Jack Dempsey vs. the Evil Robots

 
“I can whip any mechanical robot that ever has or ever will be made.”

So said Jack Dempsey. Captain Billy Fawcet, former WWI Army Captain, apparently talked Jack Dempsey into doing this puff piece for Fawcett’s biggest magazine, Modern Mechanix, in 1934.
The idea of the early sci-fi robot battling the hard hitting fighter is captivating and […]

Kung Fu Tricks & Other Fakery

Breaking stones with heads or hands, tearing phone books, performing amazing feats of strength and the like go waaaaaay back. The earliest accounts of martial art tricks/stunts I recall go back to the days of the Roman gladiators.
Today it’s shaolin monks, less recently “no-touch” knockouts, a couple decades ago it was the “unbendable arm” and […]

Paper Bludgeon: the Millwall Brick

The other day I read a post on Boing Boing about constructing the Millwall Brick, which is the first I had heard of it. The Millwall (or Chelsea) Brick is an improvised weapon constructed out of rolled and folded newspaper.
The history behind the Milwall Brick is that football (soccer) hooligans, frisked at the gates, were […]

William Ewart Fairbairn: The Legendary Instructor

Combatives researcher Phil Mathews has put together another excellent biographical article on yet another combatives pioneer. This time the subject is none other than William Ewart Fairbairn, possibly the biggest name in the field.
Fairbairn spent time in the Royal Marines in the 1900s, the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1920s, then taught combatives at Camp […]

Mystery: Did Black Belt Ever Publish This Article?

I had an interesting email exchange the other day. The foremost researcher on H2H/Combatives instructor Dermot “Pat” O’Neill sent an image of page 10 from the January 1967 issue of Black Belt magazine. Here is the page (click on the image to open up to full size):

As you can see, Black Belt announces that the […]