So I have been thinking a lot about the question Terry posed in his OP—how do we preserve the sound, effective core of TKD, the things that spoke to the problem which brought it into being—how are you going to defend yourself from an untrained, dangerous attacker in a conflict you did not seek out but cannot now avoid?—and this issue of sport/tradition. I'll say this much for Flashlock's distaste for the dichotomy: very often the `traditional' side is as empty from the combat perspective as the sport side. Emphasizing the mere performance of patterns, rather than their application (or rather the application of the subsequences they can be decomposed into) and training those application, along with the adoption holus-bolus of the
kihon line training method the kwan founders learned when they studied their MAs in Japan in the 30s, isn't good enough; that's what I think of as
blind allegiance to tradition, and it's not good enough precisely because it gives the practitioner no more of an effective, versatile combat system than learning sport TKD (or karate, or `demonstration' Wu Shu). This ties in directly with Brian's point:
Old style TKD is not about sport and therefore it was built first and foremost to be able to survive in a combative situation. For that it has been very successful based on the feared reputation of the ROK in Vietnam and other conflicts.
When you merge a self defense form into a sport you get a rule based driven competition that takes the martial out of it. That does not mean that it is not useful or effective for what it is intended to do but that it simply is no longer geared towards personal protection but instead is geared towards competition in a ring. Two very, very different animals.
The point of studying the history and the traditions of TKD (or karate or any other MA) isn't so you can get a warm fuzzy lineage about practicing some supposedly ancient combat systems that links you to the Old Stone Age. The true reason is because the conditions under which any MA grew and flourished in the past contain pointers to technical details that are relevant to how components of the art are best applied in
contemporary practice. Knowing that Itosu, Matsumura and the other forefathers of modern TKD did not spend their own fighting careers blocking assailants' punches, but instead typically flattened them in the first few moves of the fight, is a crucial piece of information when looking at a down block and realizing that it's actually an upward elbow strike followed by a lateral `spearing' elbow strike followed by a knifehand or hammerfist strike to your choice of targets on the opponent's forcibly lowered upper body (which is what the `retraction chambering' hand is actually helping you to enforce). It's not a block primarily, or even secondarily. The forms are an entrée into the mind of the great Okinawan fighters and their best senior students showing us how they saw strikes, throws, locks and neck-twists flowing together in the course of a fight they wanted to end, like,
right now. If tradition isn't studied from this point of view—for clues to actual combat practice—then yes, it's just so much fluff.
So from that general point of view, my best guess at a useful answer to Terry's question is, what TKD needs is a network—or system of networks—of dojangs, dojos and other MA schools committed to this idea of combat application under realistic, often very unpleasant and, almost certainly, way less than ideal conditions...the kind of thing that Brian has been building with his Instinctive Response Training program. The last thing we need is another organization with the greed, egomania and other-than-combat agendas we see in virtually every large MA association. What I'm thinking of is a kind of
informal North American version of the British Combat Association and their constellation of seminars, special training programs and cross-fertilization of tactical resources. People in the BCA don't lose the separate identity of their `home' MAs; they learn from each other how best to train those MAs and how to better perfrom the tactical components—locks, for example, or the uses of chokes in a striking art, or technique `flow'—that their own arts shares with many others. If I had my own school, that's what I'd be looking to help get set up. Nothing institutionalized or bureaucratized; but a community of combat-oriented MA schools more interested in developing effective self-defense fighters than in empty emblems of rank, like fifteeenth Dan belts, or profits from teaching people lame cardio kickboxing routines and packaging them as effective self-defense and great character-builders for kids...
