“How do you know how many fights you’ve had? It seems like a stretch. Did you count sparring? Why don’t I have a record?”
With all of the charlatans in the ‘stick-fighting’ world out there it is a fair question to ask. Let’s set aside my disastrous boxing record for now. The record you were discussing after our last training session currently stands as so:
From 1998 thru 2014 James has fought 668 stick bouts for a record of 448 wins, 168 losses and 52 draws.
From 2002 thru 2013 James fought 221 blunt machete duels for 116 wins, 86 losses and 19 draws.
The stick record is fights against everybody, some not very good fighters included. The machete duels were only against top fighters. I am actually a better blade man than stick man, so this shows what a difference quality of opposition makes in a record.
I know how many fights I’ve had and what the outcomes where because I either kept track during a private meet—like when Aaron and I met for 4 1 hour beatings of this guy, which netted me 1 win out of 29 fights. In the case of a pubic meet—or at our July 5th slobber knocker where I was drunk, I had my girl keep track of the stick fights on a note pad, which I found in my pocket the next day. In other cases I have viewed films of bouts from events, like in our May 2013 agon.
Mathematically I am somewhere just above an earth worm. But, this is just adding. Earth worms can add. Hell, dirt can add! From 1998 through 2004 I kept track of everyone’s fights. When we started having open meets I was overwhelmed and decided to keep my own record going, as it served a much bigger purpose than my own bragging rights.
Records are good and bad. An example of what is bad about records is managing a fighter so that he has a perfect one, and thereby not testing him, like in boxing. Another example of how record keeping is bad comes from my years of training as a boy with weights. I became obsessed with how much I could lift, and tried to break certain barriers.
At age 15 and 143 pounds I had the following stats:
-dips, 127 [75 with 50 pounds tied to my waist]
-rope climb without using legs, 16 feet in 4 seconds, could do it at progressively slower times four times in a row without a standing rest at the bottom
-pull ups, 18
-chin ups, 21
-pull ups behind the back, 14
-Olympic barbell snatch, 145 pounds
-Olympic barbell clean and jerk, 155 pounds
-barbell curl, 120 pounds
-bench press 195 pounds
I destroyed my right shoulder trying to turn the 200 pound corner in the bench press. Now I can’t do a single dip and a pull up is agony. Getting out of bed is like getting off the floor after you knocked me down last Sunday. The point is this ego-centric record caused me to ruin a really good set of shoulders.
In late 1998 Chuck Goetz and I wanted to start fighting with sticks. We had fought with knives in kill bouts and using different point systems for a year. Until I found the Lumsden brothers in 2002 and Aaron in 2005 no one in Baltimore would spar with or fight us—nobody had done it that we knew of. Before we began recruiting people we decided to do a study of 140 bouts.
We called a stick-fight over when one of us had taken 5 hard clean shots. The reasoning was that no one I knew of from my violence study had taken 5 blunt weapon strokes without being incapacitated. In some cases the person survived dozens of strokes before going out. But in no case did someone who was hit five times with a blunt weapon not become incapacitated at some point before or after the fifth stroke.
Chuck and I wanted information, numbers. We did the first 140 fights with rattan, white oak, ash wood, wax wood, and once with 1 and ¼ inch foot long steel pipes. We fought in the park in front of homeless guys and Mexican landscapers who gave us feedback. They noted that the fights with the more dangerous materials lasted longer and had little action. We settled on rattan and have stuck with it ever since.
My record includes bouts fought according to the following methods: 5 point, weapon only submission, NHB submission, MMA, FMA, freestyle, gladiatorial, double-stick, stick and dagger [FMA and freestyle].
The longest and most grueling stick fight was a 10 minute submission bout with Chuck.
The nastiest one was a roughly two minute 5 point bout against Aaron in which he broke his stick on me, bent the main bar of my helmet and disarmed me.
The quickest stick fight was against you young man, when I took your forehand in the left lat, and snaked your stick away as I smacked you in the temple in front of a dozen young college ladies.
This begs the sparring question. You had been murdering me in sparring but choked in front of that gathered vagina. The next week, when Cory and I arrived at the school and you were already there, I noticed he had not brought gear. When I inquired he said that he was just going to watch the slaughter; that “It was on.”
As I recall—dimly through the sheet of remembered pain—you beat my ass righteously for 1 hour and 40-some minutes as pay back for those two seconds of humiliation.
The pictures in the article I am linking to Stick & Dagger were also from sparring with you. You injured me bad enough that you had to treat me like your grandmother for the next month. Also, when sparring with Aaron, he hurt me worse than when he was focused on victory. The point is sparring and fighting overlap in severity depending on the format and the match up.
When Chuck and I started we never sparred, but only fought. By 2004 I sparred 20 minutes for every bout I fought. It has gone steadily up from there. I now spar roughly 20 hours for every bout I fight—and I don’t get hurt fighting, but in sparring, as we have a lot of time for variables to intrude in sparring.
My goal was to clock as many bouts as I could to determine the injury profile for what I hoped might one day be a professional sport. I began when I was 36 when recovering from a life time of injury, am technically a weakling, have only average athletic ability, and am small. My opponents have averaged half my age and 50 pounds larger. I have fought some of the best stick-fighters in the world and lost almost every one of those bouts in brutal fashion. I trust that makes my record of injuries read alongside my record of combat, a reliably conservative case study for any future governing body for a legitimate unarmored stick-fighting conference to consider.
I hope to make it to 700 bouts with your cruel help Charles. I could care less how many I win. I have already lost over 150 stick fights, and only won 7 out of 21 boxing matches. In stick-fighting terms I’ve simply become information.
When I get to the end of the road just let me fall.
