Sport?

There is an ongoing conflict within the martial arts world. It revolves around the purpose and focus of just what a martial art is. Is it a sport, or is it not.

Do you train to get good at dominating other practitioners in the dojo, or at tournaments, or to prepare along a more self-defense line.

An example of this would be competitive Taekwondo. It started as a real-combat oriented martial art, but has now evolved strongly towards sport competition. The best get to the Olympics, and what they can do is truly spectacular. However, the rules force a move away from true combat effectiveness. No face punching allowed, so they never train in punching, and fight with their hands down by their sides. No need to practice face punch awareness. They are also not permitted to catch an opponent’s kick or to take him down.

Jiu-Jitsu also has this conflict. Most of its styles come down on one side or the other over the issue.

I experienced this first hand recently. A Blue Belt visited from another organization. His style was very clearly sport focused. He was young, and very athletic. He didn't really try and learn the techniques presented in either the White or Blue Belt classes. He seemed to just want to apply what he already knew how to do.

For part of the Blue Belt class, he and I rolled a bit. Being young and athletic and focused on sport free rolling, he handled me pretty easily. Did I mention that he's a level higher rank than me? No big deal, but what he was doing was fully sport.

He displayed no awareness at all of striking awareness. I do Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. In it we are always being made aware of real world issues. There are no rules in the real world. Grapple with somebody, and they are likely going to try and hammer your face in.

My visiting partner left massive holes in his real-world defense. I could have landed blows on him at will. It wasn't just defensive holes either. He left way too much space between himself and me, and fought constantly with his head up. This means that every habit of his being is to fight with sport goals in mind.

Don't get me wrong. There's no problem with sport Jiu-Jitsu schools, just as there is no problem with non-sport ones. The problem comes when one doesn't understand just what is going on. Because he could easily “win” when we were doing a grapple-only drill he left feeling we had nothing to offer.

If he'd come back a second time he would have run into a different reality.

It would have started with another White Belt class followed by another for the Blues. In the Blue class we would have reviewed the material from the previous training. So far, pretty identical.

After that we took turns going up against opponents who were wearing boxing gloves. The reason? The gloved enemy acts as a non-grappling, punch-oriented individual.

It is a whole different kettle of fish.