MA Magazines

**Darth Paul** · Posted On: 6/23/2002 6:39pm

This site is so clearly opposed to schools that short-change their students for the sake of profit, but how many of you think that a major contributor the the greedy mentality that leads to this disgrace to martial arts are magazines like Black Belt?

**JKDChick** · Posted On: 6/23/2002 6:39pm

Black Belt is the worst waste of paper I've ever seen. Even Grappling is a better mag and it has a column by Furey!

The OTHER Vampire Slayer.

**Phrost** · Posted On: 6/23/2002 6:40pm

Yeah, BB is a waste of trees. My favorite parts of any MA magazine are the ads. You can find some really funny stuff there, from 15th Dan Ninjitsu Masters that have never been to Japan, to ads for obscure martial arts with guys using rowboat paddles.

It's great for a laugh, but the sad part is that most of them take themselves seriously... and what's worse is that they're making money off people that don't know any better.

**Darth Paul** · Posted On: 6/23/2002 6:41pm

Besides BB being 90% junk catalog, they give these poser martial artists a national voice where they can upchuck their views on MA training or philosophy, and some of the things that they say are too stupid to bother remembering. All I've really learned from BB is that there are a lot of scams in the MA world. I mean there are some real hard-ons doing stuff in Black Belt who aren't just trying to con us, but they are conning themselves also. I call it the “Leroy mentality”, after the character Leroy Brown from the MA comedy “The Last Dragon”. If you've seen that movie then you know the type of wanna be Kwi Chang Kane, Musashi motherf(beep)kers out there.

Leroys are hard boiled American traditionalists who are so hard-core that they don't even consider themselves American or "western" anymore. They prefer to believe that they live in Feudal Japan, or Ancient China so they wear a kimono or robes like they belong at the Asian Renaissance Faire or something. They talk about the "western" mentality being so flawed and weak. And how we are lazy and our training methods are faulty, probably because we use modern technology instead of the 36 chambers or whatever the popular training method was 1,000 years ago.

They trained in Japan or China, so suddenly they think they are authorities on their art, and the culture which created it. It makes me sick. Mostly they are just self-aggrandizing fools who would last all of two seconds against a real fighter.

I'm sure you've seen these people slinking around the MA world. Not just in magazines, but books and even some documentaries have some real hard-ons doing the talking.