Sifu Freddie Lee Safe Sparring Kung Fu Demo
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This was the last sparring lesson I did with Shunyuan before he left the school. Before this time, he was gone from the school for about a year for personal reasons and for a spiritual journey. So I had not sparred with him for about a year and then he comes back to the school and this is the last sparring lesson I had with him before he left again.
The sparring aspect of the Martial Arts has always been one of his biggest challenges. He still spars with a lot of emotion, anger, fear, ego, etc. When I watch this video it makes me think about Bruce Lee teaching that kid in “Enter the Dragon” Bruce yelled at the kid and said “Emotional content, NOT ANGER!”
Shunyuan has a football background; he used to play college football. And with all those years of playing football, it’s not easy to transform into a Martial Artist suddenly. He still spars like a football player.
I never promote my students to fight on the ground, but it is the less experienced students that end up trying to take the fight into the ground and then they end up getting themselves into even more danger. This sparring video is not clean, it’s messy, it’s not artistic, it’s too dirty.
Martial Artists are supposed to spar with speed, grace, control, meditation, etc. But if your sparring partner is not on point, then the engagement will end up looking messy, when one person ends up taking the fight to the ground, it ends up looking dirty just like the cage fighters, and the Martial Artist that ends up getting taken to the ground is left with no other option than to fight dirty too.
I tell my students that on the streets, if someone wants to take me down to the ground, they better get ready to die, because I don’t play those games. Every student that tries to take me to the ground always loses, they have to realize that’s not where they want to be. You would rather walk away from the fight standing up than force the fight onto the ground and then end up getting killed.
I’m not down with this ground fighting bullshit, but I am not going to tell my students not to do it, but they will have to eventually learn that if you really want to learn how to spar, you got to stop running away from the fight. There are two ways of running away, one is actually running away from the opponent and the other is trying to take the opponent down to the ground. In both instances, you are saying, “I am not capable of stand up fighting, so I will try to tackle you to end the fight.”
Well this is not football, this is Martial Arts. When you tackle someone, the fight is not over, and on the streets, there really are no rules, anything goes, so if you want to be a ground fighter, you better be prepared for the worse.
It’s too difficult to teach a stranger from the streets to become a Martial Artist, it takes too much time and when the struggles start coming, a lot of them just run away or disappear. I’ve come to the conclusion, that I cannot teach anyone to become a Martial Artist, I can only live it.
