He Was Crazy...And He Studied Korean Karate With Me.

Written by Al Case

Saturday, 12 June 2010 08:06

by AlCase

I doubt whether most martial arts training halls, be they Goju Ryu or Mixed Martial Arts or Jujitsu or whatever, have ever had a crazy guy in their school like Mud Car. We called him Mud Car because that's what his license plates on his automobile stated. That vehicle, more than just about anything else, told the story of Mud Car.

He had strung parachute webbing across the insides of his car because he felt that parachute webbing was best for holding his car together on the inside. He had fire extinguishers clamped throughout his car. He had a switch on his dashboard to give extra power to his tail lights, and he clicked it whenever he faced away from the sun so that people behind him could see when he braked.

This was all surface stuff, though. The most impressive thing that Mud Car did was memorize the times of all the traffic lights in San Jose. He could traverse that large town without ever hitting a stop light.

Unfortunately, when it came to the martial arts, he was just as crazy. He couldn't stretch, couldn't control what his body was going to do, and, because he had no control, it hurt to work with him. Just being around him you could feel the firecrackers in his mind exploding into the cosmos.

One day, in class, he interrupted the instructor to complain about a pain in his shin. "It doesn't hurt, but it keeps bothering me, do you know how to make the pain in my shin go away?" My instructor looked at me with rage in his eyes, I suppose he didn't want to look at Mud Car because he would murder him, and he said, "Hit your leg with a lead pipe...that'll make the pain go away."

I suppose the ability to drive other people crazy is the deciding factor in this matter of whether a person is insane or not. At any rate, Mud Car never made it to Black Belt. He just didn't have the mental maturity that denotes a black belt.

One day, however, a new instructor came to the school, and Mud Car was promoted to Black Belt within a month...and then he left the school. He had achieved his goal, and that was all he wanted, and the new instructor knew that was the best and most efficient way to get rid of Mud Car. Yet, I missed Mud Car.

He was nuts, but so is the guy who attacks you on the street, so if you could last a session with Mud Car without getting hurt, you knew your art was effective. Furthermore, there was a shift of standard here, for Mud Car had been given a black belt because he could drive people nuts, not because he was good. Finally, I think that is where the True Art started disappearing from the martial arts training halls...schools, even schools like traditional Karate or Tae Kwon Do or classical Wudan, did not administer soothing discipline to the insane, they just promoted them to get rid of them.

About the Author:

If you want to go crazy through the martial arts...drop on by Punch 'Em Out. If you want to go sane through the martial arts...try Monster Martial Arts. 5

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