘This is going to be your Judo.’

4.  WASHINGTON, DC

The story now shifts to what I’ve been able to make of this knowledge.  What is its worth out in the real world, away from Kodiak, either on the competition mat or in real world combatives?  The answer is complicated: initially disappointing, but don’t worry.  This ends well.  

First, I had to nail down my understanding of everything I had learned.  I found a few dependable guys willing to smash around during lunch a couple times a week, and we were off to the races.  I was collecting a lot of those old books from Corky’s list, and I put to use one of his most important lessons ever: put the book on the mat, read the instructions aloud, take turns, have arguments, and figure it out.  As one of the guys put it in a recent e-mail, ‘I remember us stumbling on to cool ideas on the mat and rediscovering old concepts.’  

We did not go head to head in match style fighting.  ‘We can do it if you want,’ I would say, and if two guys went at it, a lot of nothing got accomplished, and the fighting only got more desperate, with dives toward one another’s legs and rumbling that resembled nothing we had been working on.

‘Believe me.  I’ve been through this,’ I would say.  ‘We could be working a lot harder and getting a lot less done.’

We did practice some situational dynamics, honest to God forceful, albeit specific, attacks along with the techniques made to handle them, like in Kodiak.  The sheer depth and breadth of what we were learning, the rolling in ground fighting, and these situational drills generally satisfied everyone’s appetite for destruction.  

Having left in ’02, I flew back to Kodiak to brush up with Corky in 2004, ’06, and ’08.  It was in 2006 that the guys in DC were asking what in the world kind of Judo we were doing, since it was so different from what they were seeing on YouTube.  They knew it was Pre-War, but was it Danzan Ryu, and where did Corky get all this?

It was during the 2006 visit that I gathered the history I’ve described so far.  Who was this other sensei, I asked, the one who really set you on your course?

Stanford Chai was his name.  He was from Hawaii.  Corky knew his wife’s name and Chai’s birthdate, but after they sailed off on the ferry in 1961, Corky had never heard from him again.

I got this, I promised.  I’ll track him down by way of the net.  It took about three months, but by Christmas I had made contact with the family in California.  Stanford Chai stayed with the Seabees and served two tours in Vietnam.  He was no angel to the very end, according to family stories, and died young, in 1986, of cancer, and was buried in Oahu.  

In 2010, soon after arriving for our assignment to Honolulu, I visited Chai’s crypt and gave it a loud slap with my palm in the quiet of the mausoleum.  I was only inches away from him.  I took pictures and sent them to Alaska.  

5.  PUERTO RICO

I gave it probably three weeks before I bailed.  It was a failure on two levels:

Physically, I was weak.  I was a strapping 165, a runner and swimmer, ripped to shreds but unable to generate any real force against my surroundings.  I was flung around the mat against my will.

Mentally, I was not prepared for fighting.  With the exception of hitting a few sacrifice throws, which meant that I was being crushed by superior strength anyway, I could not apply any of the situational ‘skills’ I had practiced in Corky’s style of Judo.  The randori was too fast, rough, and random for any subtleties.

This was Puerto Rico’s large scale program at the Pabellon de Judo, part of an enormous complex that included tennis, baseball, volleyball, and boxing venues, along with the island’s Museo del Deportes.  The reason I quit was that, impressive as it was, they didn’t have any solutions to offer.  The leaders lined us up, warmed us up, and told us to fight.  I couldn’t get past all the stiff arms, and I refused to go through all that pointlessness once more.  

Friggin’ stupid sport, I rationalized, which helped with the disappointment and embarrassment.

6.  HAWAII

Back in the days when people used to burn discs for one another as a means of information sharing, Corky had one of the other guys give me a copy of an ancient sepia-toned film of Professor Henry Okazaki and a number of his students demonstrating Danzan Ryu Ju Jitsu techniques.  They’re outdoors; part of the film is shot on a lawn where the Honolulu Police building now stands, and parts are from Okazaki’s open-sided dojo.  The film’s sun-bleached slow motion has a hazy focus, and the traditional music underlying the assemblage of clips creates an eerie, otherworldly effect.  This is what made the hunt for Stanford Chai - and the greater mystery of what in the world I was doing with myself - a bit of a ghost story.

This also happens to be a decent representation of what Corky was teaching in Alaska - though I will point out that his standards on balance and rolling one’s hips instead of bending their abs were far higher.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faarpA7-gRg

At a CrossFit seminar in Hawaii, I met a guy who was running a mixed-bag martial arts club.  (This is what I had done in Puerto Rico after quitting their program.  I rounded up a few friends, and since our CrossFit workouts were sufficiently brutal, they were quite content to mess around with Judo with some degree of sanity.  By this time I had let my attention wander to military combatives, so we also practiced some Defendu and Krav Maga.)

That was the general idea in Hawaii as well, but this guy had ties to other martial art communities, one of which was Danzan Ryu.  Over the years Danzan Ryu has spread to different parts of the country as Okazaki’s students moved on to form their own schools.  However, every few years they gather for their ‘Ohana (family) Celebration,’ which happened to be in Honolulu while I was there.  

As the Ohana approached, I suggested that if the opportunity arose, we should pull a few of the old timers aside.  I could show off a few classic throws they’d recognize from that old film, and I’m sure they’d be very curious as to how some white guy from the wrong end of the United States just stepped out of a time warp.

The Ohana booked a floor of ballrooms in a hotel and was run like a convention, where students could go from session to session, training under instructors from around the country.  NO ONE threw or moved like Okazaki and his boys.  For a while, I thought I had gone to the wrong convention.  A huge karate influence was present in a lot of the seminars.  One school taught throws that were based solely on joint locks, making for a brutal, painful hour of desperately tapping out, as if we were the poor patients at the insane asylum while the Marquis de Sade supervised the experiments.     

None of the senior instructors seemed terribly approachable, or the content of what they were teaching was so removed from Okazaki’s basics that any history discussions would hold zero interest.

It was 2011 or ’12.  My God, I thought as I stood in my gi in a hotel hallway.  The whole world has moved on.  Counting myself, Corky, and the few diehards he still had, there are about five of us on the planet still doing our style, and it doesn’t friggin’ work, anyway.