First Reprint Available: Fall Guys

Big news! The first martial reprint is available although it’s not the one I had expected to be ready first. C’est la vie.
Anyway, I offer “Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce.” It was first published in 1937 by sports reporter Marcus Griffin who did his research and exposed the wrestling game, showing it to […]

Skipping Belt Ranks

There are two threads regarding skipping ranks over on the Convocation of Combat Forum. Rather than wax on over there, I’ll wax off alone over here and then link to it. (Yikes, a Karate Kid and masturbation pun in the second sentence, this is going downhill fast). Anyway, the genesis of the debate arose when […]

Jujutsu Humor

Another brief installment of jiu-jitsu humor from the Washington Post, 1-24-1905.
 An Experiment in Jiu Jitsu.
From the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
When a footpad approaches you, seze him by the center of the arm and press your thumb violently against a nerve in the inner elbow joint. The footpad will then probably shoot five bulletholes in you while […]

Early Civilian Western Martial Arts

The following roundup represents a group that goes together in my head as Civilian/Self-Defense Martial Arts in the late Renaissance to early-Victorian eras. I chose to keep boxing manuals separate, because they are generally later than these manuals.
Johann Georg Passchen’s Vollstandiges Ring-buch (1659). These other versions are probably based on Eli Steenput’s translation:

HACA

AEMMA

Nicolaes Petter’s Clear […]

Jujutsu Humor

The early 1900s newspapers often poked fun at the “jiu-jitsu” invasion. Satirical pieces were written on the convolutions of jiu-jitsu holds, as metaphor for happenings in the Russo-Japanese war, and, of course, comparing jiu-jitsu to good old-fashioned wrestling.
The couple lines below will be appreciated by the grapplers who have seen the endless debates over the […]

Butting in the Revolutionary War

For Independence Day, I thought the following account would be an appropriate choice. It is an excerpt from a butting article I am working on (I have collected dozens of these types of accounts) that took place during the Revolutionary War. Butting, in its broadest sense, was headbutting. It was predominantly practiced by African-Americans, and […]

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 […]

Chinese-American Boxers Before 1900

After 1900, there are a number of reasonably well-known Chinese-American boxers that fought in the western boxing tradition including at least two with variations on the name Ah Wing. The handful of Chinese-American boxers that fought in the 19th century are so obscure as to be unknown. Unfortunately they tended to be unknown in their […]

Vintage Martial Arts Comic Book Ads

A couple years ago, Dan Kelly did a retrospective on the martial arts advertisements found in comic books from the 1950s to 1980s. He breaks it up by advertisers, and you’ll see familiar names there, such as Joe Weider, Bruce Tegner, Count Dante, Ketsugo, etc.

We would like to eventually post something similar with earlier […]

Savate in the United States in 1896

Here’s an article describing an attempt at introducing savate to the New York Athletic Club in 1896. To the best of my knowledge, it never gained much of a foothold in the NYAC. After all, Mike Donovan was the boxing instructor for decades and it is unlikely he would have cared to have competing pugilistic […]

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 […]

Dealing with Footpads

I came across this a number of years ago and found it amusing because you see the same discussions today with keyboard self-defense experts describing how they would dismantle hypothetical attackers with their favorite techniques.
This piece was originally printed in the April 28, 1900 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle (p.14). I added the emphasis […]