Psychology of the Blade: Don’t Call Yourself a Knifefighter!

[JBrainard]

This is the title of an article written by Steven Drape in the newest issue of Filipino Martial Arts Digest:

http://www.fmadigest.com/Issues/current/Vol4_No5.pdf

I thought it was a very interesting article and I wanted to know what others thought about it.

 

[Ceicei]

This is the title of an article written by Steven Drape in the newest issue of Filipino Martial Arts Digest:

http://www.fmadigest.com/Issues/current/Vol4_No5.pdf

I thought it was a very interesting article and I wanted to know what others thought about it.

For those of you who want to locate the article quickly in this pdf, the article starts on page 19 and ends on page 23.

I find the article very interesting, especially the part discussing types of attackers who may draw a knife.

- Ceicei

 

[tellner]

It's also a very bad idea if you ever end up in court.

"Your Honor, the accused described himself as a 'skilled knife fighter'..."

I recall a guy who we ran into some time back. He was visiting Portland and described himself as a member of, oh crud I can't remember the exact name. something something "Professional Knife Fighters". He claimed to have been in "over sixty knife fights". A local JKD teacher was squiring him around when we met at a Pho restaurant.

My friend looked him up and down and said "****, you're too pretty to have done that. You've got both eyes and all your fingers. Where are your scars? I'm not saying you didn't stick sixty guys, but were any of them actually facing you when you did it?" Our hero sputtered a little, began to puff up and then looked a little afraid and shut up. Wise decision on his part. My friend is decidedly not pretty and has plenty of scars.

 

[exile]

It's also a very bad idea if you ever end up in court.

"Your Honor, the accused described himself as a 'skilled knife fighter'..."

I recall a guy who we ran into some time back. He was visiting Portland and described himself as a member of, oh crud I can't remember the exact name. something something "Professional Knife Fighters". He claimed to have been in "over sixty knife fights". A local JKD teacher was squiring him around when we met at a Pho restaurant.

My friend looked him up and down and said "****, you're too pretty to have done that. You've got both eyes and all your fingers. Where are your scars? I'm not saying you didn't stick sixty guys, but were any of them actually facing you when you did it?" Our hero sputtered a little, began to puff up and then looked a little afraid and shut up. Wise decision on his part. My friend is decidedly not pretty and has plenty of scars.

This is very funny... takes me back to ancient times, when I was an undergraduate in NYC with a very... cosmopolitan circle of friends. Not one self-professed `knifefighter' in the group. There were, however, several individuals who were universally known as, um, `good with a knife'. One of them told me, during some informal training at one point, that the most important thing when confronting someone with a knife was to get your jacket off and rolled up in your non-knife hand (everyone, and I mean everyone, carried a knife in those days, usually a K-55) to serve as a shield.

It would have been regarded as literally insane to actually tell people you carried a knife, let alone that you were a `knifefighter'—why the hell would you give away that kind of information??? And as for advertising the fact that you had shoved a blade through a fellow citizen's skin or drawn blood by a slash... only a lunatic would have owned up to anything like that. It wasn't even the police that people worried about... it was the guy's friends. You definitely did not want people knowing that you had had anything to do with the fact that someone or other had had to make a trip to the ER, because someone or other would not forget the fact, and neither would his mates, and if one of your friends was responsible for bringing it to the attention of one of his friends that you were the responsible party... well, it was something you could do without, eh? So those who were `good with a knife' never, ever admitted anything to anyone.

These `professional knifefighters' sound a wee bit like LARPers to me. Back in the day, people who actually did that stuff didn't like it to get known. It did get known, but they didn't like it...