The Bando Hidden Stick - the full story

I knew of the Bando Short Stick form for several years, one of my seniors used the Bando Staff form (The Horseman’s Foot Soldiers Form, and the Bando Short Stick form (the Hidden Stick) as supplemental weapons form in competition. To show judges he had more depth than just Isshinryu Kobudo.  It worked very successful for him.

 

When I was a brown belt, he shared the Bando staff form with Charles Murray who was training me. Charles shared it with me, more to have someone to train alongside than any Isshinryu reason).

 

After I received my black belt, when I visited Reese in Dover he would work with me to polish my Bando Staff. He also shared a little bit of his Bando Short Stick form. It was just a tiny piece of the form.

 

Then in 1983 I received an invitation to attend the Bando Summer Camp in Maryland, extended through my instructors. I took avantage of that invitation and attended the camp.

 

As I recall the first clinic was in the use of the Bando Short stick. Among other things they recommended you should first be careful what material your stick for training was made of. It was explained on hard impact some wood (as in dowels) would break on the impact and what you wanted for the short stick was something stronger.

 

I had one of thick rattan and that was not an issue for me.

 

They then covered the stick could be used a number of different ways?

 

1.     For tip strikes,

2.     For blade strikes (as on the long side of the stick),

3.     For butt strikes

4.     Or all of the above used in mixed strikes.

 

Then they covered a striking pattern (which could be done any of the 4 above methods). I do not recall the actual pattern, but it was similar to patterns I had seen described in various books and articles about Escrima striking practices.

 

So we practiced that drill.

 

Then it was explained that use of the stick required much more than a striking pattern. It required impact training to learn how the impact would feel when the stick was being held in your hand and used.

 

As I recall the better method was to more lightly grasp the stick during striking, then tightening the hold on actual impact to go back to the lighter grip after impact.

 

They explained that an important part of the training involved actual striking to condition one to be ready for the impact going back after the strike into you.

 

This was not a theoretical study. Long sticks (such as tree limbs) were held by two people and you practices impact strikes to feel the reverberation from those strikes. To better condition the hand for those strikes.

 

And yes some of the people there were using wooden dowel sticks, ones that broke during striking.

 

I can still remember the feel of that impact, making use of the stick more real.

 

That clinic was followed by an Escrima instructor sharing some Escrima knowledge and practice. Unfortunately I do not recall the details.

 

The next day I made friends with a Bando Instructor (I know not who) and we discussed many things into the night.  Among them he described kukri knife training Dr. Gyi held for the black belts.. Training where they would cut into rocks, not so slice them but to condition the hand for the impact of the strike, akin to the short stick impact training.

 

As fate would decree that last day Sunday Morning I was up early standing in a field practicing my Bando Staff form (I did not cover that during the camp) and also what I knew of the Bando short stick form.

 

A Bando instructor was ? bemused? At my efforts and told me he would give me two of his brown belts and then tell them to teach me his version of the stick form and not to stop till I had it. (He was attending a private Bando black belt training session with Dr. Gyi off in the woods of the campground).

 

So for the next 2 hours those brown belts piece by piece taught me the form. Movement by movement, and for each movement how I would use that technique.

It was a very intense study.

Then when finished I kept working on that form, not to forget it.

 

In fact I remember little of the close of the camp. Just going over and over that form in my mind.

 

That continued through the 4 hour drive home. I would drive and go through the movements of the stick form best as I could while driving. Then when I got home I immediately went through the form outside of my house.

 

It was something I had already experienced.  A onetime opportunity to keep what I saw, and then worked to make it so.

 

So as time passed I continued to work on that form.

 

One day months later while on a trip down to Salisbury to train with Sensei, I stopped first in Dover to train with Reese Rigby.

 

It was a regular tradition with me to visit him. At first realizing I was training on my own he kept putting me through my Isshinryu forms to see if I was remembering them. Then as he realized I was doing that and progressing, we moved on to many other things.

 

So I showed him what I had learned. I showed him my Hidden Stick form, then he showed me his Hidden Stick form. Each was slightly different from the other.

He declared he was going to stick with his version, I then said I was going to skick with mine. And that is what each of us did.

 

As time passed I realized the form could be done with anything I held in my hand. A rock, a bottle, a can, a book, a length of chain, a sword, literally anything.

 

 I even worked out the movements could be used as a different system of empty hand fighting, and worked out accompanying empty hand uses. It was not karate but something else.

 

Due the length of the form I worked how ½ of the form could be used as a brown belt supplemental study (and that was a good form in its own right).

 

 

 

Then after black belt the entire form would be studied. As the student already knew half the form, they just had to learn the end. It made a nice black belt supplemental study

 

 

 

 And after the entire form was used, I would snow them it made for an interesting knife technique form too. (But my purpose was not to teach them to slice into others with knives – still I made them aware that potential exists.

 

Many times my students competed with the form and when they walk towards the judges, the crown not knowing the stick is up their sleeve. You can hear the crowd mutter where is his weapon? Then to gasp as the students pulls it out of his sleeve.

 

The reality is the same form can be done entirely with tip of the stick strikes.

The reality is the same form can be done entirely with blade of the stick strikes.

The reality of the same form can be done entirely with butt stick strikes.

The reality of the same form can be done mixing all three strikes, and while our practice uses one set of combinations, there are many other possibilities.

 

 

Much later I found a YouTube video of a Bando Kukri form, and it is extremely similar to the stick form I studied. Really now knowing the Bando system, I could theorize the stick form might have been a derivative of the kukri form, done that was as a beginning practice. While that works for me it is not necessarily reality.

 

 

 

Of course a Stick in Time Saves Nine, takes on a new meaning.