Why is it called Outlaw Karate!

People were trying to get me when I started teaching this thing called Outlaw Karate. Students from other karate dojos pulled my flyers from bulletin boards and poles, I went to watch a tournament, and an instructor threatened to beat me. A Monkey boxing instructor came to my school looking for a duel. And finally I received a death threat.

Oh my gosh, this was fun!

I kept teaching.

Now, in fact, I studied martial arts with Outlaw Bikers. 1% ers. Gypsy Jokers, Hell’s Angels, those kinds of guys. No, I did not go to their clubhouse and practiced esoteric martial arts, they came to the school I was in and studied. It was the best school in the area, and there’s one thing about the Hells Angels … when it comes to violence, they don’t waste time.

Anyway, that was not the reason I named my style Outlaw Karate. I chose the name because it went beyond accepted martial arts beliefs. He was ‘coming out of the law of the fist’.

I guess that’s why people got so mad, that and a few other little things. Things like I said that I could teach a person the Black Belt within a year. That was really the turning point.

Well why not? It takes about that long in the east, if you get a good instructor and stay away from the “official institutions”. But most people, belonging to official institutions, and I will let you decide what kind of beast it is, think that it takes three to four years … to decades.

Lord God! It is a body! It’s a punch! Do something with it! Learn a shape, practice the techniques. Freestyle to your heart’s content. People who bend over and scrape, who insist that monkeys see monkeys without ever knowing the reasons … let them fall.

Martial arts should be practiced, learned, and enjoyed while young, not with the permission of some old fossil who wants to enrich himself with school fees.

Well, I have spoken my piece and that is what happened when I taught an art called Outlaw Karate. I know a lot of traditionalists are going to spit bullets, but that’s okay. Art is something alive, something that breathes, and if you don’t mess with it and explore the concepts in their entirety, then you don’t really learn.