MixedMartialArts.com shows what really work in martial arts, and sometimes what doesn’t work, by studying what happens on the street, or in this case, at a seminar. If you enjoyed it, check out more best-of stories on:
1. Style vs. Style
2. Martial Arts on The Street
3. Dojo Storms
Prior to the advent of mixed martial arts, there was endless bickering about what martial art was better, with every approach arguing for its superiority. It was like Garrison Keillor’s Like Wobegone – a place where all the children were above average. Bizarrely, no one ever actually tried fighting to find out if their approach to fighting was actually more effective.
There were, however, a handful of exceptions.
In the Wing Chun / Ving Tsun community there have been endless decades of blather about which approach was better. Eventually, Wing Chun Grand Master William Cheung made the cardinal mistake of believing his own malarkey, and put out a challenge.
“I am the most knowledgeable master in the Wing Chun System and I am the best fighter,” he wrote. “And I am willing to prove it to them at any time, anywhere.”
Turkish/German Ving Tsun master Emin Boztepe took him up on that. For the record, master Emin has nothing whatsoever verifiable to back up his fighting ability. He and his students do however have dumpsters full of ludicrous stories. Boztepe has numerous times fought multiple armed skinheads, they say. AND, he never suffered a defeat in 300 such streetfights, they say. And master sifu has really great abs! PLUS a mean scowl. There is NO WAY he is not legit. Just watch him demonstrate on a compliant student, and you’ll see.
But in 1986, things got real. Cheung went to Germany to conduct a seminar, and he was confronted by Boztepe. They two fought.
Curiously, not everyone was kung-fu fighting. In fact, no one was.
What Happened
The pair clinch, without knowing how to clinch, and Cheung throws an elbow and follows up with a knee, whereupon the pair fall to the ground. Whether going to the ground was ineptitude or by design is a point of disagreement.
Please note, in a system without any ground fighting, when two of its leading grandmasters fought, it went to the ground within 2-3 seconds. Cheung resembles nothing so much as a tortoise that has been flipped over, shoving with his arms and then his legs. Boztepe, flopping on top, tries to pin an arm to no avail, throws several harmless punches, and then it peters out.
Despite endless rumors, neither man was hurt in the least.
Cheung says what really happened was he didn’t want to fight because it could jeopardize his German visa, plus right before the seminar a photographer (in retrospect a covert actor for the Ving Tsun group) asked him to don slippery shoes leading to the takedown, plus he was attacked from behind, plus he blocked all of Boztepe’s strikes so his opponent ended up running away in frustration.
You can’t make this stuff up. How even a single person remains in his organization is a testament to the human ability to live with delusion.
The Lesson
The fight proved something to any rational human being who hasn’t taken too many Wing Chun lessons. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, neither Emin Boztepe nor William Cheung knows much, if anything, about fighting. They looked like nothing so much as school children, rolling around in tears after a disagreement on who was better, Spiderman or Santa Claus.
The fight also proved whether Ving Tsun or Wing Chun is better – neither. Both instructors know nothing about fighting. Unfortunately, some martial arts students’ sense of self gets so wrapped up in whatever hocus pocus discipline they study, that all rational thought is self-suppressed, and replaced with an unfortunate form of blind faith.
A child could look at this video and tell that neither man knew how to fight. Unfortunately, adults still tell stories, to others and themselves. But the truth is right there for all to see. And it’s not a secret.
Bruce Lee on Wing Chun
When Bruce Lee started studying Wing Chun, Cheung was a classmate. Lee once had to actually try it, vs. Wong Jack-Man, another Hong Kong-based Kung Fu expert. Matthew Polly, author of Bruce Lee: A Life, interviewed David Chin, who arranged the fight on Wong’s behalf. Chin says as Wong was about to bow in, Lee flurried, overwhelming his opponent, who turned and ran. According to this account, Lee, still punching, chased after Wong, who ran around the room until he fell, whereupon Lee leapt on top and punched until it was over.
This matches Lee’s own accounting of what happened.
“I’d gotten into a fight in San Francisco with a Kung-Fu cat, and after a brief encounter the son-of-a-bitch started to run,” recalled Lee. “I chased him and, like a fool, kept punching him behind his head and back. Soon my fists began to swell from hitting his hard head. Right then I realized Wing Chun was not too practical and began to alter my way of fighting.”
Lee vs. Jack-Man likely looked a lot like the video above. This is what Hollywood said it looked like (that’s supposed to be Lee barechested, Man in orange robes):
That cartoonish style of fighting is still taught and believed in, to this day. Yet the only verifiable fight that both Boztepe and Cheung were ever in looks like a joke. And it’s easy to fight if you want to, especially when you are in the fight business.
Dutch martial arts legend Jon Bluming says Boztepe had an offer to actually fight, and turned it down, in tears.
“My boys went over there [to Emin Boztepe’s kwoon] Dolman and Vrij and a few other guys, because he claimed no one can beat him,” said Bluming. “He was on his knees crying, and I’m not kidding you. He’s an a**hole. He said, ‘please guys this is only for advertising, come on, I just want to make a dollar, that’s all.’ So they just spit on him and they left. He’s an a**hole.
Buming’s notable students include Wim Ruska (two-time world champion and two-time Olympic champion in judo), Chris Dolman (two-time world sambo champion), Semmy Schilt (four-time K-1 World Grand Prix Champion), Gilbert Yvel (pioneering Dutch MMA fighter), Jan Plas and Thom Harinck (The Fathers of Dutch Kickboxing), Hideyuki Ashihara (founder of Ashihara Karate), Azuma Takashi (founder of Daidō Juku), and countless other tremendous talents.
There are so many martial arts that demonstrably work. And there are so many that demonstrably don’t, when pressure tested. Why so many millions cling to the latter, while desiring the ability to defend themselves, remains an enduring mystery.
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