John F. Springer

**CanucKyokushin** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 11:31am

Did he ever say he taught Anti-grapple in his school.

Old frame BJJ should be explained clearly in the article.If i'm correct he claimed he learned it from Colombian police officers.

Also add Master of pankration.

**Fantasy Warrior** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 11:36am

One paragraph I think could be better worded:
"In another thread (which precipitated his leaving the Bullshido website), Springer was found to be teaching grappling and groundfighting to students even though he did not have any established rank in these areas; Springer only held verifiable rank in Chinese stand-up styles. "

The word I don't like is Rank. Rank means **** all most of the time. If an proven MMA fighter had no ranks you wouldn't say what he's teaching is invalid on that count alone.

Maybe a more general "techniques with claimed effectiveness beyond their realistic success rate, and implied expertise beyond that evidenced." - ok that's crap wording but you hopefully get my gist.

**It is Fake** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 11:39am

Originally Posted by Kickcatcher

One paragraph I think could be better worded:
"In another thread (which precipitated his leaving the Bullshido website), Springer was found to be teaching grappling and groundfighting to students even though he did not have any established rank in these areas; Springer only held verifiable rank in Chinese stand-up styles. "

The word I don't like is Rank. Rank means **** all most of the time. If an proven MMA fighter had no ranks you wouldn't say what he's teaching is invalid on that count alone.

Maybe a more general "techniques with claimed effectiveness beyond their realistic success rate, and implied expertise beyond that evidenced." - ok that's crap wording but you hopefully get my gist.

I disagree. Most people that don't know still think grappling is gay and Rank is important.

We were watching pride at work and there were about 10-12 cat calls of gay during grappling.
These same people I had to school on Bruce Lee having no verifiable fight record.

Rank adds emphasis to the uninitiated.

**It is Fake** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 11:40am

Originally Posted by CanucKyokushin

Did he ever say he taught Anti-grapple in his school.

Old frame BJJ should be explained clearly in the article.If i'm correct he claimed he learned it from Colombian police officers.

Also add Master of pankration.

No I'm pretty sure a student came on and said it was the anti-grapple.

Later said student suddenly back tracked.

**Fantasy Warrior** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 11:42am

peoples silliness is no excuse for the voice of reason to give in to delusions that rank in and of itself counts for ****

**It is Fake** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 11:44am

Originally Posted by Kickcatcher

peoples silliness is no excuse for the voice of reason to give in to delusions that rank in and of itself counts for ****

When writing an article explaining the situation you speak to the average audience not, the knowledgeable one.

**Cullion** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 11:50am

Here are the relevant parts of a PM I sent to Kempofist in response to a PM he sent asking me how I felt after the footage came out.

Originally Posted by Cullion

Sit down dude, this is a long story. Print it out and read it on the crapper.

Let me address each of them seperately:-

JFS
With JFS, I have gone through a progression.
First, he was a very rude noob to the board who called people out all the time and claimed an interesting history including service in US special forces and decades long mastery of a a couple of CMA styles. Other people checked these claims about him, and they checked out.

So JFS' story checked out, his noisy detractors turned out not to check out, and he accepted a challenge from Asia, after Asia had established he really was a former special forces soldier. Scrapper checked his background too, and said that his CMA credentials seemed impeccable.

A couple of guys, Tao Yin Lee and Geordie Steve turned up to troll him over some CMA lineage dispute. They were in the UK, so I checked out some of their claims, and Scrapper checked out another.

They didn't tally with what they were saying on the board. Please have a look in my 'Custom tag please' thread in the BB club.

So we had a rude, obnoxious guy (plenty of those on Bullshido) who liked to throw out challenges (and actually seemed willing to identify himself and show) with a lot of CMA knowledge. So far so good.
He talked **** to JKDChick once and I told him to cool his language, which he did. (You can check this with her yourself).

He also organised some very well attended throwdowns in Maryland, and people who attended attested to his standup skill. It really did seem that he was an OK guy in person and had been verified as having standup skills by other BS members. I was genuinely interested in his opinion on CMA.

This was also a time when it seemed that the worst young BJJ nutriders were being given free reign to troll the **** out of forums left right and centre. It led to an awesome guy, and very accomplished MA called Ronin, who used to be a mod, leaving. Lots of members were pissed about this.

Now, some of the staff didn't like being challenged and flipped out a bit. Anthony made all sorts of noise about lawsuits and guns etc.. I thought it was a bit cheap, because if they thought what he did was bullshit in terms of effectiveness (rather than truth of credentials), then they should check it out. Anthony decided to investigate JFS, and eventually found that he'd claimed to be qualified to teach grappling 'old frame BJJ'.

Now, when this factual evidence of fake credentials came to light, I apologised to Anthony immediately. Ronin, Rudy and JFS etc.. had already gone and founded TMA.org .

I still found the board noisy and it a bit dull trying to discuss CMA related stuff without it getting trolled a lot, and there was some interesting content on TMA.org I knew that JFS had been found spinning a yarn before, but his CMA credentials and military credentials had still been checked out. I also know that not everybody on Bullshido is whiter than white and that his own investigation had been triggered by personal beef between him and Anthony. I still found his posts on CMA informative, but I didn't forget that he'd been caught once in a lie.

That's why I was so carefully qualifying stuff when I relayed the claim he made about his posts being edited with phrases like 'JFS claims' and 'I don't know if this is true but..'

My view of him now?

JFS has lost any and all respect I ever had for him. End of story. What I once thought of as a tongue-in-cheek gruff internet persona is clearly a real and deviant part of his makeup. I'm not qualified to say this really, but I think he is mentally ill. And I'm no longer interested in his opinion on CMA as he's obviously no great fighter either.

The person I feel most sorry for in all of this is JFS' estranged son.

JFS is divorced and that son of his has been with him to throwdowns in Maryland.

He seemed to look up to his dad as this awesome martial artist who he was going to learn Kung Fu from one day,

Instead he is probably being taunted at school right now over videos, which are all over the Internet, of his wacko divorced dad shoving arround a 20-something young woman in a carpark and yelling '******' and 'skank' with his shirt flapping open or weirdly draped over a shoulder as he tries to show off his pecs, shortly followed by a beatdown by a slightly smaller guy whose MA skill his dad always made fun of.

I'm sure you can imagine what his highschool classmates are making of this.

That's really sad.

RUDY
Rudy has been around on Bullshido way longer than either of us. I remember a time when he was in the BB club and seemed to be chilling out and rolling with the jokes, but he lost his cool when Ronin left and went back to troll-style.

Rudy is clearly somewhat nuts. His response to all this on his own board appears to me delusional. As to his skill, we will see if he shows up to fight Anthony, or whether he punks out. I don't think he's crazy in the way JFS is crazy though. I'm still hoping that he turns up to fight and then goes for a beer or something with Anthony.

OMAR
Whilst Lebell is mostly a comedy poster, his assessment of Omar being a sort of nice, meek, new-agey guy caught up in wanting to belong in asian culture and feeling special to be a chinese sifu's 'disciple' is in IMHO mostly spot on. If you have the time to look at TMA.org you'll see him talking about certain aspects of his training and me and Ronin replying with a sort of surprised disbelief like 'uh.. that's not a replacement for sparring, it's just a drill'.

I've often had the impression that his chinese sifu seems to just want to teach Omar some nice looking forms, some pushing hands and a few conditioning things like 'Iron Palm' without him getting involved in any sort of trouble like challenges or full contact competition. Which is sort of telling. The behaviour here confirms it.

However, Omar wants to be the 'real deal' CMA toughguy , so on one level he finds this frustrating. He perhaps sort of sees JFS as the 'bad-boy' sifu he wishes he had.

Omar was weak to let JFS take control and encourage him to do something so stupid as take a grudge match young woman to a barenuckle full-contact match on concrete. That shoving **** with Kat was just pathetic, but I think he comes out of this more as a slightly pathetic follower than as a badguy.

I always thought this challenge was wrong. I tried to stop this for a long time, and I was being told I was an idiot over there as much as I was here. My posts on the Omar/Kat thing are easily checkable both here and 'there'.

Other TMA people:
They aren't all like that, and some of them were never on Bullshido AFAIK. ChanceDuBois seems like a cool guy with real experience and very little ****-talking, and Ronin is an awesome dude. I hope he comes back to BS one day.

I'm not sure how many BS members you've met in person

About 10-15 british ones. I co-organised the Oxford throwdown back in Jan 2006. You can find video of my fat ass being owned on the ground. I did some light slappy standup which never got filmed. I'm quite a lot lighter and a bit stronger now, but still make no claims to the deadly. I'm not afraid to meet people and spar hard as long as it's not some fucking insane illegal carpark/no gloves deal with people who may not stop when I'm done.

This is a quick copy and paste of a PM, it obviously needs editing to make it JFS specific, and I am happy to hunt down the links to posts by JFS, TYL and other more respected members which explain why I held the views I did for so long.

Since I wrote this to Kempofist, I have decided I also owe Anthony an apology for its content. He could've twisted the knife into JFS after all this, but at the critical moment, he held back and considered the other blameless parties in JFS' sorry life.

That was classy sir. I remember things like that.

**Judah Maccabee** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 12:05pm

Ok, guys, I appreciate the input from some on how the article can be changed or altered. But the fact is, a wiki is best done with edits by multiple members so it can get hashed out appropriately.

http://www.bullshido.org/w/index.php...er&action=edit

If there's something you'd like to add or change, click the above link. Even if it's not formatted properly, someone will come by and fix it later.

**It is Fake** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 12:07pm

Gotcha. I thought you were asking for advice my bad.

**Fighting Cephalopod** · Posted On: 7/14/2007 12:08pm

Originally Posted by Cullion

Since I wrote this to Kempofist, I have decided I also owe Anthony an apology for its content. He could've twisted the knife into JFS after all this, but at the critical moment, he held back and considered the other blameless parties in JFS' sorry life.

That was classy sir. I remember things like that.

Anthony's an impulsive guy and has a tendency to overreact and occasionally go off half-cocked, especially when his friends are involved. At core, though, he's a good and decent guy, and it's easy to lose sight of that when your only experience with him is on a message board.