Balto and Togo

(Thanksgiving 2020)

It doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving for a lot of us.  Some families are sharing pictures of empty chairs, the ones once filled by family members lost to COVID.  Other families, like mine, are not getting together now or at Christmas, precisely because of the risk those pictures represent.  Still others have little reason this year to celebrate the idea of abundance. 

Most of us should be thanking our lucky stars.  This crapshoot of a pandemic has been pretty heavily weighted in our favor, since the disease is killing or crippling only the weakest among us.  In fact, this whole crisis, with the masks, distancing, and economic slowdown, has been an attempt at shared social responsibility, weathering the storm together to protect our most vulnerable.  People are growing tired of the burden, if the soaring hospitalizations are any indication.  

We’ve also largely given up on finding inspiration.  Moments with the potential to lift our spirits never amounted to much.  In early April, a police escort accompanied a New England Patriots tractor trailer delivering 300,000 N-95 masks to hospital personnel in New York City.  Owner Robert Kraft had sent the team plane to China to pick up some 1.7 million masks, which were then offloaded by National Guard troops.  The cops were clearly excited to be part of the spectacle rolling down Interstate 95, with their flashing lights and whooping sirens.  It was much like the arrival of the USNS COMFORT, the hospital ship ordered by President Trump to New York Harbor.  Crowds stood along the shore and waved in excitement.  Fire boats shot streams of water high in the air as a sign of welcome.  These moments represented hope:  Hell, yeah!  Finally, somebody’s doing something to fight back - but sadly we came to realize that all those masks were gone as quickly as leaves in a fire, and the COMFORT only saw 182 patients while tens of thousands of others died elsewhere in intensive care.  

Now, three vaccines stand ready to rid the world of this scourge.  These are phenomenally impressive achievements, hijacking the virus’ messenger-RNA process and blunting the effect of its spike proteins, the weapon that’s made it so cruelly effective.  We’re on the threshold of a seminal moment in world history.  

It’s one thing if your side has won the election, or that the Pittsburgh Steelers have started the season 10-0, or even that the Cleveland Browns are 7-3.  The Browns 7-3?  We’ve always imagined that was possible, but it’s happening now?  For real?  

The vaccines are a victory for all of humanity.  Whether we are together or apart, we should all be ripping our clothes off and partying this Thanksgiving.  

Speaking of that kind of delirium: in 1925, the nation hung on news from a drama unfolding in Alaska.  An outbreak of diphtheria threatened the city of Nome, and a 20-team relay of dogsleds was poised to rush an antitoxin serum across the wilderness before time ran out.  Updates were front page news in papers across the country, and those who had radios tuned in for the latest bulletins.  

In mid January, as two children presented symptoms and died quickly, Dr. Curtis Welch realized a diphtheria epidemic was imminent.  Hastily, he and the mayor arranged a quarantine and sent radio telegrams all around the territory warning of the danger.  To Washington, DC, he pleaded for antitoxin serum.  Despite the quarantine, Nome quickly developed 20 cases.  An epidemic would prove 100 percent fatal to the entire area, where the 1918 Spanish flu had already killed half the population.  

Diphtheria is a bacterial infection that begins with a sore throat and fever.  Patches develop in the throat, which can block the airway, and from there, numerous complications ensue.  The patches form a coating that blocks and damages tissues throughout the respiratory system.  Cardiac and nerve problems develop afterward, all the result of a toxin released by the bacteria.  Children were particularly susceptible.

In Alaska, the authorities considered their options.  The ocean near Nome was frozen solid, and a ship’s journey from Seattle would take too long, anyway.  The only airplanes in Alaska had open cockpits and water cooled engines, and had long been dismantled for the winter.  The only solution was dog teams.  The Post Office Inspector agreed to arrange a relay.  It was 675 miles from the train terminus at Nenana to Nome.  A mail run was usually about 25 days.  

The serum will only last for six, he was told.  What’s more, an Arctic high pressure system had blown in the most brutal weather in 25 years.  

Not one moment of the relay was anything but heroic.  ‘Wild Bill’ Shannon left Nenana with an 11-dog team in temperatures of minus 50 degrees.  He became hypothermic and had to run beside the sled to keep warm.  He stopped to rest and drop off three dogs, who quickly died, and continued with eight, reaching his transfer point with a face blackened by frostbite.  Another driver had to have water poured over his hands at an arrival point so he could release the sled’s handle.  Still another had to pull his sled himself when two dogs collapsed.  As he reached his transfer point, the dogs were dead. 

The Arctic storm had swept from Alaska to the continental States, bringing record lows, freezing the Hudson River in New York, and adding to the drama playing across newspapers and radios from coast to coast.  In Alaska, authorities argued and second guessed their decision.  A fifth victim had died in Nome, and the case count climbed to 27.  The antitoxin supply would only treat 30.  

The sled drivers, mostly native Athabaskans, crossed ice, climbed and descended mountains, and were sometimes hit by gusts ferocious enough to throw them through the air and off the trail.  One team crashed into a reindeer.  

Eventually, the packet was handed to Norwegian born musher Gunnar Kassen, whose lead dog was named Balto.  It was 70 below zero.  Waiting for the storm to break only made it worse, so Kassen and his team headed out into a hellscape of chest-deep snow, pitch blackness, and hurricane force winds.  He could hardly hear himself think as the wind slammed down from the mountains or shrieked through tunnels created by the landscape.  At times he was so blinded by snow he couldn’t even see the two dogs closest to his sled, but somehow, at the head of the team, in front of six sets of dogs two abreast, Balto drove on.  Kassen hung on - for dear life, and as the sled lurched left to right, up and down as it plunged through the blizzard, they were only a day away - and they could make it in time, if Balto held the trail.  

It’s been the stuff of movies and books for ages.  This point is precisely where parents looking to turn their children into readers for life - through reading as an act of rebellion -  would close the book and say, ‘It’s time for you to get some sleep.’

‘Wait!  What happens?  Does Balto save the children?’  

‘I don’t know, sweetheart.  We’ll have to see.’  

Siberian Huskies are the fastest mammals on land at covering distances over 10 miles.  Bred to perfection by the Chukchi culture in Russia, they were introduced to this continent during the Yukon Gold Rush.  Despite being half the size of malamutes, they pull faster, pound for pound.  "Big dogs have longer gaits, covering more ground with each stride, but their mass makes them overheat," says Raymond Coppinger of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, who is co-author of HOW DOGS WORK.  "The smaller Siberian Husky generates less heat, and with the same skin area for dissipation, they maintain temperature."  Their combination of pelvis angle, back length, and shoulder width allow for the longest possible stride as they lope, which means they have at least one paw in contact with the ground at all times.  Other dogs that bound through the air as they sprint, like greyhounds, are far faster.  However, those “dogs that have flights are known as floaters and are ineffective sled-pullers," says Coppinger.

To handle the brutal cold, “Siberian Huskies have lots of very fine, highly twisted secondary hairs, compared to other breeds, says veterinary pathologist Kelly Credille. These hairs form a special layer of their coat that traps warm air against the body, like a down jacket.  Huskies can also use their large fuzzy tails to ensure that they breathe warm air at night. Each dog curls up into a wall and covers its nose with the fur of its tail, which acts as a warm air filter.”

What about that most incredible part of the story, that Balto held the trail despite the blizzard?  It turns out that on the 1925 Serum Run the most impressive dog of all was a different one, named Togo.  With just two days before the serum expired, time was melting away, so sled driver Leonhard Seppala made the decision to take a short cut, crossing the unstable Norton Sound ice sheet as a blizzard closed in.  Seppala found himself effectively blind in a whiteout.  In the 20 miles of open ocean ahead, the ice was shifting, leaving areas of open water as well as jagged outcroppings where ice sheets had crashed together.  Seppala had to rely on Togo completely to navigate around these hazards.  

Togo found his way right to the Eskimo sod igloo awaiting them on the northern shore.  Siberian Huskies’ whiskers can sense changes in air flow by way of sensors at the bases called trylotich pads, which of course they have more of than do any other breed.  

This was quite the breeding program the Chukchi had mastered through the generations.  Intelligence and playfulness were bred in; aggression was bred out.  If you were ever to run into Balto or Togo, you might not be all that impressed at first glance.  They were each only about 50 or 60 pounds.  Still, they were jet engines.  If a Tour de France bicyclist’s V02 Max measures in at 88.2, sled dogs are at 200.  Compared to humans they have 70 percent more mitochondria in their cells.  Their training increases the size of their hearts by 50 percent.  

The rational explanation for the 1925 miracle does not make it any less awesome.  (God, there might even be a rational explanation for the Cleveland Browns’ being 7-3.)  We’re getting nothing but slowly unfolding facts, but the vaccines, which will prove to be one of humanity’s greatest feats, are coming.  This Thanksgiving, raise a glass to the scientists, and then go outside and stand in the cold night air.  Try to hear Balto bringing ‘em in.      

(quotes from a BBC Earth article)

Colonel Henry Mucci

In 1994, on a dreary, quiet Sunday afternoon - which it had to be, since the place was always packed on weekdays - I was in the weight room at Patrick Air Force Base in Melbourne, Florida.  I had the place to myself, except for one other guy, a strange, gnomish little old-timer, well into his 80’s, with scaly, permanently tanned skin.  He was bald, bent, and determined, with an enormous hook nose, which added to his otherworldly appearance, and he was going at it pretty hard, knocking out reps with an empty bar of a sort of a clean-slash-curl to his shoulders and then a press.  

He’d put the bar down and then, hands on hips, push out some concerted puffs, with his mouth rounded into an ‘O.’  Around the back of his neck and tucked into his white T-shirt was a rolled towel.  Beneath that, he was in ancient gray sweatpants.  This was a very old fashioned way of bearing one’s self in a weight room.  

Eventually, he came closer and sat at the end of a bench with his legs out wide and his hands on his knees.  He and I gave each other a nod, and soon he commenced a series of questions.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Who was your father?’  

He furrowed his brow, seeming to search his memory.  ‘He was in broadcasting, in New York,’ I said.  The man shook his head, but sensing I should hit the ball back across the net, I asked, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Henry Mucci.’  (MEW-see)

‘Colonel Henry Mucci?  There’s a highway named after you.  I’ve been on it many times.’

‘Yep,’ he nodded.  ‘I founded the Sixth Army Rangers.  We were in the Philippines.’

‘My Dad was in the Philippines, in a tank battalion.’  A second later, I added, ‘He died in 1990.’

Mucci gave kind of a quiet ‘Yeah,’ as he took that in.  Since nobody could fill me in on the Sixth Rangers, he explained, ‘We rescued a bunch of prisoners of war.  That’s what all the honors were for.’

We talked for a while.  Years later, when I finally learned about that rescue, I could have predicted every part of it, based on Mucci’s stories.  

In May 2001, on a sleepy Saturday morning of pancake making, NPR’s Scott Simon was interviewing OUTSIDE magazine’s Hampton Sides about his new book, GHOST SOLDIERS, when suddenly I had to leap across the kitchen and crank the volume.  ‘It’s one of World War Two’s least known but probably most daring commando missions,’ Sides was saying [and I’m paraphrasing] ‘and it was led by this dynamo of a guy, a West Point grad named Henry Mucci.’  

121 members of the Sixth Army Rangers penetrated 30 miles behind enemy lines and freed 513 emaciated, diseased, and all but forgotten survivors of the Bataan Death March, who had been held by the Japanese in the brutal Cabanatuan Death Camp for nearly three years.  

The instant the book arrived, I cracked it open to the picture section in the center.  There he was, that dynamo of a guy from the Patrick weight room.  

When I brought up that fancy highway named after him, Mucci pointed out that in the 1930’s, ‘there were no highways,’ but in the summers when he was home from West Point, he was all over the roads, squiring one date after another to fancy Italian restaurants.  Mucci was a little guy even in his prime, part of the first American-born generation of a Sicilian family that sold horses.  He had money and a car, and it must have been the uniform, but he had no problem sailing into WASP-ier communities to pick up their daughters for nights on the town.  Among cadets at West Point, Sides says, he was legendary for bringing phenomenal looking women to dances.  

A decade later, he arrived in New Guinea to turn the mule skinners of the 98th Field Artillery into the Sixth Rangers, training 500 men practically singlehandedly in jungle warfare, judo, and commando tactics.  As Sides puts it, ‘Some of the Rangers had come to call him ‘Little MacArthur,’ not only because he smoked a pipe incessantly but also because he had, like the Supreme Commander, a firm grasp of the theatrics of warfare . . . . Mucci was a fitness enthusiast who could outrun and outmarch most subordinates ten years his junior.  Thirty three years old, he was a short, sinewy man with a pencil thin mustache, thick, black eyebrows, and enormous forearms bristling with dark hair.’

It was January 30, 1945 on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.  My father was a Harvard University kid spending his junior year abroad, commanding a tank platoon attached to the 43rd Division, as the Sixth Army worked to broaden its zone of control.  The high command had another problem.  Intelligence was bringing them horrifying tales from desperate escapees, that the Japanese were executing their last remaining American prisoners, in some cases by forcing them into ditches, soaking them with fuel, and burning them alive.  The Cabanatuan camp was thirty miles into unsecured territory.  ‘Tell Mucci I want to see him,’ the American general ordered.  

Two other units deserve recognition for this raid.  The Alamo Scouts, themselves quite the story, were the first to lay eyes on the camp and get critical information back to Mucci.  The Rangers were also accompanied by 250 Filipino guerrillas, who provided cover for Mucci’s mission by attacking and slaughtering a nearby encampment of Japanese soldiers.

When Mucci and the Rangers struck in the darkness, they too were merciless, annihilating the guard towers and pillboxes in seconds and fanning out though the camp in an assault geared to deny the guards any chance of mounting a response.  Burly Rangers carried heavy machine guns and sawed through bamboo barracks walls, thuds turning into increasingly wet sounding smacks as bullets laid into Japanese bodies.  The prisoners by and large were stunned.  They had no idea these were Americans who had come for them; the uniforms, the weapons, and the sheer size of these guys were all unfamiliar.  Mentally they were pretty fragile and simply couldn’t process the idea of their enemies - their tormentors - being disemboweled before their very eyes.  The prisoners were led, pushed, or carried out of the prison gates, where they encountered Mucci, who was standing on a hilltop and would guide them to freedom.

One of the picture sections in GHOST SOLDIERS has a shot of Mucci shaking hands after the raid with Dr. James Duckworth, who had functioned as American commander in the prison camp.  Mucci has some guns.  His sleeves are rolled up in such a way to make this clear, in case anyone wondered.  On that cloudy Sunday afternoon, he and I did not talk about the raid.  It was all girls and cars - so to the story of the raid itself I can add only one observation: he was the real deal.  He was there to lift that day.  (It occurs to me that maybe he approached me because he thought I could use someone to talk to.)  

He’d roll back and do a set of bench presses from time to time  - and I think he stood up and did some curls with a cable machine as well.  (Guns - Pipes - Until You Die)  

Mucci died a few years after this, from complications after breaking his hip while swimming in heavy surf.  The dude was in his late 80’s, and bodysurfing.  

Back at Cabanatuan, Mucci had 30 miles to travel to the American zone.  Staggering toward him, egged on by his Rangers, were 513 tortured, starved, and disease ridden skeletons.  

This was Mucci, however, the fast talking, roadster driving Italian Stallion who had already liberated nearly that many young ladies, one at a time, deep behind enemy lines.  He had wheels.  Through his Filipino guerrilla counterparts, Mucci had arranged for a carabao caravan to meet them further up the trail.  The fragile prisoners would ride in wagons.  

The Rangers greased a light Japanese tank at one point, and air cover obliterated a set of troop transport trucks, but the slog home, hard as it was, was quiet until they encountered a ‘Huk’ village.  

The Hukbalahap were Communist guerrillas who were anti-Japanese and anti-American, and not willing to let anyone pass.  In the negotiations Mucci began to have suspicions about his own Filipino translator.  Finally he grew impatient.  With a gesture toward his radio operator, he said he was about to call in an artillery strike that would level the village.  Then he racked the slide on his .45, chambering a round.  He put the barrel at the base of his translator’s spine.  ‘Walk,’ he said.  

That radio was broken.  Mucci was bluffing.  

When they did make contact with their command, they were told that American forces - quite possibly my father among them - had advanced 15 miles.  They had a much shorter trip to safety.  

You never know whom you’ll run into in the gym, including some guy who’s had books and movies - plural - made about him.  The closing sequence in John Wayne’s BACK TO BATAAN  is actual footage of the Rangers and Cabanatuan prisoners crossing back through American lines.    

In Cleveland, I pulled a woman out of icy cold water after she had capsized her kayak.  I once had to go tearing down a grassy highway median in a Jeep to get someone to a hospital in an emergency.  Whenever I had an epic story to tell, I’d sign my e-mails, ‘Mucci, 6th Rangers.’

George Floyd and the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

(in the wake of the George Floyd killing, May 2020)

Aside of that decent little technical discussion that followed, I blew it last week.  That was a pretty lame post - although not untrue - about work capacity.  After chiming in on the COVID crisis, I wanted to come up with something about the George Floyd murder as cities across the country exploded into protests, but I couldn’t figure out how to do so on such short notice.  

I did rationalize that dull post, thinking, ‘If I take it upon myself to comment on everything, I’m going to mark myself as the liberal opposition to the consensus around here.’  Still, I wanted to do it; I just couldn’t figure out how, which bugged me Friday after posting, lifting, and driving my kid to the second of three rallies she’s attended.  

I wasn’t going to express anything more eloquent than what was already being said, I knew, and I’d much rather reach for some kind of inspiration from my usual cast of characters: the 1970’s Steelers hurling opponents around the field, the SAS greasing terrorists, or any number of other studs who convey a sense of hard earned greatness.  

Late in the afternoon, it hit me that somebody had already done this.  I should have remembered: in moments of uncertainty, find an English major.  They’ll remind you that folks have been through this kind of situation before - and somebody wrote everything down.  This extends to the great director John Ford, whose classic western THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE assembled Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and Woody Strode, as Alpha a pack of Dogs that had ever stepped in front of a camera.  It’s a parable on the formation of America, a process in which Black Lives Mattered significantly.  

You’d recognize Woody Strode, even if the name doesn’t ring a bell.  He’s the long, tall Ethiopian gladiator in SPARTACUS who has to fight Kirk Douglas’ hero.  He wins, but rather than kill Spartacus, he hurls his trident at the balcony full of Roman dignitaries, inciting the gladiators to rebellion.  Strode was a world class decathlete, a professional wrestler, and played football for UCLA and eventually the LA Rams.   He was well known to John Ford, who had already cast him as the lead in SERGEANT RUTLEDGE, a surprisingly progressive drama about a black cavalry sergeant wrongly accused of rape and murder.  The studio wanted Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte for the part, but Ford stuck up for Strode, knowing that unlike the other two, he was hard enough to pull off the part of a rugged warrior. 

John Ford knew his business, having made dozens of films through the silent era and the first talkies.  As early as 1932, he was a commercial and artistic success, in Academy Award contention, and his four Best Director awards remains a record.   Along with THE GRAPES OF WRATH, STAGECOACH, and THE SEARCHERS, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE usually appears in the first lines of biographies that label him as one of the most important directors of all time.  It’s being the Master Storyteller, the Alpha of All Dogs, that made him man enough to gather the likes of Stewart, Wayne, Marvin, and Strode, along with Strother Martin, with his operatic cackle, and Lee Van Cleef, Marvin’s other henchman, and dozens of other prominent character actors, into a circle and dictate, ‘This is how this scene is going to go.’  

Lee Marvin, all six-foot-four inches of raw boned World War Two Marine (and whose grave I once made a point of finding at Arlington) is ruthless as Liberty Valance, a sadistic outlaw in his own right and later a hired gun for the cattlemen who want to keep the territory an ungoverned open range.  The important thing about him is his name.  A valance is a shade on a window, intended to block some or all light.  Liberty Valance, therefore, is one who obstructs freedom.  

‘Lawyer, huh?’ he snarls at a helpless Jimmy Stewart, newly arrived in the territory of Shinbone and who intervenes when Marvin menaces a woman during a stagecoach robbery.  ‘Well, I’ll teach you law - Western Law!’ at which he horsewhips Stewart nearly to death. 

This is the theme of the film, that the rule of law, not brutality, will transform the wilderness into civilized society.  After being nursed back to health, the young lawyer sets up his practice in Shinbone, which quickly leads to more trouble with Valance.  

By this point, we’ve already met Pompey, Woody Strode’s conscientious ranch hand working for John Wayne.  His first compelling moment comes in a confrontation with Valance and his henchmen.  

To earn his room and board, the young lawyer takes on the very nontraditional - and nothing is accidental in a Ford film - jobs of washing dishes and donning an apron to serve meals at the local eatery.  Valance and his men burst in on a busy Saturday night, roust a few cowboys from a table, and help themselves to their steaks.  Soon, they’re very amused to run into the lawyer once more - ‘Lookee at the new waitress!’  - and Valance trips Stewart, sending him and a tray full of dishes crashing to the ground.  

This brings John Wayne to his feet, squaring up with Valance.  That was his dinner that went all over the floor; ‘You pick it up,’ Wayne demands.  

Valance’s henchmen are on their feet.  ‘It’s three against one,’ Valance says.

Wayne motions toward a spot beyond Valance.  ‘My boy, Pompey . . .  kitchen door.’

Marvin turns and sees Strode with the heavy artillery, a rifle in the crook of his arm, pointed right at him.  Wisely, he backs down.  ‘The show’s over for now.’

‘My BOY, Pompey?’  Even in 1962, when the film was made, that was blatantly racist and patronizing - which is precisely John Ford’s point.  Pompey’s just proven himself a good man to have in a tight spot, far better than anyone else in town, especially the marshal, yet he continues to suffer injustices.  When a meeting is held to vote on statehood, Pompey must remain outside.  When he walks into a bar looking for Wayne, the bartender won’t serve him.  

Other dynamics in the formation of America are in play.  Stewart’s young lawyer is also the teacher in Shinbone’s one room schoolhouse, where the lesson is civics.  Stewart addresses the class in a shot that’s almost enough to make one weep: ‘The law of the land states that the governing power rests with the electorate.  Now, that means YOU, the people,’ he says as we look over his shoulder at a truly unlikely bunch: Pompey, a bunch of Mexican kids, and Swedish immigrants of various ages and levels of bewilderment.  

At one point Pompey struggles with reciting the beginning to the Declaration of Independence.  ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that . . . ‘

‘All men are created equal,’ Stewart fills in.

‘I just plum forgot it,’ Pompey says.

‘That’s all right.  A lot of people forget that part.’

A theme emerges as the paths of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne’s characters diverge.  The workings of democracy and the use of violence are very separate things, yet they must maintain a relationship.  

The young lawyer knows he’s on a collision course with Valance.  He finds himself at Wayne’s ranch to train in handling a gun, but he’s beyond inept.  ‘Go put these paint cans on those fence posts,’ Wayne instructs, and as Stewart places the last one, Wayne blasts all three.  The last one, just above Stewart’s head, explodes in a shower of paint which wrecks Stewart’s suit.  

Wayne roars with laughter.  ‘I hate tricks, Pilgrim, but that’s what you’re up against with Valance.’

Skinny little Jimmy Stewart, his teeth bared, stalks back to Wayne and lets fly a haymaker with all his might, knocking Wayne flat on his arse.  Wayne is too astonished by Stewart’s fury to react any further.  Ford thereby establishes a hierarchy: the military shall answer to civilian control.

Their roles are put to the test in the final confrontation with Valance - a story to be told twice, the way John Ford did it.  Valance has attacked the newspaper editor, which draws Stewart into a nighttime showdown in the center of town.  Stewart is clearly out of his depth; Valance toys with him, shattering a flowerpot beside his head - in similar fashion to the paint can earlier - wounding Stewart in the forearm to knock his gun away, and shooting at the ground to make him jump.  Impossibly, Stewart reaches for the gun with his other hand - in even more uncoordinated fashion -  grabs it, and manages to kill Valance in an exchange of fire.  

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is a story about stories and hidden truths, which is the key to its Black Lives Matter message.  Jimmy Stewart’s character cannot live with the fact that he’s killed a man.  Shinbone’s residents are clamoring for him to be their delegate in Washington in the quest for statehood, but he’s on the verge of skipping town and heading back to where he came from.  

John Wayne has to set him straight.  ‘You didn’t kill Liberty Valance,’ he informs him.  ‘Think back, Pilgrim.’  As Wayne tells his tale, Ford takes us to a different angle on that fateful night.  Wayne and Pompey step out of the darkness of an alley as Stewart struggles awkwardly with the gun in his left hand.  

‘Pompey,’ Wayne whispers.  Pompey tosses him the rifle.  As Stewart and Marvin raise their pistols, Wayne brings up the rifle, and they all fire in the same instant.  Clearly, it’s the rifle that cuts Valance down, who - come to think of it - does fly back surprisingly hard and drop very dead when we first  think Stewart shot him.  

Then follows one of the most powerful shots in the entire film: Wayne chucks the rifle back to Strode, and they exit, crossing as silhouettes, all business, their grim work done, in front of the camera.  (In CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, the way the Navy SEAL snipers saunter off after killing the pirates is an homage - probably one of many - to this shot.)  

In Democracy’s greatest moment of peril, the military is there to handle the situation, goes the parable - with yet another solid assist from the black dude.  That’s history we cannot ignore, Ford is telling us.  Black lives mattered more to our common good than we might realize.  

If we’re not going to revert to the level of Liberty Valance or his henchmen, or if we’re going to believe in the ideals Stewart shares in that one room schoolhouse, then they still matter.  

The SAS, Patriots, and Gillette

Two Tuesdays ago, al-Shabaab terrorists stormed a Nairobi, Kenya luxury hotel with bombs and guns, killing 21 people, among them an American and a Briton, and wounding a great many more.  The prolonged siege made for a great deal of television and cellphone footage of bystanders fleeing into the surrounding neighborhood and diving to the ground en masse whenever gunshots rang out.  Some 20 or so hours later, authorities announced that the attackers had been killed inside the building.  

Interestingly, the cameras revealed that among the responders was a white-skinned beefy lad in blue jeans, a sweatshirt, and in classic special ops fashion, a pair of trail sneakers.  More significantly, he was wearing a camouflage colored combat vest, pack, and belt, his head covered by a tan balaclava.  He carried an assault rifle, and a semi-automatic pistol was strapped to one thigh.  Cameras captured him making numerous trips into the compound, carrying out wounded victims, stopping to confer with authorities, and most memorably, dashing singlehandedly into a doorway as a Kenyan soldier in the foreground hunkers safely behind cover.

‘That guy’s SAS!’  the British press gushed the next day, referring to the Special Air Service, the elite commando regiment.  The papers surmised what they could from the compelling images: he was assigned to Kenya as a training liaison; clearly he was off duty and probably had all of his gear in the trunk of his car, so he just threw it on over his casual clothes as he was called for back up.  

One particular picture has become a meme on Facebook, a shot of him running hand in hand with a frightened woman, bringing her to safety.  The caption reads, ‘TOXIC MASCULINITY: Because when the shit hits the fan, no one hides behind a feminist.’

Late Sunday night, after his 75-yard overtime scoring drive led the New England Patriots past the Kansas City Chiefs and to yet another Super Bowl, quarterback Tom Brady posted a smug and admittedly funny video to Instagram.  In it, he and tight end Rob Gronkowski are walking near the team buses somewhere beneath Arrowhead Stadium.  They don’t say a word.  Brady smiles and simply raises his eyebrows as if to ask, ‘Well, what can you say?’  Gronkowski similarly shrugs before he struts and purses his lips in a smirk.  The video then cuts to a shot of the game winning touchdown, set to the tune of Diddy’s ‘Bad Boy for Life.’ 

Brady and Gronkowski ‘ain’t goin’ nowhere; [they] can’t be stopped,’ as the lyrics say, despite how numerous broadcasters and fans of rival teams labeled them as mere shadows of their former selves.  Brady’s throwing numbers have been down.  Gronkowski’s been injured.  They’re probably done after this season, said the experts.  The Patriots’ playoff hopes are definitely done.    

Brady earned the right to gloat, which was the latest volley in a long running social media battle with his critics.  He was a stone-cold cool customer in the game, leading two of his trademark scoring drives at the end, one with two minutes left in regulation and the other for the overtime win.  Brady and Gronk might not be the men they once were, but they were more man than anybody else last week.

Another meme I liked floated through my Facebook feed a few weeks ago.  It’s either a video or picture of a collegiate wrestler launching an opponent by way of a giant, back-arching suplex.  The landing is, or promises to be, brutal.  The caption reads: ‘Last year, 2.1 million kids were bullied.  Strangely enough, none of them were wrestlers.  Scientists are struggling to discover why.’

This fits perfectly into the theme of Getting the Job Done.  Sometimes a good dose of violence, properly applied, is necessary to restore the social order - and becoming able to deliver that dose is an important part of growing up.    

Fourteen year old Equestrienne Girl and I have talked about how kids could be mean at school.  ‘If you’re ever in a situation where you have to stick up for someone - or yourself,’ I told her, ‘you are absolutely cleared to engage.  I’d love to come to that parent conference.’  

Since a perfect amount of macho-violent fulfillment can be found on-line, if not at the gym, I was surprised by the level of backlash against a recent commercial made by the Gillette shaving company.  Playing upon their ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ tagline, they ask whether men are in fact living up to their responsibilities in a society too often plagued by bullying and sexual harassment.  Other forms of masculinity are just fine, the two-minute piece hastens to point out.  The men depicted coming to the aid of the kid being bullied, breaking up the backyard fight, and intercepting the guy lunging after a woman on the street display moral courage.  The implicit message, that the greater social welfare is ultimately in the hands of men, ought to be reassuring as well, but people aren’t catching it.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

On YouTube, where the ad has been viewed 25 million times, the Dislikes outnumber the Likes 12 million to 712,000.  The comments are overwhelmingly negative.  Some are racist, some sexist, some political; others vow to boycott Gillette.  

This is a lot of guys unable to distinguish between positive and negative forms of male behavior.  They should have paid better attention in English class and learned how to parse meanings - especially when it comes to the phrase ‘toxic masculinity.’  Somehow they’ve taken that to mean that there’s an ‘equals’ sign in there, that masculinity IS toxic.  No, fellas; they’re just specifying.  

Secondly, for such a big collection of presumably rough and tough hombres, they seem oddly threatened by this commercial, if not the political movement.  The chorus that masculinity itself is under attack sounds pretty panicky.  They’re throwing up their hands with an exaggerated, ‘You don’t like anything we [men] do,’ which smacks of a childish petulance at being scolded.  

Still, I kind of know what these guys are driving at, even if they’re not articulating it: there are some facts of male existence that women, and a certain number of men, fail to appreciate.  Men naturally sort out who the Alpha Dogs are.  Consciously or not, they establish pecking orders.  Life is a meritocracy; it’s how guys think, how they order the universe.  Even as they try to be reasonable members of society, they reserve the right to claim their place and give in to a testosterone laden impulse from time to time.  

All of that is absolutely valid.  The problem, quite simply, is when that testosterone fueled behavior comes at someone else’s expense.  

We’re left to wonder if the guys objecting to the Gillette commercial are fighting to retain the right to gang up and beat on the goofy kid, or the gay kid, somebody who can’t fight back.  

Really, these guys are fighting for the freedom to humiliate or sexualize a woman when they can’t make an impression based on their own merits?  

I might be hanging around the wrong websites, but I don’t see a lot of people admiring those who victimize others.   By contrast, the guys we like to see kick ass are usually making the world a better place.

That SAS meme, above, is actually a decent joke at heart: ‘Jeez, you give us men nothing but grief - until you really need us.’  Well, yeah.  That’s part of what being Alpha is, getting the job done when it matters most.  There’s nothing toxic about that - and it’s about as masculine as one can get, especially when you consider the story a little more deeply: that guy was detailed to Kenya specifically to train their forces to handle an al-Shabaab attack.  Once all the innocent victims had been evacuated from the hotel, he no doubt gathered a squad of Kenyan soldiers in a huddle.  ‘OK, class, we’re flipping ahead a few chapters.  Let’s go finish these guys off.’

Whether or not you’re rooting for Brady, Gronkowski, and the Patriots, you have to admire those guys for coming through in a clutch situation.  The wordless Instagram post was a stroke of genius; they’ll do all their talking on the field.  More importantly, you don’t see those guys bringing anybody down.

One of my athletes from from last year just rejoined us, having been gone all Summer and Fall playing football - and lifting.  In fact, I wrote about him; he used to wince as the lightest weights folded him up.  Now, however, it’s a different story.  I used him the other day in a demonstration about the squat.  

This has not escaped the notice of the young ladies.  After a workout, I caught a bit of conversation as I passed through the lobby.  One girl wanted to know all about what he’d been up to.  She gazed up at him as he stood with one thumb hooked inside the backpack strap on his shoulder.  

He tossed the hair out of his eyes.  ‘College?  I don’t know,’ he shrugged.  ’I have another year.  Yeah, a lot of people think I’m a senior for some reason.’  

Just get the job done.  The masculinity will take care of itself.

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. 

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.

Corky, Part One

Walter ‘Corky’ McFarland of Kodiak, Alaska died last week, aged 92, seven months after the loss of his beloved Mary, his wife of 71 years.  He served in both the Army and Navy, settling in his final duty station, where he raised a family, roamed the island as an outdoorsman, and became a self taught expert in a form of Judo otherwise lost to history, a turn-of-the 20th-Century adherence to the principles enumerated by founder Jigoro Kano and those who studied directly under him.

This was my Aged and Wise Sensei, who revolutionized my understanding of athletic movement and modeled the self reliance needed to tackle the most challenging of pursuits.  The news last week caused me more than a twinge of guilt, as it came soon after my damning indictment of Judo on the STARTING STRENGTH website.  I had only recently discovered Judo’s true potential in hand to hand combat, long after ending a 20 year career of more formal study.  

The truth is more complicated than the point I was trying to make last month.  I stand by the statement that Judo as it’s commonly taught is a moronic, needlessly difficult sport given to stalemate, frustration, and injury.  I elected not to get into the fact that seven years into my career, I made a major course change upon being assigned to Kodiak, Alaska, where Corky ran a class in what he called ‘Pre-War Judo.’  This was pre- World War Two, and was (is) a study of whole bodied, efficient mechanics, where speed and movement can transcend the limits of strength - yours or your opponent’s.  The most familiar analogies would be that of a tennis player swinging a racket with his whole body or Mike Tyson jumping and twisting - keeping his arms largely in place - as he generated the ferocious power we saw in his knockouts.  When you have grocery bags in both arms, and you didn’t close the car door all the way, that hip check with which you bash it shut is moving from your center of effort.  

All movement should originate in your center of gravity, Corky would say, which is true for any sport.  It’s something I bear in mind even now in the weight room.  I’ve interpreted all of Rippetoe’s technique through the lens of Corky’s instruction.  

Walter McFarland’s legacy could conceivably reach far beyond the mats in Kodiak’s National Guard Armory.  His ideas - or Kano’s old ones - on human structural engineering would prove eye opening to fighters of all kinds, and could even lead to a significant change in how Judo is practiced.  ‘If you want a new idea, read an old book,’ it’s been said.  This might be the revolution needed to save a dying sport.

Context is everything.

1.  JUDO

Much like Corky, Jigoro Kano can be characterized by self reliance and determination, which in his case made him a prominent official in Japan’s Ministry of Education and the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee.  As an ambassador for the sport he founded, he traveled worldwide lecturing and giving demonstrations.  He was the product of private schools as a child, academically inclined, studying English and German, aware of the wider world even at an early age.  However, this serious nature and his small size led to his being bullied mercilessly.  

Ju Jutsu can take care of that, young Kano was told.  He had some inclination that if done correctly, it could help a smaller person overcome someone far larger.  

Roughly put, Ju Jutsu at the time was not a very well maintained tradition in Japan.  Its techniques date back centuries, but fighting had become associated with the more thuggish elements of a divided, feudal society, and any real theoretical expertise had been either lost or limited to a very few specific schools.  Kano was at once hooked yet frustrated by the seemingly random set of techniques he had accumulated - though he remained driven to learn all he could.  Once, in a match, he resorted to a technique he had seen in a western book about wrestling, a fireman’s carry.  It worked and to this day remains part of his curriculum under the Japanese name for ‘shoulder wheel.’

Long story short: the threads of Kano’s career as educator and founder of the Kodokan Judo Institute wove into a series of broad ideals.  As an educator studying in Europe, he was quick to shake off the Japanese tradition in which teachers were subservient to socially superior pupils.  He embraced European and American approaches, in which teachers held roles as respected intellectuals and leaders.

In the dojo, he searched for ‘an underlying principle to Ju Jutsu,’ and over time fashioned what he mostly couldn’t find, a governing bio-mechanical principle, which turned out to be whole bodied movement.  This is something common among any number of sports, but Kano went on to discover that moving from one’s center of effort - or center of gravity - while preventing an opponent from doing the same was the key to victory.  An opponent’s center can be knocked out from under him, rendering him an unstable structure - AND if an opponent places too much strength in one particular area of his body, that’s displacing his own center, which can be exploited.  Much is said about Judo’s ‘gentleness’ or ‘yielding,’ but positioning and opportunism might be closer to the truth.  

This was the first step in Ju Jutsu’s becoming Ju-DO, where ‘Do’ means ‘way,’ an all-encompassing approach to physical, intellectual, and spiritual well being.  As an educator, he saw great value in what was a solid workout, a sophisticated skill to comprehend, and a pursuit that conferred mutual benefit and fellowship among practitioners.  

Jigoro Kano died at sea in 1938 during one of his international voyages.  

After the Japanese surrender in World War Two and during the American occupation, the story goes, a handful of Kodokan senior members somehow managed to secure a meeting with the supreme commander of the occupying forces, General Douglas MacArthur.  They probably tried to put as positive a spin as possible on their request: ‘We represent a cultural institution, one that traces its traditions back hundreds of years and espouses the highest moral ideals.  Our hope is to reopen - ‘

‘A fighting academy?’ MacArthur replied incredulously.  ‘Negative.  That’s how you have insurgencies.’ They were promptly shown the door.

When they had a chance to regroup, a fateful argument took place.  ‘We shouldn’t have even brought it up.’ 

‘That would be great.  The Americans find us training, and we all wind up in front of a firing squad.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We have to take the fighting out of it - convince them it’s a sport.’  This became the crux of the debate: Sport Judo vs. no Judo.  The Sport faction eventually won out, and they made plans to approach the American command once again.  They couldn’t get near MacArthur’s office, and to the subordinate who would see them they pleaded their case:  ‘It’s a sport, just like boxing or wrestling - and if you want, your guys can join in.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ the American official said, much to their surprise - and the die was cast.

That story’s apocryphal, but the occupation changed the nature and purpose of Judo.  

2.  CORKY

In 1955, a wiry 5’6”, 150 pound Corky McFarland joined the Judo club at the Kodiak Naval Base.  It was a pretty rough affair; a number of the members were substantially larger and stronger Marines  who were quite happy to dump Corky ‘on his head,’ as he recalled it.  Before long, he had had enough.  He quit.

In a week or two’s time, his front doorbell rang.  It was the instructor, who asked, ‘If you’re done, can I buy that gi back from you?  Someone else is going to need it.’

Corky was disappointed in himself.  This was the first time he had ever quit anything.  He said as much to the instructor, and added, ‘There must be something I’m missing.’

‘If you want, I have some books you can look at,’ the instructor offered - and that made all the difference.  Soon, Corky was poring through books he borrowed and then bought for himself, works by Aida, Kawaishi, Oda, as translated by EJ Harrison, along with Harrison’s original works.  In later years he collected books by Koizumi, Feldenkrais, and Eric Dominy, among others.  

Corky quickly grew wise to the fact that what was being taught on the mat was a very different thing from the content of these books.  Like Jigoro Kano resorting to that fireman’s carry that day, Corky began experimenting with some of the ideas he was reading about.  The Marines starting hitting the mat with increasing frequency.  

In 1958, a Navy Seabee newly assigned to Kodiak came to watch a practice.  He was not impressed by the jacket rasslin’ that had become typical of Judo; a great many skills had been lost in translation in the years since the war, though that one smaller dude seemed to know what he’s doing, he noticed.  The Seabee was Stanford Chai, hailing from Honolulu, where he had studied Judo and Danzan Ryu Ju Jutsu, an influential offshoot, in backyard and alley dojos from the time he was a boy.  

Chai would become the club’s new instructor, since the first one was soon transferring away.  It was back to basics, Chai decreed.  Everyone’s fundamental mechanics needed work, except those of the smaller dude, Corky.  ‘Where did you learn this?’ Chai asked.  

Corky told him his story.  ‘I got it from books.’  

The two of them were equally amazed by the other, Chai that Corky could transfer principles from the printed page to the mat, and Corky that Chai trained in an honest-to-God old school dojo with people who stuck to Kano’s original approach.  A beautiful friendship was born.  For the three year duration of Chai’s Kodiak tour, they were inseparable.  Their kids were the same age, the families were always at each other’s houses, and they hunted and fished, often with their kids, when they weren’t smashing around on the mat.  Chai’s specialty was self defense, specifically separating attackers from their knives, clubs, or guns.  Together, he and Corky ran the club and conducted training for the local police, the military police, and various commands around the base.  

Chai knew whereof he spoke, and he was no angel, having had run-ins with the law in previous duty stations.  In one, he was in a bar raided and cleared out by the military police.  Everybody was leaving peacefully, Chai pointed out, so there was no need to be swinging those billy clubs around.  However, one cop elected to give him a tap for good measure, whereupon he flattened four of them in short order.  He waited to surrender to the arriving reinforcements, figuring like guys in this situation often do, ‘Well, if I’m going to jail, I might as well finish my beer.’

In 1961, the Navy transferred Chai and his family to California.  Corky never saw him again.  

Kodiak Island is accessible from the mainland only by air or ferry.  Therefore, in the ensuing decades as Corky kept at it, he effectively preserved this ancient form of Judo in isolation, free from the influences of any organizations or tournaments.  This would be the template by which Corky lived his life: constant analysis, patient, steady improvement, roughneck fun, and a sense of discovery.  He taught for generations, in his own house, various gyms around town, and ultimately at the National Guard Armory.  To pay his rent there, he held seminars for the Guardsmen in handling batons and knives, or how to throw a man using his own rifle.   Students grew up and eventually brought their own kids to class.  

In 1999, 38 years after Stanford Chai left, I walked into the Armory.

The Foxtrot Turkey Trot

(from Thanksgiving 2019)

It was a dark and stormy night.

A chance encounter helped turn our two years in Guam into a fantastic adventure.  It also led to a big Thanksgiving Day event for me, the Foxtrot Turkey Trot, a long run-swim-run with the Foxtrot platoon of SEAL Team One, a privilege, a defining moment 25 years ago this week.  

Jeff’s Pirates Cove is away from the rest of the action in Guam.  It’s down to the southeast from the Navy base, which sits on the island’s western side.  25 years ago, a narrow road across the island wound through mountains, jungle, and tall grasses, past countless hidden caves and valleys - where Yokoi, the Japanese soldier, was found 27 years after the war ended.  Jeff’s, on the shore in Talofofo, wasn’t much at the time, a one-story roadside, beachside bar where the restaurant out back consisted of picnic tables on a cement floor, beneath a corrugated metal roof.  

You had to be careful at night at Jeff’s, as crabs would wander onto the porch from their holes in the grassy flat near the sand.  If you hold the heels of your hands together and wiggle your fingers, that was the size of the land crabs that would scuttle along beneath the tables looking for fallen morsels.   Folks propped their feet on the opposite benches as they sat, or if they had short legs, like my wife, sat Indian style.  Still, every so often people would lean away and glance under the table to make sure there were no surprise visitors - and you definitely didn’t want to have a coconut crab crawl over your bare foot and flip-flop, since they’re tarantula-shaped monsters that can spread out as wide as a manhole cover.  

The Toohey’s Draught and the seafood were always worth the trip, so my wife and I rolled out on a rainy, lousy Saturday night.  Jeff’s was pretty dead; from what we could tell, only one person was running the place, a woman who left the bar to take our order and then headed into the kitchen to do the cooking.  The lights weren’t even on in the front lobby.  My wife and I were the only ones in the darkened dining area, aside of a crab here or there, but at the bar, forearms firmly planted and with bottles and glasses steadily piling up, three SEAL’s were hunkered over, hard at work getting hammered.  

We had to pass by them on the way out, which was when they slid off their barstools and stood in our way.  The leader was an inch or two shorter than me, but he bowed up chest to chest, with his eyes barely open.  ‘I bet you’re getting laid tonight,’ he ventured.  

Not showing any reaction is the whole ballgame.  I agreed, ‘It’s looking pretty good.’  

One of the other guys let it be known that they had just started a six month forward deployment.  They would not be capping off a Saturday night with their wives for a long time.

The guy in front tried another tack.  ‘You look like a college boy.’

‘Yeah, I’m a college boy.’  

‘What college?’

‘[Trump University.]’

His eyes popped open while his brows dropped.  ‘Did you know [Billy Morgan]?’

‘I did radio shows with Billy Morgan.’

‘I played baseball with Billy Morgan.’

Soon, we were all bellied up to the bar like old friends.  This was my introduction to [Sluggo, or The Slug] legendary wild man, de facto social affairs chair for the organization.  I had been to Billy Morgan’s house in their hometown of Annandale, Virginia, I told the Slug.  This was before a trip to some fancy club in Georgetown.  (Billy Morgan was handsome to the point of being pretty, like the singer George Michael.  He was at once massively tuned into pop culture and a gifted impressionist who could sing like Bono from U2 or nail just about any other 80’s celebrity, singing or speaking.  We took big advantage of this, clowning around on a weekly comedy show on the campus radio station.  To this day, Billy has no idea he saved my bacon in a bar on the other side of the world.)

I also told the guys that if they were new to the island, they should check out our Masters’ swim team on base, where a couple of Frogs trained on the side, along with EOD guys and various other doctors, lawyers, and so on.  

In the following weeks, we saw Sluggo at the pool quite a bit, or on some early mornings, while running out to the end of Orote Peninsula on base, I’d see much of the SEAL command headed out to do the same.  This was when they were around.  Every so often they’d head off to Thailand (‘to stock up on some Mekhong,’ the Slug would always say) or the Philippines or Brunei, presumably for training exercises, if not the arts and entertainment.  

As Thanksgiving approached, Sluggo asked one day whether I’d be interested in joining his platoon ‘on a nice little evolution,’ a big run-swim-run after which the command was letting everyone have the weekend off.  This was quite the honor, to be invited to a legitimate training event.  None of the EOD guys or anyone else was part of this, so I had to keep it on the down-low, and play things as cool as possible once again.  

We gathered in the parking lot just outside the Frogs’ barracks, which was where we’d start, but first we piled into a white Navy school bus to stage our equipment.  The Slug had left a message on my answering machine the night before about what to bring: two sets of running shoes, as well as fins, mask and snorkel - if you want - but otherwise, goggles.  ‘Hydrate, brother,’ he advised, (which was pronounced HAH-drate) and then, for emphasis, he added, ‘HAH-drate, HAH-drate, HAH-drate.’  

My wife and I still say this to one another when a big event approaches: ‘HAH-drate, broth-uh, HAH-drate.’

In the bus, we headed to Gab Gab Beach, where on the deck of the big pool that opens into Apra Harbor, we dropped our fins and goggles into little piles all in a row.  From there, we headed to the end of Sumay Cove, where we stashed our packs, with the second set of shoes and any water we had, at the stone wall at the very end of the channel.  

Guys started waking up during the bus ride.  ‘Hey, Slug,’ they’d call.  ‘Did you invite the Men in Gray Suits?’

‘Yes, I did, as a matter of fact,’ Slug answered.  ‘They were asking about you.  They were hoping to see you today.’  Guys laughed.

This went back to when Slug skipped a Masters’ workout a few weeks before.  ‘Where were you?’ I asked when I saw him.

‘We had a Boogey Man Swim.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A night swim.  It’s just you out there, with the Boogey Man.  That’s when you start thinking about the Men in Gray Suits, circling below, who’d like to have a word with you.’

In two years of training and triathlon-ing, I never ran into one of the Men in Gray Suits.  Other folks saw hammerheads or grays once in a while.  At night, people said, big tigers came close to the reefs.   Every so often, some poor soul spearfishing with a flashlight would be gobbled up.  On my very last ocean swim in July 1996, as I was coming back in to Gab Gab from one of the mooring buoys, I said to God, ‘Dude, I appreciate your listening to all those frantic prayers way back when, but if you want to let things slide and allow just one shark to cruise by - you know, nothing major - this would be the time.’

This would also justify the tattoo I’d get on my calf muscle, like every other guy on the island.  No man in a gray suit came by, so I never got the tattoo.  

The Special Warfare Unit hosted four deployed platoons at a time, two from Team One and two from Team Five.  The event involved only the Foxtrot platoon from One, though there seemed to be a handful of visiting SDV, Swimmer Delivery Vehicle, guys who came along - so far as I could tell from the introductions on the bus.  There’d be 20 or so of us making the Trot.  

The lieutenant described the course: the run around the base, out to the point and ending at Gab Gab was about five miles.  Hit the water, and swim to the first mooring buoy.

Mooring buoys, about a half mile out in the harbor, were so visiting ships could anchor.  They were massive, white hockey puck shapes, with a giant shackle on top for a ship to attach a line, and a giant chain that led to anchors 150 feet below.  

After the mooring buoy, cut right and head for the Sumay Cove Marina channel.  ‘Now, be careful, ‘ he said.  ‘There are two channels.  Go to the FAR one.  The first one is a dead end.’

That first channel was for the old Pan Am Clipper.  You’ve seen this - in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, as Indiana Jones travels the world.  The screen would show the enormous Boeing flying boat superimposed over a map depicting the stops along the way.  A trip from from San Francisco to Hong Kong would take six days, with Guam being one of the islands used for an overnight stay.  Between the Clipper and marina channels was the old Sumay Landing, a restaurant straight out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, open aired with lazy ceiling fans and bamboo shades and furniture.  

‘You go all the way to the end of the SECOND channel,’ the lieutenant instructed.  At the stone wall, you’d throw on your other set of shoes, stash your fins in your pack, throw it on, and run one last half-mile back to the barracks.  

I can remember squinting through the run.  We all were.  It was about 10 in the morning, and the sun was already bright, but nobody wanted to leave their Oakley’s unprotected with their running shoes.  I was near the front of the pack; doubling back from Orote Point I passed the Slug, who gave me an encouraging, ‘Yeah!’ as he was still headed out.  I got to Gab Gab and pulled off my T-shirt and shoes as the first splashes sounded.  

The Slug had shown me a trick they used for keeping their cool in the water.  The danger is that in the  excitement of a race - or a real life situation - you go out too hard and don’t regulate your breathing.  Soon, you’re sucking air, which can create a sense of panic.  The answer was to sidestroke, not freestyle: glide . . . slack off . . . and be sure you have breath and energy to spare before you pick up the pace.  The sidestroke also lets you slice through waves that would tangle up your arms in a freestyle.  

I went out too hard, and as the sandy bottom of the pool fell away to the reef at 20, then 30 feet, I had to tell myself, Stop.  Roll sideways.  Slow down.  Get your breath back.  

The reef disappears at 40 or 50 feet, and from then on the view is just a deep blue or purple penetrated by shafts of light.  Apra Harbor is 120 or 150 feet deep out in the middle of things, and it is kind of crazy just being a speck out in the open between infinite spaces above and below, but the real safety feature, the secret hiding in plain view, is in the fins we were wearing.  If you ever got in trouble, the trick would be to roll over on your back.  With fins on, you barely have to kick to stay afloat.  You’re not even treading water.  

With fins, you could be either an upper body swimmer or lower, but not both.  I was an upper body freestyler getting a 10 or 20 percent boost in speed from what little I did with my fins.  Some guys could really motor by using their legs primarily, in the sidestroke or combat crawl.  An SDV guy who had sat across the aisle in the school bus passed by, sidestroking, after we had rounded the buoy and headed for the marina.  

Since there were no reference points below us, we had to pop our heads out of the water every eight or ten strokes to make sure we were headed the right way.  Above water, I could see sets of arms stroking and splashing at intervals of 10 or 20 feet apart.  At one point, I caught a glimpse of the lieutenant out in front lifting his head to scan the horizon.  Below the water, only feet away from each of us, were barracuda.  Everyone generally had one gliding alongside, eyeing them.  They were three- or four-foot guided missiles with giant underbites and teeth like long needles, probably attracted by the glints of light from our watches or other bits of metal, but what they really wanted to see was whether any pilotfish would try to hitch a ride.  

The swim, at two or two and a half miles, took more than an hour.  Upon rounding the mooring buoy, there was no way to spot the channels at Sumay, but I did recognize the spit of land between them, so I knew to head for that.  We got to the spit, and I do remember a few moments of guys treading water and calling out, ‘This way?’ and, ‘Yeah, keep going.’

The marina channel was warm, muddy, and shallow.  This made for fast swimming, and I can remember catching glimpses during breaths of about three of us stroking in tandem through the calm water.  We hit the sand and pulled ourselves up on our hands and knees to the water’s edge.  Your balance can be shot after a long swim, and your arms are pretty fried, so you just roll over onto your rear end and pull your fins off.  Here, it was pretty much over.  I was exhilarated - and exhausted - but it felt glorious stuffing my fins in my pack and running that last three or four minutes up the hill.  

The guys were gathering in the shade of a tree outside the barracks.  I had finished in the top third of the pack.  The lieutenant was counting bodies, of course, but the others started cracking jokes as they drained their water bottles and looked down the hill at the guys coming up from Sumay.  One big guy didn’t have a pack.  He labored along with a fin in each hand and his goggles around his neck.

‘Yeah, he’s hung over,’ was the consensus.  

For a while, nobody appeared.  ‘Where the Hell is [so-and-so] - who should be a lot faster,’ someone would ask.  

‘He’s down shaking hands with Davy Jones,’ someone said, to general laughter.  This was another one of their catchphrases.

The SDV guy who had passed me at one point came in.  ‘Swam down the wrong friggin’ canal,’ he gasped.  

‘Who did?’  asked the lieutenant.

’Slug; a couple guys.  Slug lost a fin somewhere - did pretty much the whole thing with one.’

Nobody cared that some guys were slow; they had made it, after all.  The Slug ran in and hadn’t said anything until the lieutenant asked, ‘You lost a fin?’

He nodded as he sucked air and drank water.  

That was significant.  Slug was a freestyle puller, not a lower body guy, but still he had lost a considerable boost to his speed.  That was a long hour and a half in the water.  ‘Nice swim, Sluggo,’ they all acknowledged.  ‘Good job.’

My wife and I hosted Sluggo and another guy for Thanksgiving dinner that night.  Between the Foxtrot Turkey Trot and the beers, all of our eyes were barely open before long.   I realized something that day that these guys might not have thought about: the ocean swims, lifting, rock climbing, martial arts, or diving they do - especially outside of their usual training - went a long way in convincing them they could do anything.  That’s an important mindset in a very dangerous line of work.  

Those were good times.  Thanks, Sluggo; fellas.  It went a long way for my mindset as well.  

Happy Thanksgiving.  Watch out for the Men in Gray Suits.  

Sudden Violence

In a coincidence, just days after Mark Rippetoe and Nick Delgadillo discussed Learning How to Fight on the STARTING STRENGTH podcast, I headed off this past weekend for a combatives seminar.  It was physically quite brutal, a boxing and Muay Thai fueled study of speed, chaos, and panic - which are the hallmarks of violence.  We did not hang around practicing technique in static drills or discussing hypotheticals.  The aim was to experience both the disorientation and quick adaptation that result from actual fighting.  

As far as strength is concerned, mine was certainly helpful in handling the abuse.  Despite not being a CrossFitter or a five or six runs-and-swims-a-week kind of guy anymore, I held my own (in metabolic output) through fights that had athletes of all types - and guys far younger than I, gasping.  The greater lesson, however, is that if strength training is based on a few simple truths, the same is true for fighting.  

The term ‘combatives’ refers mainly, or originally, to military hand to hand techniques, the quick and dirty battlefield moves that presumably finish a fight in a matter of seconds.  This is really ‘in’ nowadays, often referred to as ‘reality based self defense,’ a term meant to draw a distinction from martial arts, which are considered to have a great deal of carrying on with no practical purpose.   

My interest in combatives grew from my background in Judo and studying its history, particularly the role it’s played in military training, often in systems that had to be drawn up very quickly in times of war.  This involved quite the cast of characters, most notably William Fairbairn, who learned his trade as a policeman on the mean streets of Shanghai a century ago and became an expert on fighting, be it with one’s hands, a knife, or pistol.  He went on to introduce the concepts of the ‘kill house,’ stun grenades, and the rapid, coordinated assaults used so often by militaries and SWAT teams today.  

This past weekend’s seminar was run by a similar trailblazer, a former Special Operations Marine who trains everyone from civilians and mixed martial arts competitors to government security details and even top government and corporate officials.  He’s done it - whatever you can imagine - in the ring or a foreign country.  

His central lesson is that violence is unmitigated fury and confusion that has to be experienced to be understood.  What happens in combat in the desert or jungle is the same as what happens in a boxing ring: panic sets in, bringing tunnel vision, loss of hearing, and difficulty in breathing and judgment.  The only way to understand this is to get in the ring with someone who’s trying to punch your face in - while your only recourse is to do the same to them.  Abject failure to function, whether it’s when the bullets fly or the gloves start swinging, is par for the course for everybody the first time around.  

I got my ass kicked numerous times over the two days of training.  As souvenirs, I’m sporting a nice shiner over my left eye as well as a deep thigh bruise that’ll be with me for a few days.  I got a few shots in as well - but really, I was was scoring in the 30 to 40 percent success range.  

It was humiliating - not that any of the other guys cared; many were going through the same thing.  It was humiliating to face myself with an ugly truth: I’m not anywhere near as prepared for trouble as I thought I was.  Beyond that was my self image.  I go through everyday life as a pretty competent guy, so such failure was disturbing, unfamiliar territory.  The mental component to this class is tougher than the physical.    

The good news is that the learning curve is steep, the instructor told us, and this was true.  After one bout in which you’ve screwed up and feel like an idiot, you punch like a champion in the next, realizing what’s really demanded.  With time, the logic goes, you develop presence of mind under duress.  Being ‘cool under fire’ means you understand the physics of it, but you have to keep fighting to do so.  

We covered a great many skills, of course, but these are repetitions that will have to be done over the long term, things like punching combinations and knowing how to take an angle in the ring.   We studied clinching, head control, and leg kicks by way of Muay Thai, along with the the little plyometric hop necessary to make a knee drive truly powerful.  Violence came in a lot of forms and not just fisticuffs from standing in the ring.  We faced tackles, takedowns, headlocks, chokes, and kicks.  On the ground, we covered a number of essential principles, including one I especially loved.  If you’ve managed a takedown, and you’re climbing around to take control, an important part is delivering a good forearm blast to the guy’s cheekbone.  Then you keep it there and drive it in with your weight.  Two things happen: it’s a nice shot to lay on, but then, pinning the side of a guy’s face to the ground means he can’t move his head relative to his shoulders.  This is an old Judo concept I recognized.  The guy loses all of his upper body strength.  

The instructor had to stop here and laugh.  Brazilian Jiu Jitsu guys are absolutely undone by this, he said.  They tend to swagger in like a bunch of superheroes, ready to take control of any situation.  They’ll pull folks down into their guard, their signature move, and find themselves clouted across the face - which their rules do not allow.  This is often their moment of personal discovery.  

Yes, being strong made me harder to kill than I would have been 10 years ago as a wiry CrossFitter.  One guy, who was plenty tough as a fighter but the size I was back then, had to do lots of stretching and mobility styled recovery during breaks.  At one point, he needed a blast from the massage gun.  Aside of a 285 pound wrestler, who was an assistant instructor, I was the strongest guy there.  However, in all the wild thrashes, on our feet or on the ground, I could never bring max force to bear - though when that 285 pounder tackled me at one point, I did have the opportunity.  Strangely, nothing happened.  

This past Monday’s heavy squats and Romanians didn’t happen either.  Epic Mondays depend on pretty restful Sundays, so I knew I wouldn’t have the juice for sets of 8.  I hit 3’s just to make sure neurologically I was at the right bandwidth, and also I didn’t want this bruised thigh to lock up, a decision that definitely didn’t do the pain and swelling much good right away, but the worst of it was over in 48 hours.  Recuperative German NA beer was also administered.

I did hit 277.5 for a triple in the bench Tuesday, which I think is a record, so the week was not a total loss.  

More important than pure strength in a fight is scrappiness, which I’d label as sheer hustle, an ability to move fast and find targets.  

Just as focused strength training produces the greatest physical adaptations in the human body, actual fighting best teaches how to trade in violence.  Be wary of the ‘experts’ you’re following online.