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Spitting Blood

Many otherwise intelligent young martial artists aspire to learn how to street fight. And they come and ask me, an ex-streetfighter how to do it.

Huh? Why would you want to engage in stupid, obnoxious, dangerous and -- most often -- illegal behavior?

While trends in advertising put great emphasis on unbeatable streetfighting training, it is, at best, an unrealistic fantasy and, at worst, a flat-out lie that can and will get you killed. If you do survive, you will find yourself in all kinds of legal and social trouble. In short, street-fighting is NOT what it is cracked up to be.

Spitting Blood
I earned the name "Animal" in Los Angeles back in the 70s and 80s. I ran the streets and the night during the most violent period in American history, a time of the highest murder rate ever.

While some might think that statement is me marketing my unbeatable fighting system, the simple fact is that is middle class thinking. Not only that, but calling what I grew up in 'the streets' IS marketing. What I grew up in is called 'situational poverty.' That means my family was economically reduced to living among people of generational poverty. Their grandparents were poor, their parents were poor, they were poor ... and for many of them their children are now poor. This isn't some grand and glorious thing, it's living among people for whom violence and crime were considered useful tools. And yes, I used those tools.

When I grow'd up out of that, I worked in high risk professions such as body guarding, bouncing and correctional institutions -- well into the late 90's. (It's been 13 years since I was last shot at). Yep, even after I had begun writing about streetfighting and survival I was still deep in the shit.

How deep? It was still my job to tell very nasty people "No." And when you tell someone "No, you can't kidnap, rape and murder this woman" -- those kinds of people get real cranky.

In short, I have stood on both sides of the law and experienced extensive amounts of violence from both perspectives.

I want you to realize that I am 49 years old and there is NEVER a time in my life that I don't remember fighting, trying to avoid a fight, dealing with the repercussions of a fight, training to fight, waiting for violence to happen, preventing violence from happening, cleaning up the mess from violence that did happen, studying violence, researching crime and violence or teaching others how to deal with it. (1) While that doesn't make me the toughest man on the planet, it does make me a whole lot more knowledgeable about the subject than 99.999% of the internet warriors and dojo darling out there. There were times in my life where in one week I was involved in more violence than most so-called self-defense experts have experienced in their entire lives.

That's why these days when some young puffed up mixed martial artist tries to tell me how prepared he is for real street fighting, I tell him "Kid, where I'm from, if you thought the guy was a threat, you reached for a weapon. We used empty hands to beat women."

Welcome to the reality of street life.

It ain't grand. It ain't glorious. Having spent time in "the Life," I have strong feelings about the wisdom in the saying "Don't go there."

This ain't no elite boys club that joining will solve all your feelings of insecurity and inferiority. And it definitely won't make your dick grow. It will just give you bigger problems. There's a lot of pain and stupidity out there.. A lot of people think there is a lot of power and pride in being a "streetfighter," I can tell you from personal experience that the grief and pain far outweighs any benefits.

And to tell you the truth, in order to find yourself in a "streetfight" you have to be somewhat of an asshole. You may want to believe otherwise, but there is a simple raw truth....there ain't no such thing as "a good guy" in a streetfight. In fact, most of the time it's a pretty self-absorbed and dead end attitude.

So if you're looking for someone to do all that for you by making you an unbeatable streetfighter using their ultimate fighting system, pack your fantasies up and go somewhere else.

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1)When I tell you what kind of people are involved in street violence I am not only speaking from personal and bloody experience, but I'm also citing sources from criminology, law enforcement, corrections, justice system and psychology. Return to Text