A Thing of Beauty

On Saturdays, I like to do what's become known in my house as "long cardio day." This means that I go to the gym and run on the treadmill like the boring 30-something that I am and then, and then, do another 30 minutes on the elliptical machine. 60 minutes of cardio! That's long, man!

But life, as it does, is starting to wag its finger in my face about that. Minor and subtle aches creep into my legs more often than they used to these days, which is something I once thought was major problem and is now just one of those normal things you accept. I used to think that I was an 80 year-old guy trapped in 28 year-old's body. Now, I'm just some dude.

Whenever I actually stop to give these little pains some real thought --which, kind of never happens, I guess-- I'm always reminded of my time in college training in Kyokushin karate. Mostly, I'm reminded of how often I would come home from practice with my bell rung because I never kept my hands up during fights with one of the Japanese students (whom were goddamn Kyokushin wizards). "Minor aches and pains" were often sore shins and bruised chest muscles from taking a few training beatings. We're talking 2000-2002 here, which means that MMA was still very much a niche thing, and it wasn't as easy to find a gym that taught hard-contact fighting as it might be today. Dumb-lucking into it on my own college campus at such a time was kind of spectacular. I stopped training in martial arts after I graduated from college because I was broke and couldn't find a suitable Kyokushin replacement in the Cleveland area (though it was the broke thing, mostly), but these are times I remember fondly; ass beatings notwithstanding.

Ok, then. Look at this. I mean, really, skip to the 54 second mark of this video and gaze upon this poetic thing of beauty:

Really quick, I'm not a violent guy. I'm very even-tempered, and my full time job requires that I maintain that kind of disposition. But, man, this combo. This is a pre-programmed chain (the Street Fighter games call them "target combos" now) that originated in Tekken 4. No, I don't mean the dumb uppercut/ sidekick thing at the end, I mean the four kicks and punches that came in such a succinct and brutal manner beforehand. Tekken 4, in all honesty, is a piece of shit in Tekken terms, but this combo is not. From a fighter's perspective, it looks like it was made in a laboratory full of mad Kyokushin geniuses. In a stand-up fight in a ring, these four hits, aligned in such an economical symphony of body movement, is at once startlingly efficient in its systemic ways of butchering an opponent as it is fluid in its seemingly simple mechanics. I can't not talk about this combo.

Piece-of-Shit-Tekken 4 came out at a time in my Kyokushin training when we were taking a break from learning the often useless perfunctory of katas so we could focus on why most of us were in the class: to train for and compete in tournaments. What makes it unique compared to its far superior predecessor, if only to two or three males in Bowling Green, OH at the turn of the millennium, was its copious inclusion of Kyokushin tidbits. From an attract mode kata to story mode implications to combos like this one, the ghost of Oyama's style looms heavily over the game, and it was impossible for someone training in the form to miss it. Naturally, we even tried to replicate what we were playing while sparring, at least as best we could. In the game, the combo in question isn't entirely useful compared to other ways of closing the distance and finishing someone off. IRL, though. if I can get off that first kick to your head, even blocked, then you would remember it. It is as gorgeous and perfect as the Spring sun upon a flowered meadow. I swear to God I'm not joking about this.

So let's break it down, movement by movement. It certainly looks simple enough to perform, and it's relatively short length is deceptive in the damage that it would deal to a human body, but that's part of the beauty. The reality, here, is that these are all pinpointed movements to shorten the space between you and the target before quickly attacking individual locations on the body to cripple them and end the fight.

It starts before the high round kick with the left leg to the head. In the video, right-handed Kazuya deftly switches his stance to the left while inching forward (or "kosa," and if he were rounding the side of the opponent subtly to do it --which would have only made to make this combo that much fucking crazier-- it would have been a "sabaki" movement). This looks like he's just taking a step forward with his right leg (and, in a way, it is), but this takes planning and forethought in a real fight to dope an opponent into letting their guard down to pull it off. From here, the kick comes to the side of the head, as roundhouse kicks are meant to do, but isn't intent on going through the target as roundhouse kicks normally should. While certainly designed to hurt, the kosa movement and then kick scoots Kazuya forward for one of two mutually useful effects: either it hits the guy in the head to daze them, or gets their hands up to block the kick. The payoff of the latter will come soon.

It's here that we need to take a quick second and swoon like the child I am at Kazuya's form with this kick, because that leads us into the next movement. Like most Japanese fighters, the mechanics of his round kick form a motion that resembles a person running: left foot forward/ left hand back/ right foot back/ right hand forward. This is intentionally taught, because to get this seemingly easy concept down in execution takes a substantial amount of practice. And for good reason, too, because if you're doing it right, you'll obtain the maximum amount of force for the kick. But we just discussed that force wasn't the point of this particular attack, though it would certainly be handy here.

Now the left hand comes as the left leg returns to the floor. However, Kazuya didn't wheel his hip backward after his left kick like most people would after the connection. Instead, he drops his foot to the ground after the strike snaps to use it as his final movement forward so as to ease into the range of the left punch, which was already in the chamber. Though it's just a guy kicking and then punching, doing both from one side of the body in succession is something of a counter-intuitive movement without having practiced it extensively. But carefully looking at how Kazuya pulls it off makes it deceptively seamless. The reality of it is simple body mechanics, like the rest of the combo: as his hips are turned for the kick, placing the foot down and forward after the strike readies the already-cocked left arm for quick release.

Most novice or intermediate opponents probably know that this isn't a common movement, this punch off of the kicking leg's side, and indeed it subverts the typical left/right/left/right techniques that are common to a student's early training. It's actually hard to notice without slowing down the video or pausing at the right moment, but the eventual punch goes slightly downward into the collarbone or top of the chest, implying that this wasn't meant to be the real breadwinner of these four movements, either (although the dummy in the video is just bending backward for effect). But imagine this combo like a four syllable word or phrase, and where the emphasis is placed is a decision for the speaker. One could really get some force out of that punch, but judging by what you see from next two moves that follow, it doesn't feel totally necessary.

For that, we're going back to basic body mechanics. With clever movement, Kazuya is now re-positioned back to his original right-handed stance. This happened concurrent with the punch, which readies his hips with ample amounts of torque for the back right leg to throw a devastating low round kick. This is a somewhat short ranged move that the first two attacks placed Kazuya in perfect range for. In the gym, the kick would strike on the side (or top) of the opponent's thigh, with the point of impact being the bottom of Kazuya's shin --something harder than the fragile arch of his foot-- into the meat of the leg. But that's the nice guy way of doing things. In a combat situation where Kazuya's life might depend on it, he would nail the other schmuck on the side of the knee to try to blow out the joint which, if it connects, is about as cruel as it sounds. Even if that's not the case, a full-speed kick like this to the quad is a real bruiser, even if it's not the most common way of turning someone's lights out like a roundhouse to the back of the head might be. The low kick snaps back to ready Kazuya's hips for the final blow.

Now, if you grew up watching martial arts movies as a kid, you easily condition yourself into thinking that real hand-to-hand fighting has a secret vocabulary of enchanted movements. When it comes to actual training, though, this gets demystified for you pretty quickly once you get passed learning specific techniques and logistical movement. From there, it's just practice, practice, practice until you get your body able to do things that opponents flat out don't see coming or can't react to. Basically, once you move out of the newbie stage, there aren't any secrets anymore.

Except one.

I'm writing this on a Monday. Before I had my kid, Mondays were often the day of the week that meant an apology note should be sent to my liver. Maybe even a large, though tasteful, bouquet of flowers. I would do terrible things to my liver on the weekends, and if I were still training in Kyokushin, Mondays are the days that I would pay for them the worst. The liver, you see, is located on the front right side of the body just outside of the abdominal region, but not quite to your profile. It is soft, and easy to target. It will also make a grown man crumple to his knees when given the right kind of shot, and it's a shot that takes even less effort depending on how much this grown man drinks. The liver is the great, mythic hot spot in a martial art that doesn't typically allow punches to the face during open tournaments; it can do the most amount of real punishment with comparatively minimal effort in terms of energy consumption (round kicks to the face, unsurprisingly, take a lot out of you). At the risk of sounding even more meatheaded than the rest of this blog already has, one good smack to the liver hurts like a motherfucker. It's the best.

A good left hook would do it, and our buddy Kazuya had built the previous three movements to carefully worm his way there. Though painful, the first two attacks set up a perfect sleight-of-hand misdirection to take the opponent's defense away from the tender right side of their body: a blocked high round kick gets the arm up, which will try to defend the left straight punch, which wouldn't even see the fast low round kick coming at that range (which is gravy here), opening up to a perfect drill to the chops. Conversely, if the first kick really lands, the subsequent techniques would render a body limp enough that no kind of arm flailing would sufficiently block that last hit. The opponent crumples in a heap before him, and this fight's over. After taking my share of liver punches, I can tell you with perfect confidence that this is the natural conclusion.

I cannot stress enough how difficult it can be to make your body do these things with this kind of fluidity. But after a certain amount of practice and a little bit of forethought, it's an amazingly economical way of beating the snot out of someone. It's a stone cold beating with absolutely zero wasted movement. Each technique is at the ready even during the first step, and it simply needs the correct speed and follow-through to put someone on the floor. I could never get all four shots off at the speed in which video game Kazuya pulls it off, but it was good enough for me to try, and strangely spectacular to have video game Kazuya show me the way. The Japanese guys in class eventually sniffed it out and nailed me for it. But like I said, those guys were Kyokushin maestros anyway.

Curiously, further Tekken games would alter this perfect sonnet of human movement to make it less realistic; the final blow blasting an opponent backward like they were being pushed out of a helicopter. Judging by how this combo video follows up the movement with the (dumb) uppercut/ sidekick connection, it seem like that was probably the most balanced way of handling things with the total amount of damage that it can incur. But that's just video games. This is a perfect combo.