Bullshido on campus

**Beorn** · Posted On: 3/08/2008 7:47pm

Hey guys this isn't a specific thread about one bad school or one bad instructor, this is more about an epidemic that i have seen first hand and also heard of at many other institutions, which is terrible martial arts clubs on campus. college is a time when people are supposed to broaden their horizons, and alot of people decide to dothis by taking up a martial art. So i get to Ohio State last year (i am a sophomore), and at that point i had taken tae kwon do for 4 years at a solid, traditional school so i had a decent idea what i wanted, and for the time being i wanted to continue tkd. My first flag went off when there were FOUR tkd clubs. that is completly unnecessary. as much as i love tkd, there is one kind, and therefore needs to be only one club. my flags further went up when i was telling them that i had four years of experience, and they assumed i should be at least a third degree, when i had gotten my first maybe 6 months before i came up. but i break down and i decide to go to a class.

The fuckers were retarded. first they were pissed cause i wore my full uniform as opposed to pants and a t shirt. then these guys come up to me fawning cause i am a blackbelt, but they are 4th degrees so they're the cats fuckin ass. the guy and the girl were my age and if they were 4th degrees, i am a grandmaster, and im not going to the olympics anytime soon. we go through drills, and they say to do reverse roundhouses down the floor. this conversation follows:

instructor: hit with the heel

me: its a reverse round house, ur foot should be in the same position as a round house

instructor: well here we do it with the heel

me: well thats a hook kick

instructor: well arent those the same thing?

sigh..

so i never went back. and it wasn't just tkd. later on i went to a wu-shu class with my gf at the time (btw, completely physcho, still dont know where the **** that came from) and it was cute, but some of the people there actually thought they could fight, and the instructor was egging them on. now i was polite enough not to throw down in their class, but later on at a party in my house, the instructor,who was drunk, confided in me that all they did was glorified gymnastics, and that i would kill him in a real fight, which is y he was so apologetic for me finding him in my room with a girl. the list goes on to include at least one karate club, the capoeria club, three quarters of all the mma clubs, ect,ect...

thats not to say that there aren't awesome instruction here. the judo club and ju jutsu club have produced national champions, the shotokan club has national level competitors (mostly forms, but they hold their own in sparring) and there is even a decent mma club. but the problem is that the bullshido schools control the hierarchy and it is fucked up. my ju jutsu club, that had over 20 students three days a week, got booted from from our time by a tkd school that has on average FIVE students. they claimed they needed matts,a tkd club, and even tried to fight me and my instructor, more on that later

so yeah sorry for the long rant, but i have heard of similar and even worse situations at colleges my friends go to. i was just wondering if this was common and if there are any suggestions to fix it, cause we are trying and no one seems to be listening. thanks for the feedback guys.

**Tango M.F.** · Posted On: 3/08/2008 8:10pm

Originally Posted by Beorn

they claimed they needed matts,a tkd club, and even tried to fight me and my instructor, more on that later

I am intrigued, sir.

I was part of a really good muay thai/kickboxing club that trained with a shotokan club at the college I used to go to. The karate guys and gals were good to work with, as they were fast as hell, and we all sparred at least twice a week.

The only weird thing was the people we seemed to attract:

The girl who looked like she was ten and performed kata like it was a tango dance (to the head-shaking amusement of the sensei);

the mma wanna-be who would wander off and hit the bag with sloppy haymakers when the rest of us were doing pad-work;

the fat kid who came for a single class, saw that we were actually sweating, and never came back;

the guy who came to the club with his girlfriend and started instructing her about how, "A palm strike to the face will drive the nose-bone into the brain and kill a person;"

the uber-hot asian kung-fu girl who would randomly break out into flowery staff forms (where the **** did she even get the staff from, now that I think about it);

and of course the assorted wanna-be asian white dudes who had chinese character tats, smoked way to much ganj and thought they were Bruce Lee.

On the plus side we had several amateur fighters, a few guys who trained in Thailand and came back with awesome technique and balls-to-the-wall conditioning, some karate black-belts who fucking owned in sparing, and of course a cool old Japanese guy teaching karate.

I actually miss the place a lot.

Edit: I just remembered about the time "palm-strike" boy interrupted me when I was teaching a pad-work session to try and teach me akkido. It didn't work at all, and I had to curtly remind him to focus on the pad-work combos we were doing.

**seriousmantid** · Posted On: 3/08/2008 8:39pm

Why don't you just find a class you like and let the others do their thing. If you don't like the clubs then don't join. Why complain about everyone else. It sounds as if you are just trying to toot your own horn, without looking like you are. Now that is just my observation from this side of the keyboard.

**Beorn** · Posted On: 3/08/2008 9:11pm

i complain for the same reason that anyone complains here. shoddy training and dubious ranks make the martial community as a whole worse. im not saying i am a great martial artist, i have so far to go its ridiculous, but i know i can progress because i have excellent instruction with a proven track record. and alot of these kids will go to some tournament on campus thinking theyre tough **** and getting hurt, or even coming into my class, telling me they have all this experience, and getting hurt because i go fullblast based on what they have told me when theyare not as good as their instructor has told them, and that can get people hurt.

example: i am in one of our rooms with the wrestling matts shadow boxing and warming up when i spot a guy doing the same thing,we get to talking and decide to do some light sparring, becasue neither of us have brought sparring gear. he tells me he has been doing capoeria for two years, and has beaten some kids from the karate club that i respect. so at first im going easy,not trying to grapple him at all, just striking. i kick him a few times and he does this little spin catwheel thing and kicks me in the ankle. i just kind of stare at him and let him stand back up, and i ask him what that was supposed to do.

"well if i had kicked full force u would have fallen down"

uh huh

so i tell him that he can feel free to do that full force next time. i let him do it once, i dont go down. so i tell him he should probably stop doing that because it leaves him flat on his back and very exposed. he doesn't listen so the next time he does it i lift the leg he kicked at and throw an axe kick that i stop a little bit over his stomach. i feel like ive made my point,so we keep sparring.we go for a little bit, AND HE TRIES IT AGAIN. this time i am pissed so when he hits his back i go to side mount and kimura him, then stop sparring. this kid had been told by his instructor that he was some kinda prodigy and that there were these "go to" moves that would work on the street, and **** like that can get u killed in the wrong part of town, which fortunately is just south of osu, in between us and the nice part of columbus. **** like that is bad for all martial artists, not just the guy who gets his ass kicked.

next time: 5 tkd black belts vs my ju jutsu instructor? i think hes ok

**Blue Negation** · Posted On: 3/08/2008 9:12pm

Originally Posted by Beorn

Hey guys this isn't a specific thread about one bad school or one bad instructor, this is more about an epidemic that i have seen first hand and also heard of at many other institutions, which is terrible martial arts clubs on campus. college is a time when people are supposed to broaden their horizons, and alot of people decide to dothis by taking up a martial art. So i get to Ohio State last year (i am a sophomore), and at that point i had taken tae kwon do for 4 years at a solid, traditional school so i had a decent idea what i wanted, and for the time being i wanted to continue tkd. My first flag went off when there were FOUR tkd clubs. that is completly unnecessary. as much as i love tkd, there is one kind, and therefore needs to be only one club. my flags further went up when i was telling them that i had four years of experience, and they assumed i should be at least a third degree, when i had gotten my first maybe 6 months before i came up. but i break down and i decide to go to a class.

The fuckers were retarded. first they were pissed cause i wore my full uniform as opposed to pants and a t shirt. then these guys come up to me fawning cause i am a blackbelt, but they are 4th degrees so they're the cats fuckin ass. the guy and the girl were my age and if they were 4th degrees, i am a grandmaster, and im not going to the olympics anytime soon. we go through drills, and they say to do reverse roundhouses down the floor. this conversation follows:

instructor: hit with the heel

me: its a reverse round house, ur foot should be in the same position as a round house

instructor: well here we do it with the heel

me: well thats a hook kick

instructor: well arent those the same thing?

sigh..

It's TKD... you can't expect much.

so i never went back. and it wasn't just tkd. later on i went to a wu-shu class with my gf at the time (btw, completely physcho, still dont know where the **** that came from) and it was cute, but some of the people there actually thought they could fight, and the instructor was egging them on. now i was polite enough not to throw down in their class, but later on at a party in my house, the instructor,who was drunk, confided in me that all they did was glorified gymnastics, and that i would kill him in a real fight, which is y he was so apologetic for me finding him in my room with a girl. the list goes on to include at least one karate club, the capoeria club, three quarters of all the mma clubs, ect,ect...

Yeah the Wu Shu stuff looks cool and I took that class. Which instructor was this? Was it one of the student ones? Not Josh was it?

And how many MMA clubs are there anyways? I've heard about the do jung isshu guys but never trained with them and the JKD/FMA club is legit (and run by a national Kali champ, BJJ purple, semi-pro MMA fighter), hope you weren't talking about them. But what are the rest?

thats not to say that there aren't awesome instruction here. the judo club and ju jutsu club have produced national champions, the shotokan club has national level competitors (mostly forms, but they hold their own in sparring) and there is even a decent mma club. but the problem is that the bullshido schools control the hierarchy and it is fucked up. my ju jutsu club, that had over 20 students three days a week, got booted from from our time by a tkd school that has on average FIVE students. they claimed they needed matts,a tkd club, and even tried to fight me and my instructor, more on that later

Yeah don't **** with the Judo club. I can't touch any of their black belts on the ground, let alone standing, and their browns vary from tooling me to being a serious but beatable challenge - on the ground. Standing I'm basically a throwing dummy. The Ju-jutsu club... do you mean the Seiei-kan with the Swedish guy? I've never had a high impression of them - what competitions have they won?

so yeah sorry for the long rant, but i have heard of similar and even worse situations at colleges my friends go to. i was just wondering if this was common and if there are any suggestions to fix it, cause we are trying and no one seems to be listening. thanks for the feedback guys.

All you can do to fix it is try to attract more members to the legit clubs so they get room and time preference and crowd the **** ones out. The problem is that it's hard to attract people to real clubs where you have to sweat and fight, like the Judo club where one of the instructors is a 350 lb rokudan who likes to narrate his randori sessions about 3 seconds ahead of time and you know you can't stop him from doing whatever it is that he just called out ("Osoto gari? **** **** ****") and can kesa gatame people into near unconsciousness.

**The Question** · Posted On: 3/08/2008 9:26pm

Campus Martial Arts clubs are esentially going to be a cross section of Martial Arts in wider society. Yes, that means there will be lots of LARPing.

**Beorn** · Posted On: 3/08/2008 9:41pm