The Long Muh-WAH-Shee: Part 1

It's never supposed to connect.

It was quite the commitment for my first year of college, but he payment plan was reasonable and I was working a lot so my Dad let me do it. Twelve hundred dollars total. A hundred a month. Working one summer I could pay it all off without having to work my sophomore year of college. My dad, frowning, co-signed the agreement and it was done.

I was going to take one year's training at American Karate.

I don't know how Un-American Karate went, but the guy I was training under was a world champion several times over and had developed a system of kicks and punches that made any fight consisting of kicks and punches more likely to run in your favor. Unfortunately, it required a shedload of conditioning and a lot of point fighting.

Point-fighting is the martial arts equivalent of eating cake without sugar, pie without filling, steak without...steak. Unlike all other fight sports, point-fighting was more about demonstrating your mastery of circumstances than actually being skilled. To score a point while point-fighting, all you really had to do was demonstrate that you COULD hit your opponent if you wanted to. So if you make like you're going to hit an opponents wide open abdomen after he/she over extended a punch or kick, the point was yours. Three of them bad boys and you either moved on to the next round or collected a nice, tall, fakeass gold trophy.

The problem with point-fighting is that the strikes were totally up to interpretation by the judges. If you were lucky you had three of them positioned at various vantage points and two of them had to agree for a point to be scored. But that's at Nationals. Mostly I point-fought at my local gym or at some university's gym while going for a promotion (raising the color of your belt to the next level).

I took to point-fighting quickly, mostly because I'm very gullible. If a guy tried to fake me, I reacted. And in point-fighting it don't matter if you fake. It matters if it LOOKS like you connect. And it looked like I was connecting a lot. Especially with black belts. They were none too pleased.

Black belts think that they run the show. Technically they do, but most of them just memorized the proper forms and went to every test available. Whether they could apply the skills necessary was immaterial. They'd paid their money and showed up enough, but God they were gonna get their black belt.

One night we had a point-fighting mini-tournament to see where everyone was. It was mostly a test of the white/green belts (me) to see how they faired against more experienced fighters. In a real fight, flinching allows for enough reaction time to bite on someone's feint and recover since they're not really supposed to hid you. So in this mini-tournament I dominated. I was athletic, quick, and talented of course. But mostly I bit on every fake maneuver. They tried to counter with someone else 'cuz they didn't expect me to be so easily faked, but by then I'd figured it out and had my fist next to their face. Demonstration of dominance was as good as gold, so I scored point after point after point.

Three black belts later, I met up with The Cop.