My Sisters, Fighting Isn’t Sport

“Real emotional content. Not anger. Now try again!” — Bruce Lee, “Enter the Dragon”

Maybe six years ago, while living in Atlanta, my friend Mushtaq called me and said that a friend of his, one of the deadliest knife fighters in the world, was coming through Atlanta and wondered if I would like to meet him. I said a fervent “yes.”

For reasons that will become apparent, I am deliberately obscuring identity here.

We met at the hotel where he was staying (he was in town in relation to his “day job”) and had a very pleasant dinner, while he spoke of his art with great passion and intelligence. Seemed a very, very pleasant guy, younger than me, but quite accomplished in several arenas. Finally, he asked me if I would like to experience his art.

I said “sure.”

We went up to his room, he extracted a live knife blade from his luggage, and what followed I can only describe as two hours of unmitigated terror. He moved that knife so fast it was a blur, coming from all angles at the same time. Broken rhythm. Absolute control: he would actually touch my skin with the blade WITHOUT CUTTING ME. I tried everything I knew, everything I’d learned in almost a half-century of training…and nothing worked.

And the technical brilliance was not the worst part. That was the tip of the spear, so to speak. The haft was the EMOTIONS motivating the action. Every martial art has a different emotional component, and every martial artist, if they are to be an…