Memoirs of a Karate Fighter Read online

  Top-level instruction from Japanese karateka, who were then amongst the best in the world, also played a part in Britain’s success. But, ironically, it was the latent racism within Japanese karate that had made the British team so successful in international competitions, from the mid-1970s right up until the 1990s. After a brief period of condescension in the 1960s, when it was considered that the gaijin student did not possess the innate qualities, nor the martial arts tradition to really learn karate, the Japanese then set the bar so high to achieve a black belt that in many cases a European third dan ended up having a far greater range of techniques and knowledge than his Japanese equivalent. And yet, when given the choice, many clubs in Britain chose a Japanese instructor to do their grading examinations, as it had been so firmly implanted into their subconscious that the belts they awarded were somehow ‘more authentic’. Japan’s defeat in World War Two also influenced how some instructors taught their art. Once, when slightly worse for drink, a Japanese instructor confided in Eddie Cox that he would never teach an American or English karateka all he knew. They could speak the language, profess a love for the culture, even marry a Japanese person and train diligently, but there was no way he would impart to them the ogi (secret techniques) of Wado Ryu. The irony only struck me after years of training: many of my peers had become involved in karate as a reaction to the racism they faced on a day-to-day basis, and yet many dojos were not the sanctuaries from intolerance they had sought but often hothouses of prejudices based on grades, style of karate, nationality and race.

  *

  A couple of days later there was a pleasant surprise waiting for me at my parents’ home when I called in one evening: there was a letter informing me that I had been selected to attend trials for selection for an England against Scotland match at under-21 level. I could hardly eat my dinner fast enough before I hurried to Clinton’s house.

  I found him lying under an old Ford Escort he had bought. His brother Ewart was a Ford mechanic and had told him not to buy it, but Clinton spurned my good advice. I told Clinton about the letter but he stayed under the car and grunted that he had received one too. The sound of banging and scraping of metal continued. I had anticipated a different reaction: at first I had been fearful that my selection might provoke some envy but then I quickly discounted the thought as Clinton had never been jealous of any of my successes, in fact he shared in them as I would not have achieved much without him as my training partner. But when I heard that Clinton had also been picked for the trials I immediately expected more of an excited response, in which we would plan a training schedule together. When he finally emerged from underneath the old car, I saw a strange look in Clinton’s eyes that I had not noticed before and it disturbed me. It was distant and disengaged. I was not sure what to do so I playfully punched him on the shoulder as I congratulated him, hoping it would bring him out of t h i s trance. Clinton looked at his shoulder and then slowly up into my face. He blinked, and as if slowly waking, a smile started to spread across his face. “Well,” he laughed, “getting selected can’t be no big thing, even Leslie got a letter.”

  I was still feeling a pang of concern for my cousin. “But you’re feeling all right, Clint?”

  He gave me a puzzled frown and gently poked my chest. “Better than you.” He picked up his tools and said, “Come on, let’s go inside and work out how we’re going to fit in some extra training.”

  – Chapter Eight –

  Many things cause a loss of balance. One cause is danger, another is adversity and another is surprise.

  Miyamoto Musashi – The Fire Book

  I HAD ARRIVED early for the first class on Thursday evening. During the previous session I had been told to turn up for the junior class, which was for beginners and those students who were younger than fifteen, to help with their instruction. Through the door of the dojo I saw an ill-at-ease, wiry man pacing the floor. “Ralph, hurry up and get changed!” shouted a relieved Eddie Cox, “there’s a man here who wants to take a photo.”

  Once I had my gi on, I hurried back into the dojo. Reticent about publicity, none of the senior members had bothered to turn up for the photo shoot so it was left to Don Hamilton, Mick Bryan, Trog and one of the younger students to line up with me and our sensei to proudly show off the British Karate Federation Clubs’ Championship trophy to the readers of the local evening newspaper. The camera’s flash lit up the hall half a dozen times before the photographer produced a notebook and took Eddie Cox to one side to ask a few questions about the tournament and those who were present for the photograph. Unused to such media attention, we gawked at our sensei and the journalist until Eddie Cox looked over and called out, “Mr Robb, please warm up the class.”

  Trog was not happy as I put the class through a series of stretching routines. He was much more supple than anyone else present and may have been a better choice, but I was the higher grade. Trog still believed that the position given to me in the first team had been rightfully his, even though I had vindicated my sensei’s faith in me with my performances at the championships.

  This was my first attempt at giving instructions and I was amazed at how uncoordinated the movements of the beginners were – and yet I had performed the same exercises in a similar awkward fashion only five years before. The changes to my body and mind were incremental over the years of karate training and it was only after being confronted with the ungainly novices did I realize just how much I had changed.

  The sensei returned and took the bow to formally begin the training session and as I was the most senior student present he told me to put the class through the basic techniques. He was throwing me in at the deep end: up until then I had simply followed instructions and never analyzed the principles that lay behind them. It was then I grasped how much of a learning experience teaching karate is, as I did my best to explain how to perform a simple punch, the importance of breathing properly and how a kiai (shout) is used to enhance the power of a technique, in a manner similar to that of field athletes and weight-lifters as they expel air during a moment of intense exertion. But with the sensei – and Trog – scrutinizing my performance, I was becoming flustered as I tried to convey what I wanted the students to perform. I was glad when I was finally relieved of my duties. As I joined the rest of the students, out of the side of his mouth, Trog said, “You were confusing yourself, never mind the rest of us.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “like the time when my foot in your chest seemed to confuse you.”

  By the time the junior class had ended only a quarter of the normal number of seniors had turned up. Despite the discipline in the dojo, in reality there is no compulsion in the martial arts. No one forces us to go training, we make the choice to do so – and as Hironori Ohtsuka said: the first opponent we must overcome is ourselves. The black belts turned up and offered a series of lame excuses about why they had missed the photo shoot. It had taken a concerted effort by every member, and not just the seven fighters who had made up the first team, to secure the victory, and some were obviously still feeling the effects. But by turning up for training the black belts set an example for the rest of us. Each one of the senior grades had their own personal ambitions to drive them on; with so many titleholders in the club it meant that no one could rest on their laurels. Jerome Atkinson was the most outstanding example of this. He had won his first national and European Wado Ryu titles as a brown belt but he realized he needed a change in his training and fighting style to go up a level and win a national all-styles title; and once he had experienced fighting at the 1980 world championships he became aware that his training regime had to be refined yet further if he were to succeed at the very top level. In many ways, he was re-programming his reflexes and ‘muscle-memory’ and was a model of extraordinary single-mindedness.

  But it seemed some were taking longer than others to recover from the British championships. Clinton and Leslie were amongst the missing and I worried that their call-up for the under-21 trials had made them compla
cent. Clinton’s absence caused me the most anxiety: he was my training partner and I felt it was my responsibility to get him back on track.

  *

  Clinton was underneath his old Ford again. He had been working on it almost every day in the two weeks since he had bought it and the car had yet to move from the front of his house. Clinton was nothing if not determined, but to me it was like trying to breathe life into a body that was long dead. I had driven by his place to see if he wanted a lift to the Saturday morning fighting class, but the moment I spotted him I knew he would be too busy with his car to come training. Cursing him and the car, I decided to save my breath and pressed on for Leslie’s house.

  Leslie’s parents were on holiday in Jamaica, and because of previous experiences, when I rang the bell I was unsure of what I would find on the other side of the door. “Quick, come in,” he said, eyes furtively shifting from side to side. As he closed the door behind me I noticed how tired he looked and that his clothes were askew as if he had dressed hastily. It did not take me long to work out that he had company. It turned out to be the tall girl to whom we had given a lift to the nightclub with her friend Cleo. After a brief moment of wondering about what girls saw in him and how the hell he had won her around, I asked Leslie if he were coming training and he looked at me as if I had just asked a very stupid question. “But look, Les,” I protested, “we have to get back into the groove. We’ve got the trials coming up, remember.”

  He was laughing as he said, “Next week, Ralph, we’ll start next week. I’m just letting the injuries heal before I get back into serious training.”

  I drove to the dojo berating both Clinton and Leslie’s lapses in dedication but part of me was regretting that I had not asked Leslie about Cleo; perhaps my commitment would be waning too if I had such an attractive distraction in my life.

  The fighting class was exactly that. After the customary warm-up exercises there followed an hour of sparring, starting off slow and light but normally finishing very fast and very hard. It still attracted karateka from throughout the area who were looking to improve their fighting skills. It must have been a daunting prospect for them, particularly for the visiting black belts who often found themselves struggling with the green belts – and at the end of the line there were the more proficient and merciless black belts waiting for them. After watching the team win the British championships, a brown belt had travelled from Birmingham to train with us. He bowed, while politely asking Eddie Cox if he could join the class. He was at least six-foot-four but his suit had either shrunk or he had borrowed it from a far smaller karateka. His first mistake was to give off an air of timidity and fear – the very things that should not be shown when entering a combat situation. How much more fearful he would have been if he had seen the expressions of those who were looking on: we were like a pride of hungry lions who had just spotted our next meal. The trouble the brown belt had taken to visit the YMCA dojo should have been seen as a compliment, but for the majority of the low and middle grades it was an opportunity to prove themselves. Trog, as usual, was the most vocal. To the group of green belts around him he said loudly, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall!”

  And the tall brown belt did fall many times during that morning’s session. In the dojo, according to many instructors, there is no cruelty – and pain is a lesson well learned; the YMCA karate club adhered to this maxim and did its best to teach everyone a lesson, no matter who they were. On one occasion, there had been a national Wado Ryu squad training session held at the YMCA dojo, and a young Japanese instructor, who had apparently won an All-Japan Universities championship, had exactly the same sort of treatment meted out to him. He had hit the floor many, many times. To his credit, he kept hauling himself upright every time. The samurai had a saying of which the young Japanese champion was probably aware: ‘Kikioji, mikuzure, futanren.’ Kikioji is fear of an enemy’s reputation; mikuzure is fear of how the adversary looks; futanren is inadequate training; and any one of these three is enough to lose a fight. The reputation, grade, or the way a visitor looked counted for nothing in the YMCA dojo, and in that way, everyone was treated equally. If a visitor held his own, as only a few did, he could walk from the dojo with a real sense of achievement – and take with him the respect of the karateka with whom he had trained.

  *

  As I walked from the tower block where I lived, I saw signs of disrespect for people of my background everywhere. In the short time since I had moved to my flat there had been a proliferation of racist graffiti and National Front stickers that were plastered over empty shopfronts and hoardings. Most of this activity was due to local council elections, and as part of its campaign the NF was blaming immigrants for every social ill. Rising unemployment and crime levels and the poor state of the health service were all supposedly the fault of people like my hard-working, law-abiding parents. It made me furious – and frustrated, as I had yet to see anyone actually putting up a National Front poster, or scrawl one of their slogans: like nocturnal animals, they only seemed to appear at night.

  At nine o’clock on every Sunday morning Mr Kovac, one of my neighbours who lived in the flat directly opposite mine, would make the slow and steady walk down to the newsagents in the nearby high street. He was an elderly Hungarian man who did not appear to have many friends and he always expressed delight when I accompanied him. Often, he would have me spellbound with stories from his youth, in what he called the “old country”. Occasionally, I would try to match him with colourful events that had happened in my life but they always seemed pale in comparison.

  On hearing the familiar clunk of his front door, I simultaneously opened mine and he greeted me in his harsh Hungarian accent that had never softened, despite the years he had spent in England. We walked together along the murky landing and I wished bad luck on the person who had stolen yet another lightbulb from the passageway. While we waited for the lift, we made small talk about the weather. “Are you going karate chopping today?” he asked, changing the subject while making a swiping motion with his hands in gentle mockery.

  “Not today, we don’t start running again until next week. But that doesn’t stop you coming training with me. You’re not too old for me to give you a beating, you know.” I replied jokingly. Mr Kovac laughed and said he had enough trouble keeping his wife from beating him when he misbehaved. “How is your wife?” I asked, “I haven’t seen her around lately.”

  “Her legs are playing up,” Mr Kovac replied. “They hurt sometimes. She is resting and getting her strength up for her visit to Hungary next week.”

  “Are you going too?” I asked.

  He answered falteringly, “Hungary is my home, my beloved country, but I can’t go back.”

  His face showed signs of great pain, and I decided not to inquire about why he could not return. From our previous conversations, I knew Mr Kovac still carried the scars of experiences from his younger days and they were matters best left untouched. “How long is your wife going for?”

  “Two weeks. Her sister died recently.”

  The lift doors opened and I saw how dried blood speckled its walls. I took a hesitant step inside, chilled by the sight.

  “It’s only a little blood. It won’t hurt. I saw plenty of blood as a young man. Some of it was the blood of my friends,” Mr Kovac said, as he pushed the button for the ground floor.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, seeing what I thought was more than ‘a little blood’.

  Mr Kovac looked at me quizzically, and then he said, “Probably from those wild young men on the top floor. They are always cutting themselves or each other.”

  “You mean those skinheads?”

  “Yes, those poor boys covered in all those tattoos. They are lost souls.”

  “I can’t believe you call them ‘poor boys’. I hate them,” I snarled. “If they had their way, I would not even be in this country. And believe you me, you’d be on the next boat.”

  On hearing the anger in my voice the old
man shook his head. “You don’t understand what I said. They should be pitied; they are being used by others. They are not so different from you or me. Just like so many of you people, they have slipped through the cracks of society and they are often pushed to express themselves through violence. They are young, they are uneducated.”

  “These skinheads are all in the NF and want to hurt innocent people,” I protested. “You know the Front was trying to organize a march the other day, just to stir up more trouble, don’t you?”

  I had the feeling that Mr Kovac did not always understand me. “Don’t forget most of them are ignorant of the real world,” he said. “They, like so many young people, only know the little world they see and live in. And isn’t England a country of free speech? Maybe it is better to let them march and vent their frustration that way.”

  The lift doors slid open. “But you shouldn’t be free to stir up hatred with lies,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, I agree,” said Mr Kovac, as he moved stiffly beside me, “I’ve seen it all before in my country with the Jews. They felt they could not assimilate with other people because they were hated by a few, but their religious beliefs kept them separate too. This kind of separation feeds on itself, it feeds suspicion and gives one group a reason to hate the other and stay apart. And so many of them fail to recognize that we share the same humanity until it is too late.”

  We walked in silence for the rest of the short journey to the shop. We had our newspapers and were making our way back to the flats as I continued to try and work out if I agreed with – or even properly understood – what Mr Kovac had said. The lights of a pelican crossing changed for us and a car pulled up; I was still figuring out how I should reply to him while we were crossing the road, and did I not pay much attention to it. A blast of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from two large speaker horns on the car’s roof startled me and turned my head. A call of: “ENGLAND FOR THE ENGLISH – REPATRIATE NOW!” accompanied the music.