Now I never
heard this from my instructors, they didn’t talk about training, they trained.
But somewhere I picked up a strength of the Isshinryu system was that our
higher stances made us more mobile than say the deeper system stances like in
Shiotokan.
Maybe it was
from some magazine article, but the idea stuck in my head.
One of the
competitors I went against regularly was Tristan Sutrisno. At that time I only
know of him from forms competition. He was from outside the US and he would
perform an absolutely brilliant form only to always mess up on the last
movement. To be honest I was never that good.
Then one
Saturday outside the gym we were chatting about stuff. It really had not
registered he was a Shotokan stylist.
So the time came
when I waxed philosophically about the superiority of Isshinryu stances versus
Shotokan stances.
He just replied,
“Well….”
Exploded back into a Shotokan
Zenkatsu Dachi (The Shotokan Deep Front Stance), and fast as lightening threw a front kick ending at my mouth. There was a grin across his face.
“So our stances make us slower?”
I learned a
great lesson in humility that day.
To put it in
perspective Tristan was Indonesian. He immigrated to the US to marry here. He
was trained from age 4 by his father, who had studied under Funakoshi Sensei at
the Naval War College in the 1930s,, along with 1930s Aikido studies, kobudo
and Indonesian Tjimande.
After about a
year of competition the day came and he no longer made that mistake, and he
began to dominate his divisions.
Then one day he
showed up with a staff. I remember judges trying to discourage him competing so
as not to disgrace himself, for everyone knew Shotokan did not do weapons. That
was the start of his dominance in Kubudo.
Of course at tournaments they only saw a very small set of what he
practiced.
He was also very
skilled in Kumite, which was interesting because he didn’t teach kumite in his
classes.
His ‘bunkai’ was
also extremely interesting as the paradigm he used was not what others do.
Something others outside his friends and students did not see.
He was one of
the quickest individuals I ever met. He had an incredible set of drills and
kata bunkai using a different paradigm than anyone else I have ever seen.
I studied with his learning what he chose to show with me for a
decade till distance made that impossible.
I learned a real
lesson that day, Never assume, for when you assume,….
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