When I was kid, if you wanted books on the martial arts and went to the library, you ran into Bruce Tegner. Born in Chicago in 1929, Bruce was instructed from earliest childhood by his parents, who were judo and jiu-jitsu teachers. He went on to become California State Judo Champion, and work as in instructor for military police, among other lucrative gigs one would expect of a California-based instructor. One of the interesting aspects of Tegner’s work is that he was apparently instructed in fencing at an early age. This shows through in his cane, umbrella and walking stick sections.

Stick-Fighting as a book, is primarily of value as a historical resource. The self-defense concerns depicted are largely ones of a less predatory bygone age. This is not to say that the techniques depicted in the numerous photos are of no value. Actually, I was surprised that half of the assailant knife behavior depicted is realistic, which put Bruce far ahead of the generation of self-defense gurus that would follow him. The author’s insistence on attacking the knife hand repeatedly with blunt weapon strokes is on point and ahead of its time.

The cane techniques appear to be a hybrid of Korean and French methods. This appeals to my sense that the French method relies on distance too much, which seems to be over optimistic, and the Korean method is so proximity-oriented, which I am suspicious of with an extension weapon.

My favorite segment is in the section on the handstick. This is a seated scenario with Tegner next to a small woman. In the text he describes options for the woman dependent on whether or not the man next to her is simply being ‘annoying’, or launching an attack.

Lastly, the impressive thing about Bruce Tegner as a published instructor is that he often plays ‘the bad guy’ in scenarios, which is still generally unheard of in martial arts instruction, where the cult of personality is still so avidly cultivated, and was sacrosanct in his day. Mister Tenger comes off in this book, and ones produced before it, as a proto-mixed-martial-artist. When I was a kid I did not think so much of him, as he lacked the flash and the brutality of the magazine gurus. Now, from this vantage, I see him as having been way ahead of his time.