WMA in the future?

[James Hudec]

I'm just wondering: If, supposing that WMA become more popular and publicly acknowledged, do you see longsword or other combat styles becoming competition sports on the level of, say, saber or foil fencing?

[GaryGrzybek]

Good question...

It could be damaging to the art if too many rules are applied or much of the combat effective techniques removed for safety. I would support this as long as the integrity of the art could remain intact. After all, isn't this what happened to many of the Asian fighting systems?

[John_Clements]

Ugg...I desperately hope not. Sportification is the death of serious martial art.

[Casper Bradak]

Some people are certainly trying. Several SCAish types from faux-chivalric tournament sports are working on melding the two. I hope they don't overshadow our efforts at legitimacy.

[James Hudec]

My apologies John, I guess it was a bit of a stupid question.

What made me bring it up was that I've got this weird image stuck in my mind of foot combat with war hammers as a spectator sport. <img src="/forum/images/icons/crazy.gif" alt="" />

[Derek Gulas]

Now that's a sport I'd pay to watch! It's too bad nobody had thought of that sport when I was still in high school.

[Jay Vail]

We already have sport longsword. It’s called kendo.

[Gene Tausk]

Why would we want to make it more "sportified?'

The whole reason ARMA had to develop in the first place is because WMA degenerated from effective fighting arts to highly limited and structured sports like fencing. It seems we would be going in a circular pattern if we tried to impose rules and restrictions on ourselves and certainly would be counterproductive to ARMA's purpose.


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[Jaron Bernstein]

I don't know. Just a thought, but if we look at EMA tournaments, we have a range of things like awful "point karate" to better Judo matches, muay thai fights or western boxing bouts up to what I think is a very fair and high quality MMA world. A sword fight formal competition doesn't have to be kendo or some ridiculous "gentlemanly" foil bout on 1' wide strip with "right of way" and buzzers. It can just as easily be structured more like a MMA/UFC/Pride bout with paddeds, wasters, and (wooden) rondels and armor thrown in.

[Casper Bradak]

Sounds like a tourney to me. In that respect, some SCA and "live steel" groups are occasionally not too far off.

[John_Clements]

There's no stupid questions, James, no need to apologize. It's a worthy discussion.

Any fencing or martial art activity that is far removed from either the battlefield or self-defense conditions which originated them, and suffers from the inevitable civilianization and sportification that results, will prove insufficient for understanding historical fighting skills concerned about earnest combat. One essential problem that arises for students of historical fencing is that fictional incarnations in popular culture typically are terrible distortions of the real thing, yet are pervasively influential. Make sense?

JC

[James Hudec]

Yes John, that makes perfect sense. While I would love to see a medieval or renaissance foot combat, I can see there's no reason to "sportify" it or otherwise debase it by turning it into some sort of popular entertainment.

I'm sorry I've taken so long to reply to this. I haven't been able to get on for a while.

By the way, my thanks to everyone who welcomed me here and the advice they gave. It's very much appreciated.

[Derek Gulas]

Okay... you just said there are no stupid questions, so I'm gonna take a shot at this <img src="/forum/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" />

My question is, why can't we have it both ways? Why can't we have a completely effective and deadly martial art, that could also have a competitive element to it added on? This competitive element doesn't have to be the focus of the art. I guess what I'm trying to say is, as long as we make a competition only a small part of the art, a "Nebenkunst" so to speak, perhaps we could preserve the combativeness, keep it in its context and have a little fun at the same time. Afterall, we can recognize the fact that we allowed our fighting arts to atrophy last time, and therefore be more vigilant this time. I'm not saying that the ARMA should do this as sports are not the focus of the ARMA, but maybe it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if another organization did this in the future, as long it were done correctly.

[Gene Tausk]

IMHO, the reason it is difficult to have both a martial art which stresses combat effectiveness and a "sport" version at the same time is because in many ways the two are mutually incompatible. In "sport" versions you are trying to gain points or win a match within a proscribed set of rules which force you to confine your training to within those parameters. Once set within those parameters, it is very difficult to get outside of them (although I hate to say this since it is trite already, "it is hard to think outside the box" <img src="/forum/images/icons/grin.gif" alt="" />

A good example is TKD. Modern Olympic TKD focuses on kicks waist high and above to the exclusion of everything else. Therefore, training in Olympic TKD is reduced to learning how to kick waist-high and above. Learning how to kick vulnerable targets to the leg and groin are excluded as well as hand techniques, to say nothing of learning how to roll, fall, grapple, etc. This means that in a combat situation, Olympic TKD practitioners have limited themselves to certain techniques with which they feel comfortable and proficient while ignoring a large variety of other techniques which are equally if not more effective (NOTE: I am NOT saying that Olympic TKD practitioners don't know how to fight). This leaves them vulnerable to many attacks against which they have not learned to defend themselves which can spell trouble for such practitioners.

Once again IMHO, once you start down the path of sportification, you are intentionally limiting the techniques you will study and use, which places limitations on your development of a martial art.

"Once you start down the path..." Hmmm, wonder where I heard that before?! <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />


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[Patrick Hardin]

I agree with Gene; the danger in creating a combat sport is that people would unavoidably start to train specifically for the sport, and not for combat. Naturally, some sort of victory condition or scoring system would have to be developed which is non-lethal. Therefore, training for the sport would eventually be specifically designed to win within that system, thus excluding a lot of martial training that has applications in real combat. Just look at sport fencing. The way a sport fencer trains and the way a martial artist studying smallsword trains will be drastically different. The exact same thing would happen in a sportified version of Rennaisance martial arts, sooner or later. At that point, the martial artist could not be greatly successful competing in the sport, and vice versa.

On a similar note, does anybody know if a similar situation arose within the sport of jousting in the Middle Ages/Rennaisance? Was there anyone who complained that jousters were merely "sporting," and not really training for war?

Patrick Hardin