“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 much more interesting than the article itself. (Click on the pic above to read the article).

The article is relative fluff, ostensibly pointing out boxing tips from the champ’s perspective, but my guess is Dempsey had little to do with the article. He describes how physics is involved in punching and posits that a robot will always be defeated by a boxer’s out-thinking it.

I won’t comment on Dempsey’s predictions on robotic thinking abilities, after all, even the futurists are wrong more often than they are right. However, the discussion of the physics of punching is weak, especially so considering that Dempsey’s Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense contains some of the best descriptions of generating punching power ever written.

Dempsey had his name on another interesting text on fighting with his How to Fight Tough based on his time spent in the Coast Guard during WWII. His tour appears to have been mainly a public relations move, the “very real threat” of Coasties engaging in hand-to-hand combat emphasized in the book copy notwithstanding.

Dempsey demonstrates a number of hand-to-hand moves, mainly on wrestler Bernard J. (BJ) Cosneck. Just to add to the spectacle, Cosneck appears in his wrestling boots and briefs throughout the book. Cosneck also wrote a book based on his time teaching the Coast Guard entitled American Combat Judo. Cosneck’s is by far the better work.

But that’s all beside the point. The point is to take a moment out of your busy day and imagine the Tin Man’s piston-like attacks facing those steel-denting Demspey hooks. Yeah, I’d still go with Dempsey.

Today it’s shaolin monks, less recently “no-touch” knockouts, a couple decades ago it was the “unbendable arm” and other ki tricks; a hundred years ago it was the jujutsu invaders entering the west doing pole-on-neck stunts. Physical culturists performed the same feats and you could find carnies, wrestlers, other martial artists, and strong men (and women) all performing similar feats at different places and times in history. The line between the categories was often blurred with some demonstrators seeming to hit all of those descriptions.

I like the following site because it shows how some of the popular tricks are performed and that there is no mystical basis behind them. Some of these techniques may require strength, but, just like good martial arts, proper technique is a strength magnifier, and they show you the techniques that make the stunts possible.

Included are ways to break bricks, bottles, roll up frying pans, resist multiple people, fake powerful punches, tear phone books and other tricks of the trade. I also like that they include some elements from the CQC/CQB/WWII combatives field, such as putting someone in the grapevine and escaping the grapevine yourself. For those unfamiliar, the grapevine was a method shown by Fairbairn to lock a man to a small tree or pole by arranging his legs in a certain way so that he could not escape unassisted.

The site is http://www.badkungfu.net and I urge you to check it out if that’s the kinda thing you’re into. The site isn’t laid out all that well so you might need to poke around a bit. As for me, I couldn’t get enough!

The history behind the Milwall Brick is that football (soccer) hooligans, frisked at the gates, were limited in the types of weapons they could smuggle into the matches. The innocuous newspaper allowed them a quickly accessible weapon at their disposal should the fistic festivities kick off.

Instructions for making one can be found here, but the photo sequence they show pretty much covers it:

Now, I’m all for improvised weapons, but this looks almost like more trouble than it’s worth. It seems to me a rolled-up magazine used as a thrusting weapon would be far more useful, not to mention quicker to implement.

Then again, the South Londoners know what they’re about when it comes to football violence, so I guess I need to make one and do a couple test whacks with it to really understand it. At first glance, it just looks too short to do anything worthwhile. Maybe that’s part of the fun: you can have a less-lethal weapon that will save your fists in a punch up and not land you in the chokey for attempted murder.

“You say the defendant then viciously attacked you with a newspaper? The defense rests, your honor.”

Fairbairn spent time in the Royal Marines in the 1900s, the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1920s, then taught combatives at Camp X in Canada and in America during WWII. During that time he studied judo, jujutsu, chinese boxing and various other arts which he synthesized into his own style of dirty fighting that he taught to law enforcement and soldiers.

How dirty was Fairbairn’s dirty fighting? My favorite line from Phil’s article is the quote from a Fairbairn student: “Within 15 seconds, I came to realize that my private parts were in constant jeopardy!”

The article fills in some gaps and clears up some misconceptions about what “everybody knows” about Fairbairn’s life and work. To read it in full, see William Ewart Fairbairn: The Legendary Instructor

Phil also recommends Peter Robins’ book The Legend of W.E. Fairbairn, Gentleman and Warrior: The Shanghai Years:

For more on the 1920s Shanghai Municipal Police, also check out Robert Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai:

As you can see, Black Belt announces that the U.S. Marine Corps is going to drop its judo based combatives program and replace it with a system based on Chinese boxing. In the announcement, Black Belt finishes with “We will carry the full story.” So everyone is thinking O’Neill (if you’ve seen the film “Devil’s Brigade,” the combatives instructor is based on him) and the hunt is on for what promises to be a fascinating article.

I google a bit, and, as with many things, I wind up on eBay looking for a February 1967 copy of Black Belt, reasoning that the page was a teaser for the next month’s issue. The first seller was in Thailand training and couldn’t get to his issue to check if the story was in there, but the next seller had a copy and was willing to check for me.

Unfortunately, the article was not in the February 1967 issue. The seller, an extremely kind man with the seller id Bloop68, went to the trouble of pulling all the 1967 issues and checking for the article. No luck, but please check out his store because he could not have been more helpful for something that would have amounted to maybe a $15 sale (it was obvious he was checking because that’s the kind of person he was, not just because I was a potential sale).

One of the EJMAS editors pointed out that the story would have went to print sometime in mid-1966 and hit the newsstands in fall 1966 considering Black Belt’s lead time, but a quick search of the online historical newspapers was fruitless.

So, the mystery remains: Did Black Belt ever actually publish the article? If anyone knows anything relevant, or you just want to chime in, please contact us! You can leave a comment here or contact us privately through the Contact Us page.

For more on O’Neill online see Cestari & Grasso’s biographical summary here. For an excellent print resource see Brown, Steve.”Dermot O’Neill: One of the 20th Century’s Most Overlooked Combatives Pioneers.” Journal Of Asian Martial Arts, 12:3, pp. 18-31 (2003).