This past weekend I assisted Sifu Arturo Gabriel with an FMA, Boxing and Wing Chun seminar at Mister Jim Frederick’s Kenpo Karate school. We had a dozen participants for the two day camp, I have known Gabe for twenty years now. He began the Saturday morning seminar by bringing me out on the mat and saying, “James has been like a brother to me for decades. He’s always been there for me when I needed him. Since I’ve known James he’s been training and fighting in martial arts, and has never worn a belt. I’m telling you what; I would put him against any stick or blade fighter I have ever seen. I trust this man with my life. This is for you James. You have earned it.”
In most settings, this belt and certificate costs me $100 or more. In this case, Gabriel paid for it—older fighter sponsoring younger fighter, instead of making money off of him.
Gabriel then awarded me my black sash in Dos Manos Cortando Kali-Escrima and went on, “I talked to my senior in the arts. He told me that you guys that have been with James, fighting, training, that we should recognize you. He said to me, ‘What have you done for them?’ I will be awarding you ranks in the future. Your martial accomplishments should not go unrecognized.”
By the end of the day on Sunday, there were eight of us left, and Gabriel gathered us around. For him, I know, this martial arts fraternity, the free association of combat artists he trains with, is his family. He made this clear in his brief talk to us, stepping up to each of us, hugging the men he had sparred with, and shaking the hands of the man he had drilled with, and said, “One day you will have your seminar, and many people will say they’ll be there. A lot of people said they’d be here, and they aren’t. That’s okay. You are here. Sigon Frederick has given us a martial home. The commercial martial arts are done—over. That stuff is all daycare now. It’s time to be warriors again, and this is your warrior clan. You need anything, you call me, you call James. We’re there. When Craig [our boxer] fights we need to be there for him. He’s our brother.”
Currently I have been reading and writing on masculinity, tribalism, anarchism, and libertarianism. I have generally come down on the side of all of these notions except for tribalism, as I have seen how when people divide themselves into groups, they are easily put at each other’s throats by those who would rule them.
But Gabriel’s idea of ‘the clan’ the ‘brotherhood of warriors’, an association of men who fight each other and other men in ritual contests, strikes me as something sustainable, something micro-cultural.
Gabriel goes out of his way to include women, but to assign them cohesive roles, as do I. The few women that train with us are treated as ‘sisters’, one as a ‘mother’. We don’t compete for the affections of the women we train with like the men in commercial schools, but treat them protectively, as family, even as they fulfill supporting roles.
We are not separate and easily divided, or homogenous and easily led, but linked.
We have a dozen arts and a half dozen races or distinct ethnic groups [members born on every continent other than Australia] represented in our roughly two dozen person network. And many of us are linked into another such free association. In many ways this is a throwback to an earlier time; this post-commercial martial arts clan. It is made possible by a sense of family held by one man, Jim Frederick.
Jim Frederick is a professional martial artist who operates a commercial martial arts school. It is his living. If students don’t come through the door he closes up and loses everything. Many times Jim has told me, “Yes, this is my living, my business, but it is not about the money.”
For four years now Jim has permitted my impoverished self, and my equally poor fighters, to train at his school free of charge. It is an ethical thing for him; an expression of his desire to support fighting men, even as he makes his living teaching self-defense. He reached across the parochial boundaries of style and lineage that has maintained the modern martial arts world as a kind of commercialized parody of real manly pursuits, and has literally brought us in out of the cold.
Gabriel, like I, has piggy backed on numerous martial arts schools, teaching his Latino brand of escrima and ‘gangster fist’ Wing Chun alongside karate, Tae-Kwon-Do, classical kung fu, and traditional FMA classes. In the end, either the schools failed in the face of competition from commercial daycare and women’s aerobic kickboxing programs, or the instructors grew jealous of Gabriel’s combative nature attracting their boldest fighters, and a parting of the ways occurred.
Stylistically the arts that Gabriel and I practice within Mister Frederick’s school are very different. What remains the same is our belief in forming honor-based attachments with real men; men that can and will fight, in the cause of perpetuating this life way through mentoring the next generation of men. It occurred to me that we have outmaneuvered the toxic economic construct that is supposed to keep us men apart, all slaves to our various nagging women and their quest for that more finely upholstered couch.
So, economically, how does this work?
Mister Frederick realizes that when you make a handshake deal with an honorable man in which you give, and ask nothing, that that man will reciprocate. When an area Kenpo school recently folded, Jim opened up his doors to all of the black belts from that school—free of charge. How can one man force the renowned greed of the martial arts world into the back seat like that and remain viable?
In hard times he will have people to call on.
Gabriel did not keep the cut of the seminar fees that were his due, even though Jim left the cut up to us, but had me collect it and give it all to the man that has brought us into his martial house. I cross-train Jim’s people free of charge and donate my seminar fees. We train outsiders for a mat fee that goes to the running of the school. Our fighters put on benefits to raise money from spectators in return for their free training space. We stock the water cooler and clean the mats, etc. We have returned to a barter system beneath the economic horizon. This is possible for a martial arts fraternity, so long as one member, who still survives above the economic horizon, is willing to make that connection.
Jim Frederick is not the only martial arts school owner who has bucked the trend of sticking with parochial prejudice by either going commercial or submitting to the Municipal Recreation Council. Tom Clark’s Practical MMA, Edgar Livingston’s Chinese Health and Fitness, and Frank Gilbert’s Loch Raven Boxing Team are schools who have opened their doors to us, and to who we are honor bound to help.
What makes these honor-based reciprocal relationships possible in a slice of our world that has literally been conquered and rendered sterile by commercialized business models?
What permits this honor is the saving grace of combat.
What we do is legitimized by what we risk. We fight; therefore we are always of consequence.
