Memoirs of a Karate Fighter

‘Memoirs of a Karate Fighter
is a highly inspirational and thoughtprovoking exploration of a life shaped by discipline, hard work and the quest for perfection. Ralph Robb’s writing is as compelling as it is impeccable.’
Irish Fighter Magazine

‘Well written and sweating with authenticity, Ralph Robb has produced a powerful book. Not only is it informative about karate but with its themes of prejudice, violence and friendship, its relevance is international.’
Robert Twigger, award-winning author of
Angry White Pyjamas

‘The author writes with the passion, precision and authority that a good writer shares with a good
karateka
, and in reading this book, you realise that Ralph Robb is both.’
Traditional Karate Magazine

‘Robb’s passion for karate is framed in a page-turning memoir, told from the heart. For those who remember ‘back in the day’ or simply wonder what it was like then, this is an exciting and informative read, full of character and incident, as it presents a ‘hard’ karate practically obsolete in modern society…
Memoirs of a Karate Fighter
is an excellent read, not only as a karate document but as a slice of social history, as Robb gives us a real insight into Britain in the 1980s and its impact on black youth culture.’
Combat Magazine

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the scores of young men who trained at the Wolverhampton YMCA karate club over the years. Their personalities and experiences have inspired many of the characters and plots in my novels. Unfortunately, editorial and other constraints make it impossible to include the names of everyone, or the many, many anecdotes about their time at the YMCA. So as well as offering my thanks, I also extend my apologies to all those I have failed to mention.

KARATE, AS PRACTISED in Japan, had its ‘golden era' in the lead up to World War Two. It was a period when, impelled by
ultra-nationalist
fervour,
karateka
trained to the very limits of human endurance. Many of Japan's young karate exponents never returned from the war, but of those who did survive, some went on to teach their art throughout America and Europe. The karate master Tatsuo Suzuki had been frustrated that he had been too young to enlist, but twenty years after the war ended he began establishing a style of karate known as Wado Ryu throughout Europe. Initially, the type of karate he taught was similar to the uncompromising sort in which he himself had been tutored. But karate had entered vastly different cultures and after initial calls in the British popular press for it to be banned, it was inevitable that the fighting art he had brought from Japan would alter as time went by.

I began my training during British karate's heyday. In 1975, Britain defeated Japan in the final of the world championships in Long Beach, California and would go onto to dominate the world championships throughout the 1980s. While Britain was the foremost team in international karate competitions, a club called the Wolverhampton YMCA was, for a period, the top club in Britain. Therefore, by most objective reckonings, it was, during that time, one of the finest karate clubs in the world.

The YMCA club was, in many ways, a freak of nature; a series of coincidences brought together some outstanding fighters who just so happened to want to learn the art of karate at around the same place and at the same time. Their collective attitude could be summed up as: go anywhere, fight with any other martial style, under any rules – and use whatever referees you like. The team won so many tournaments that it would be impossible to record them all, but amongst the YMCA's greatest achievements were two British All-styles titles, five national Wado Ryu championships and, in 1976, a national Shotokan
championship – they became the only team, in the history of British karate, not to practise the Shotokan style ever to do so. Hirokazu Kanazawa, arguably the greatest-ever Shotokan
karateka
, magnanimously led the applause as the YMCA triumphed over a team of his own students in the final. While watching the contest, Kanazawa sensei may have been reminded of the brutal fights that had taken place between rival schools while Japanese karate was in its infancy: the 1976 Shotokan Karate International championships had been, by many people's reckoning, one of the bloodiest competitions ever to have taken place in Britain. A year later the tournament was made exclusive to Shotokan teams as the inter-style rivalry had led to so many injuries that it was considered unsafe to continue with its ‘allcomers' policy.

Within the YMCA's ranks were one world, three European and twelve national champions and it was my privilege to train with them. But their fights were not limited to what happened on the competition mat or within the dojo and many of the YMCA karate team were involved in situations of real ferocity out on some very mean streets, some of which I witnessed first-hand. My intention is not to glorify any action or person, but to simply recount, to the best of my ability, the type of training and experiences I underwent to become a karate fighter.

The practise of martial arts is often characterized as a route to
self-enlightenment
, and this book is a record of the path I walked as a much younger man, and of the personalities, the triumphs, the adversities and the pitfalls that I encountered along the way.

Ralph Robb · June 2006

THE BIG GUY had a knife. This was not a film shoot, nor a rehearsed demonstration or a sporting competition. This was real, this was a matter of life and death. But the man he faced was a big guy too: Jerome Atkinson was six-foot-five and weighed in at two hundred and fifteen pounds of almost pure muscle – and unfortunately for the man with the knife he also had the innate fighting ability that one day would make him the all-styles karate heavyweight champion of the world.

There weren't too many people around who were physically bigger than Jerome, but the man with a black t-shirt stretched over his muscular chest was huge. I figured that he must have been from out of town because he was not the sort of man you could easily forget – and, judging by his behaviour, he obviously knew nothing of the reputation of the two men dressed in black suits and ties at the nightclub's door. The big stranger had ignored the queue and led his gang to the entrance. He claimed to be a relative of the owner, but my cousin Ewart Campbell had told him and his gang to get to the back of the line. Ewart was nowhere near as big, but at a little more than six feet, his lean frame reminded me of the world champion boxer and kayo specialist Tommy Hearns, though perhaps he carried even more explosive power in his fists.
One of the group shouted that no man could treat them so disrespectfully and live. People in the queue immediately began to shuffle back, some tripping over in their attempts to get out of harm's way. Angry shouts echoed amid the thudding bass that filtered out from the dance floor and into the balmy night air. A young woman screamed as she saw a blade being drawn.

I watched from the foyer, and like the rest of the onlookers, I was excited and fearful all at once. But no one was looking at me; I was not a player in this unfolding drama but just a kid of seventeen who was out for a good time with a couple of friends. Panic pushed the crowd out onto the road, but the chance to see a genuine street fight kept them hovering; like the crowds who had once flocked to the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, they were drawn by the spectacle of violence and the scent of danger. I may have been inexperienced but I felt compelled to step forward and help out my two fellow
karateka
: as formidable as they were, a ratio of six to two did not seem fair. Again, no one seemed to notice me as I sidled up to Jerome and Ewart.

The sight of the blade that had caused the woman's scream had me transfixed until a flurry of activity drew my gaze away. One of the gang had thrown a punch at Ewart, a British light-heavyweight all-styles champion, and had rapidly paid for his rash action when he hit the ground with a sickening thud. Another of the gang brushed past me to intervene and without any conscious thought, my arm went across his throat. He struggled and lashed out. Now oblivious to the melee going on around me, I managed to put him into a chokehold. He was unconscious within seconds and I lowered him to the ground – just in time to see the man with the knife standing in the middle of the street ranting and spitting threats while moving toward Jerome. Jerome took two languid steps forward. It was a response the man with the knife had not expected. By this time five men were on the ground and the crowd had spread across the street in a large arc; I sensed that a good proportion of them were still silently baying for more blood. I was concerned for Jerome's well-being, but like the rest of the onlookers I was curious too. This, after all, was what we trained for; this was the life-or-death situation we were told to imagine while punishing our bodies in the
dojo
. This would be a moment of truth.

The big guy was yelling again as he made his move. With astonishing
speed Jerome moved forward to meet his attacker, and then, with perfect timing, he sidestepped and the knife went past him. I recognized his movement as a variation of a basic technique I had been taught in the
dojo
. The Japanese call it
irimi
(entering) and when combined with
kawashi
(avoiding) the result can be devastating, as the attacker's own momentum is used against him. I heard a grunt and the sound of the blade dropping onto the road as Jerome's open hand hit the big man's throat just below his Adam's apple. The man straightened and then a fist crashed against his jaw. The crack brought a gasp from the onlookers and two large hands spread over a disbelieving face, moments after blood and teeth had sprayed from the big man's mouth. His legs folded, as if he were about to sit on an invisible stool, before an instinct for survival straightened them again. He swivelled and staggered down the road like a drunk with another three groggy men following him, one of them falling down twice as he went. The man at my feet coughed and slowly stood up. He swayed and scratched his head as he tried to figure out what had gone on. He did not even look at me, but the sight of Jerome and Ewart and his fleeing comrades was enough for him to take off after them.

My initial apprehension had been instantly turned into exhilaration. There was a clarity to the technique Jerome had used that had previously eluded me. I promised myself then that I'd practise this move over and over again in the
dojo
. This was the first time I had seen it executed with such brutal perfection. I said as much to Jerome. He smiled down at me and shook his head as he told me it had been far from perfection because his foot had slipped slightly as he threw the punch, otherwise it would have knocked the big man unconscious. Ewart was pumped up and said to Jerome that he should not have let the big guy get away, but should have run after him and finished him off. He pointed at the man who had taken the first swing; he was still lying awkwardly against the concrete steps. If it were not for a trickle of blood from the man's ears, I would have thought he was sleeping peacefully. Ewart was deadly serious when he said that anyone who drew a knife on him would be waking up in a hospital ward. The fight summed up the men's differing attitudes: Jerome had been content to disarm his opponent, but Ewart would only have only been satisfied with the armed man stretched out in the road. Part of me wanted to say that I had rendered one man unconscious, but neither
Jerome nor Ewart seemed to be aware of my contribution and as I looked across the street to the police station I thought it would be for the best if I said nothing about it. Two policemen had witnessed the whole event and were laughing to themselves. They looked across to the man who had yet to regain consciousness and applauded – I thought sarcastically – and I feared that they might be waiting for backup before coming over to arrest the three of us. I was back to being apprehensive again: how would I explain my arrest to my parents who did not even know that I was going to a nightclub?

After an ambulance had taken away the man on the steps, I had wanted to leave but felt duty-bound to stay in case there was more trouble. I was also convinced that if the police did not turn up, then the big guy would be back with reinforcements. Jerome and Ewart carried on as if completely unconcerned. Either they were very good actors, or they genuinely didn't share any of my worries. As it turned out, they had correctly guessed that the troublemakers would be spending at least one night in Accident and Emergency, and that one big man would be having his broken jaw fixed with wires.

It had not been the first time I had seen a knife used in a fight, nor would it be the last. I grew up in an area of town where there were a lot of fights; it was a place where a large number of immigrants from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent had settled and there was often trouble between them and the local white youths. My parents had arrived from Jamaica three years before I was born and I was followed into the world by three sisters. Consequently, most of my leisure time was spent in the company of my male cousins and friends. Violence, or the threat of violence, was a constant companion as I made my way along the streets to meet up with the rest of the gang. As a child of no more than twelve years old I had witnessed brawls between kids of my own age that were fought with serious and violent intent. One vivid
childhood
memory was of my young cousin Trevor smashing a bottle during a fight with the intention of pushing it into the face of another kid, who only two minutes before had been his best friend. But that was an extreme episode and usually violence amongst the local youngsters was more low-key-arguments over trivial matters that had turned into fights, such as a foul while playing soccer, or the alleged theft of a sweet.

But there were also more serious threats in the town in which I lived: it was common back in the 1970s for a black man or boy to find himself being chased by groups of white men wielding sticks or knives for simply having the nerve to walk along a street in a particular area. Many of my friends and relatives had experienced that sort of frightening encounter and as a result there were parts of town that my friends and I refused to visit. But this attitude was by no means exceptional, nor simply down to race or colour: for young men it was often about gangs and territory.

The nuclei of our little gang were my cousins Clinton, Errol and Trevor, our friend Leslie and me. Whether or not it was simply the hostile atmosphere about the town that turned us into fighters I am still not sure. Clinton and Errol had older brothers whose greater experience of the world had led them to conclude that we had to ‘toughen up'. Part of this toughening up process involved arranging fights for me with other boys at the local park. Ewart and Kingsley let it be known that they had placed money on the result and did not expect me to lose. Frequently, they would give me a taste of what to expect from them if I did. Once, when I refused to fight, they staked me out in the park and let me bake for hours under a blazing sun. Such were their reputations that no one dared to rescue me. It was a tactic they had picked up from some western movie in which Jimmy Stewart, or perhaps John Wayne, had been similarly tethered in a baking desert by Apache warriors.

Besides real fights, the gang's free time was occupied with the fantasy fighting of kung fu movies. Errol, Clinton and I spent our Friday and Saturday nights at the Colosseum cinema where the audience would be ninety-nine percent male and one hundred percent black and boisterous. Kung fu movies were all the rage when we were teenagers and the rat-infested cinema was always packed for its late-night weekend shows. The atmosphere in the Colosseum was always very different to what I would find at the cinemas in the town centre, as there were always plenty of people in the audiences who were willing to supply a running commentary on the action.

Of all the kung fu stars, Wang Yu was the favourite at the Colosseum. But why kung fu movies and why Wang? For black guys of my age the badly scripted, poorly dubbed Cantonese films were a cheap escape from the grind of daily life; their carefully choreographed fight scenes acted
as a release for people who were otherwise preoccupied with thoughts of real violence. It was easy to fantasize about thrashing either the cops who hassled us, or the thugs who attacked us, as simply as Wang dispatched his foes. As for Wang Yu himself, his popularity was, in part, due to his name: it had not been corrupted with a ‘Bruce' or a ‘Jackie', from which we surmised that he had not ‘sold out' - back then a significant phrase for young black people. This later turned out not to be strictly true, and as Wang's popularity grew his name became ‘Jimmy' Wang Yu. But this uncomfortable truth was not allowed to get in the way of unalloyed hero-worship. His fighting style was also admired as it was more traditional than Lee's and less clowning than Chan's. Furthermore, as his films only featured Chinese people we were transported to another world in which the hero wasn't always a white man, and it was the Japanese, rather than black men, who were the stereotypical bad guys.

One Friday night, shortly after we had left the Colosseum, Clinton, Errol and I had been chased by a gang of white men armed with clubs. Probably frustrated that they could not find an unaccompanied victim, they had decided to stop their car and chase three teenage boys. We scattered and I ducked into an alley that led into back streets and rear gardens. The men must have sensed easy prey and followed me into the dark. I couldn't understand it; I was a good athlete but my legs refused to respond, it was as if I were running in a tank of treacle. Breathing hard, I rounded another corner – and something hit me. The impact was severe; arms and legs violently clashed as our bodies collapsed onto the hard ground. Fearing imminent death, I screamed out loud.

“Shut up,” croaked a familiar voice, “this way.” It was Clinton: he had returned to help me.

After a short distance we had to scale a high wire-mesh fence. Within moments the men were on the other side, furiously growling obscenities and shaking the mesh, but we all knew that there was no way they were going to get over the fence. As they continued to hurl their threats I wanted to get away, but Clinton stood his ground with an air of contemptuous indifference. I stared on in disbelief as he opened his flies and began pissing through the mesh. Almost hysterical with rage, the men jumped back, as if Clinton's urine was a deadly acid.

On trembling legs, I ran back to the cinema with Clinton hoping to see Errol and to look for the safety of a crowd. “So, Ralph,” he said to me, as we slowed down to walking pace, “are you going to start training with the rest of us?”

At first I was too angry, or too scared, to speak. My lungs were still burning and my legs shaking as adrenalin continued to course through them. I paused before responding. The training he referred to was in karate at the local YMCA. At first I had been dismissive when Clinton and Leslie started training: I was supposed to be the tough guy of our little group, the one who took part in bare-knuckle fights in order to win money for Clinton's older brothers, and I had already told him that I did not need this martial arts stuff. But in truth I was wary of getting involved. The YMCA karate club had a fearsome reputation, and I had heard tales, recounted in the most reverential tones, about the instructor who had once beaten up a gang of Hell's Angels and had knocked out a genuine Chinese kung fu master; about the tough men – including Clinton's older brothers – who trained there; about injuries; about journeys to the hospital; about guys who thought they could handle themselves but who had quit after just one session. “No,” I had previously told Clinton, “I'll stick to my athletics.” But now such a response seemed pathetic because I knew that behind Clinton's question was the idea that we should have stood and fought, that we should have levelled the
club-wielding
white guys in a fashion similar Wang Yu's.