The Kai said:
Count Dante was'nt really flamboyant, I think he was more likely to be called outrageous. He advocated training is sweats with tennis shoes on. street cloths. He stated in a magazine that a boxer was better trained to win a street fight. He felt the "ritual of Kata" over took the conditioning aspects of the arts. For a Non Chinese to make these sytaemets in the early 70's - outrageous.
One of Count dante's "things" was to go into a bar on the south side of chicago and basically pick a fight - Scandeleous.
My teacher's teacher met Count Dante, basically summed it up "A cracked egg, but mastered the physicl art"
Todd
Todd, now don't jump on me for this one but.............lol. Here goes, yup, the old Count was definitely 99 cents short of a dollar but let's just think about a few of his way out concepts and his 'rationale' behind them, ya, believe it or not, in some ways there was a method to his madness.
Street clothes in training, I agree. You don't have to have it as the norm but it should be part of the program. This is the standard that police training stresses around the world. Whenever you go to the range, do your tactical, do your defensive tactics, the rule of thumb is you dress how you dress on your tour of duty. Whatever your uniform of the day is the majority of the time is what you train in, make sense to me! I haven't mixed it up for real in a gi yet.
Okay, boxers? my community was a boxing town before any martial arts exposure and I knew several and I did a little bit prior to my kempo days. One thing you can count on with a boxer in a street situation is his reaction to a punch in the nose is a punch back! That's a given. You also know he can take it as well as dish it out. A measure of a person's toughness is not how much they can dish out but how much they can take. Let's also not forget the physical conditining required to box. Go back to the life and times of John Keehan. 'Point' karate. Remember a point champ by the name of Everet 'Monster Man' Eddy? Truly a monster (size) of a man but couldn't make the transition into what was called in 1974 full contact karate due to a glass jaw? Unlike boxing, you can't always count on karate people, especially back in Keehan's day.
No, you can't go picking fights in bars although look at Chow and Emperado's group back in the old red light districts of Hawaii but agreed, that was then, this is now. However, he allowed drinking and smoking in his dojo and it sounded completely ludicrious then, still is, I wouldn't do it but look at his reasoning. Where did the term barroom brawl come from? I can tell you as a cop that where there's booze, guys and girls there are fights. His rationale, to quote Detective Harry Callahan in Magnum Force is 'a good man should no his limitations, so drink a six pack or two and a couple of shots and see how good you are now. Todd, on some issues he was ahead of his time and and I agree with your instructors analysis:"A cracked egg, but mastered the physical art" and If I may add, he knew a lot about reality fighting.
