Bob,
My perspective on Martial arts / sports today is that everyone is so rushed to say they are a black belt or want to say they are the bigest and badest.
That is definitely true, lots of people promoting themselves to ranks they shouldn't have and claiming titles that don't fit.
:lol: Nice one, Andy!
I want to revisit Mr. Whitney's text, reported in the OP for this thread, and just briefly assess—using publically available documentation—just how badly Mr. W., who keeps going on about `facts', has gotten the factual story wrong beyond all recognition. Let's just focus on the statement
The public needs to be aware that Tae Kwon Do IS NOT a Martial art and NEVER was.
and start with
... and NEVER was
• General Choi, who trained to a second dan in Shotokan under Gichin Funakoshi's direction, organized the Korean military after the Liberation and made the martial art he learned—which he and other Kwan founders eventually named Taekwondo—the standard H2H combative system for all RoK infantry starting around the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. No other national military has ever adopted a single TMA—the Korean variant of karate—as a combat standard, so far as I am aware.
• The Black Tiger commandos in the Korean War, and the White Tiger commandos in Vietnam, who were trained in this version of TKD, were feared by their enemies to such an extent that the VC field command in Vietnam in 1966 directed their troops to avoid contact with the Koreans specifically because of their TKD combat ability. At the Battle of Tra Binh Binh Dong a year, the RoK 11th Marine division imposed heavy casualties on a much larger force of North Vietnamese and broke their attack, leading to promotion of every single member of the division by a full rank. See my post
here for documentation, including news stories from
TIME magazine and the newsletter of the U.S. Marine Corps; details and reprints are given Stuart Anslow's recent book on bunkai for the ITF hyungs.
• To the extent that a battlefield combative system is successful, it has to be contrued as an effective SD system under the most extreme conditions. Since TKD (in a form still currently widely practiced by both MAists following both ITF and KKW technical content; see below), proved itself on the battlefield as a CQ fighting system to a greater extent than any other contemporary TMA, it satisfied any possible demand that a fighting system be combat-effective to qualify for the description `Martial Art'.
So much for the historical accuracy of the claim that TKD `never was' a Martial Art. Let's now go on to
TKD is not a martial art...
• The technical content of TKD, derived almost entirely from the Shotokan and Shudokan styles of karate, is maintained in its formal patterns, its hyungs, which encode exactly the same combat applications recoverable from the karate kata which gave rise to TKD. In my dojang, for example, we learn the Kichos (essentially identical to the Shotokan/Okinawan Taikyoku katas), the Palgwes (heavily indebted to the Pinan/Heian katas), and in addition to a number of black belt hyungs derived from Japanese sources, several Okinawan katas including Rohai, Bassai and Naihanchi.
• In an increasing number of dojangs, these forms are analyzed for combat application using methods pioneered by Rick Clark (
Seventy-five Down Blocks), Bill Burgar (
Five Years, One Kata) and especially Iain Abernethy (
Bunkai-Jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata), extracting combat-effective fighting techs form both the KKW and ITF hyungs and training them under`live', severely non-compliant conditions.
• As I pointed out in an earlier post to Mr. Whitney, which he apparently failed to absorb, I myself have trained for several years in a Song Moo Kwan (a literal translation into Korean of
Shoto kan `Waving pine tree martial training house') which employs hand, forearm and elbow strikes to the throat, carotid sinus, temple and eyes, trains neck breaks and spinal attacks using elbows, and breaking attacks to collarbones.
• A detailed series of newsletters written by Simon O'Neil, the appropriately named
Combat TKD series, available by subscription at
http://www.combat-tkd.com/Ctkd1/home.php, demonstrates combat applications of TKD using multiple head strikes, damaging attacks to the throat, nose and eyes, and neck breaks, employing pins, locks and other controlling moves to set up these terminal strikes.
• A very similar set of applications and attacks, using a similar strategic approach, clearly derived from O/J karate, is found in Stuart Anslow's 2006 book on street combat-effective bunkai for ITF hyungs.
• Anslow's Rayner's Lane dojang is affiliated with the British Combat Association, probably the largest national organization devoted to the realistic application under street-attack conditions of the full spectrum of MAs, including Asian TMAs, headed by the eight-dan karateka and experienced streetfighter Peter Consterdine. The TKD component of the BCA, and of Iain Abernethy's BCA-affiliated bunkai-jutsu network of MA schools and practitioners, is one of the fastest-grown components of that network.
None of the TKD schools, dojangs or practitioners mentioned here focus primarily, or at all, on tournament competition; they are all heavily invested in live training of TKD techs for unsought, but unavoidable street violence. To the extent that a traditional fighting system contains a rich set of combat applications, and makes those applications available to practitioners willing to train them for street conditions, to that extent it must count as a martial art,
as opposed to sport.
That, I think, fairly tidily disposes of Mr. Whitney's credibility insofar as he associates himself (100%, as I recall) with the statement in the OP on the website registered in his name.
Finally, I note that the Issinryu World Karate Association just held its 2007 world championship tournament, with 614 participants, according to the official tournament website at
http://www.isshin-ryu.com/iwka_2007.htm In numerous books on realistic bunkai methods for karate, such as those by Iain Abernethy and Lawrence Kane & Kris Wilder, we are repeatedly reminded that light-impact, spectacular kicks and other favored scoring methods have little or nothing to do with realistic combat methods inherent in karate's technical content, and over and over again see authors contrast `sport karate' with realistic CQ karate applications. It appears, then, that Issinryu and other forms of karate reflect a major split between sport and combat applications little different in kind from that within the Korean variant of karate called TKD.
I bring these points up just to offer some further ammunition to my friends and colleagues on MT that they might want to avail themselves of should they ever encounter claims, based in profound ignorance as a rule, that TKD is a sport, not an effective fighting system. Unfortunately, there are all too many people who know
nothing about TKD running about, telling other people who also know nothing about TKD the kind of nonsense that the OP in this thread cited from Mr. Whitney's website. In some cases, my experience has been, people will when confronted with well-documented evidence of the kind I've alluded to, readjust their ideas to a more realistic picture of TKD. There are others who may be incapable of doing so and in that case... well, you tried. Remember what Schiller told us as a general maxim:
Against stupidity, the Gods Themselves contend in vain.
What he was getting at, I think, is that sometimes it's just not worth the bother...
