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Martial Arts Cable Machine Striking Workout

A few years back I taught a seminar at Doc Sheldon’s Private Training Center in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. The place is loaded with equipment and I saw a cable machine. As an aside from my outline, I showed some folks the workout I’ve never stopped doing with cables since the 1980’s, that I thought was fairly common knowledge. But, others surrounded us, but no one there had seen it before and they found it inspiring. So for the record, here it is.

We all know the big five, generic  essential punches:

  • Jab (high, medium, low)
  • Cross (high, medium, low)
  • Hook (high, medium, low)
  • Uppercut
  • Overhand or descending overhand

There were eras in the US military that never taught an official jab or official cross, but rather just called them “right punch” or “left punch.” They thought that shoulder and foot positions weren’t important or situational and uncontrollable. I however have always seen a difference and used the training concepts of jab – foot/shoulder forward and cross – rear foot/rear shoulder because I see the need for such isolated practice.

Technically on a cable machine, you are always “pulling” on the handle and pulling cable weights up the “tower” of the machine. But to define this particular exercise process I explain that when you stand facing the machine, the cable is pulling you into it, pulling your hand into the machine. When you are facing away from the machine, you are pushing the handle away from the machine. This is how I like to define the exercises for clarity. Push-Pull. Face-away, push. Face in, pull.

I would like to add quickly that you can use these same cable machine methods with palm strikes for all you anti-punchers out there. But only in the “pushing outward” method.  You have to close your hand to grip the handle with facing in to the machine.  Don’t hyper extend your wrist. Use reasonable weights. Emphasize the palm heel as much as possible.

If you shadowbox with hand weights – yes – you are abstractly building the path for punching. Abstract because you have to remember that your hand, arm and shoulder are battling gravity with that hand weight. The more the weight and the more the hand extends, the more you are building/fighting vertical gravity and building those related up-down muscles. With a cable machine there is no up/down gravity, just the machine pivot point behind or before you at the prescribed height. Some people shadow box with mere 1 or 2 pound weights and this is so light there is not much “gravity” fighting at all. But more hand weight? You are losing goal, effectiveness.  Vertical building? Or, horizontal building? Horizontal unless of course, you are uppercutting or doing low origin shovel hooks.

You won’t get Conan muscles doing these cable exercises. Maybe Conan O’Brian muscles? But I think this method develops striking power and speed. I do a set of 25 reps with each strike listed below, when this series comes up in my rotation, which can be once or twice a week (for 40 years give or take sickness, medical operations, and travel). It takes about 20 minutes of non-stop motion. The next day my arms are very sore and my lower back muscles, with all the torso twisting, are sore. It can be aerobic, but if you switch your feet a lot with the uppercuts and hooks, it adds to workout. 

People like to do various exercises with those big rubber bands, but they can be limiting in range when attempting all the below listed strikes, and you have to hook them onto something! Will the hook be the right height? How? Meanwhile, the ubiquitous cable machine will offer the range and the height and quick-change resistance.

It’s all about the push-pull. Long ago, fitness and sport experts suggested that you must develop the pushing and pulling aspects of functional movement. One way is breaking movements down in isolated exercises. For example, in football practice years ago, they made us run up and down hills. Running down the hill as fast as you can, made you run faster than you ordinarily are. You can feel the extra speed as you struggle to keep up with yourself flying down hill. You also experience what it feels like to be faster than you normally are.  Remember that feeling. Emulate it. The same is true when you work strikes with a cable machine. When you face the machine and punch, the cable weight pulls and should makes you move faster. Just a little! Like running down the hill and falling, don’t overdo this and yank yourself into an injury.  Strike and let the cable weights make you a bit faster. And, when you retract, you get that benefit also.

With this advice, I stand facing the machine and facing away, back to the machine. I do not do these with heavy plates, but you can build up to anything you want, I guess. Just try to remember:

  1. Don’t hurt your wrists!

2. Whether punches or palm strikes get the right positioning for your hand, the best hand-to-handle position. When punching, try to get your knuckles involved in the pulling and pushing. When palm striking, try to get your palm heel involved in the pushing. (You can’t face the machine and “pull” the palm strike because your hand is open.

3. Always try to keep your free hand up and open. Don’t get sloppy and let that other hand drop.

4. Keep your mouth closed, teeth together as a matter of routine. You can still expel “martial” air.

 

Now, some exercise suggestions

The Jab and Cross (Punch or Palm) Set the pivot height at shoulder length, face away from the machine  and do-

  • A set of right jabs pushing handle.
  • A set of left hand jabs pushing the handle.
  • A set of right crosses pushing handle.
  • A set of left hand crosses pushing the handle.
  • Try some bent-arm low punches, “thrusting gut” punches too. They seem to get ignored. Set the pivot point gear low and do them.

Descending Overhand (Punch or Palm)

  • A set of right overhands pushing handle.
  • A set of left hand overhands pushing the handle.
  • A set of right cross overhands pushing handle.
  • A set of left hand crosses  overhands pushing the handle.
  • A set of right overhands pushing handle with a slight hook.
  • A set of left hand overhands pushing the handle with a slight hook.
  • A set of right cross overhands pushing handle with a slight hook.
  • A set of left hand crosses  overhands pushing the handle with a slight hook.
  • Add a slight hook to this and this exercise helps with a very popular and successful MMA style strike. You may have to reduce the weight a bit as the wrist goes a little funky with the turn and slight hook. Experiment with the weight.

Hooks (Punch or Palm) (High Hooks or Low Hooks)

  • A set of right hooks pushing the weights.
  • A set of right hooks pulling the weights.
  • A set of left hooks pushing the weights.
  • A set of left hooks pulling the weights.
  • (You can use a lot of footwork doing these)

Uppercuts (Punch or Palm)

  • A set of right uppercuts pushing the weights.
  • A set of right uppercuts pulling the weights.
  • A set of left uppercuts pushing the weights.
  • A set of left uppercuts pulling the weights.
  • (You can use a lot of footwork doing these)

Combinations (Punch or Palm)

Set the gear-pulley-pivot points at:

  • various distances apart
  • various heights
  • invent combinations of the above, in both push/pull directions!
  • you can also do hammer fists if you can get the right handle and cable.

Kicks? You ask? Yes you can do them to with ankle or foot connections. I did not photograph them here because I quit doing them in my mid-40s. No matter how light I set the weights I began to have back problems every time.


Some other points:

  • Of course you should still hit bags, etc. As I have aged, hitting things that don’t give-way (and I don’t wear big boxing gloves, nor wrap my wrists, as I don’t want to become dependent upon them.) cause me follow-up wrist, shoulder or back pain. There are various pieces of equipment that “give” sufficiently.

  • Cable machines also have straps for your ankles and the rest of your legs. You can also rig yourself up for cable, kick (and knee) work. Through the years I have done snapping, hooking kicks/knees with cable machines. But, as I have gotten older with bad hips and deteriorating backbone discs, I can no longer do these under the cable weight without follow-up pain. This essay is just about striking.

You will be looked at by gym trainers as unsafe, uncool and crazy. But after you start doing the uppercuts, blowin’ and goin’, changing footwork with each punch, they tend to leave you alone. In this vein, I am sure there will be a fitness guru here that responds to this essay and tells people I am killing you with this idea. I just don’t think so. 

As usual, as natural, you will do this and get over-confident and keep adding the weight plates. More, more, then more.  Then you will hurt yourself. Then you will heal, recoup, rebuild, add, add again, get over confident, hurt yourself, heal, recoup…re….you get the picture. This is the life we have chosen. This is the lifetime routine. Get use to it or die fat and out of shape.   

These exercises have been very beneficial to me. It’s one more thing I can do in a typical, solo gym workout that leans toward functionality. Some of you may be doing these your whole life too? But I thought I would write this for:

  • those who are new at this,
  • those who won’t do them,
  • those who didn’t care to before and might try it now,
  • those who “say” they do them, but not as completely as I have listed here,
  • or for folks who’ve never thought of it.

MORE!

Australia’s Peter Sciarra on using cable for knee strikes Click here 

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Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

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Jaw Broken in a Fight

Loose lips may sink ships, but loose jaws lead to pain and medical operations. 

Or…How can we remember to close our mouths in the assaults, or honor duels of life?

One of my early detective cases in the 1980s was to unravel a country-western, bar fight. About 6 guys were involved. Some were arrested on the scene by patrol. In patrol I/we sorted out the scene and rarely saw the aftermath. But investigators have to become aftermath experts. I caught the case because there were serious bodily injuries, otherwise it would just be another, unassigned, ignored, knucklehead fight passing through the system. Participants would bond out on simple misdemeanors and the disorderly conduct and bruises would fade away. But, sometimes there were serious bodily injuries. I hated to get these cases through time because they were always complicated and messy to – oh, what’s the pop word today – oh yeah…”unpack.” You know, who started it? Who hit who? It’s a messy suitcase.

I set up an appointment for a statement with a mumbling knucklehead on the phone and he showed up at the station. I quickly saw why he was mumbling. His jaw was wired shut! He took a simple hook punch and crackola! Worse, the doctor had to knock out a tooth so he could suck squashed food through a straw. I thought the tooth removal was extreme, but I guess that’s what they did decades ago. Make space for the straw. Adios premolar. He said he had to carry wire cutters in his pocket in case he vomited. And could like…drown in his own vomit. Talk about an emergency. He said he would be wired for almost two months.

This was not my first or last jaw-broke arrest or some-such case, but I think it was my first “aftermath” interview with a broken jaw person.  Through the years I worked numerous, “simple” punches in the face that turned into serious injuries cases, AKA felonies. I have many of these stories but today I seem to be  fixated on broken jaws.

Jaw wiring sounds and looks so bad I was surprised years later to see how many people have their jaws wired to loose weight (and how the modern docs avoid the old tooth removal idea). This diet is extreme, and people still need to have wire cutters very handy.

“But eating is only part of the problem. There’s also a strange claustrophobia that comes with having your jaw wired shut. Try closing your mouth and clenching your teeth together lightly. Now imagine that you can’t move from that position – not even a little bit, not even for a second – for the next six weeks.”- MMA champ Cub Swanson

A very common prognosis is 6 weeks wired up, depending on the fracture. WebMD states that men are about 3 times more likely than women to sustain a broken jaw. The American Bar Association reports broken jaws come from:

  • Assault = 50 percent
  • Slip and Fall = 15 percent
  • Sport Related = 15 percent
  • Auto Accident= 10 percent
  • Other Activities = 10 percent

50% from criminal assaults. I believe these stats are also common in other countries. What can we do about this? I always look to the laboratory of combat sports for great resource info. But, as in all sports, this is of course, why God made mouthpieces. (I tend to use the decades-old term mouth “piece” and not the modern term mouthguard. Mouth pieces today gets confused with lawyers, musical instrument parts and other stuff.)

Give me one moment of your attention as we run the classic facts. Stay with me now…

“Mouthguards are a low-cost way to protect the teeth, lips, cheeks, and tongues,” the docs say. The American Dental Association recommends wearing custom mouthguards for, are you ready, “the following sports: acrobats, basketball, boxing, field hockey, football, gymnastics, handball, ice hockey, lacrosse, martial arts, racquetball, roller hockey, rugby, shot putting, skateboarding, skiing, skydiving, soccer, squash, surfing, …” Their advice ends in three dots, so there are even more hobbies that can’t bother typing them all? Is sex in there? And we can’t forget that even fighters with big gloves and mouthpieces get broken jaws in the ring (see the link below for some in-depth reporting on this and sad stories).

WebMD and Colgate reports – “There are three types of mouthguards. Stock, and boil-and-bite mouth guards are usually found in most sporting goods stores. Athletic mouth guards can vary in comfort and cost. A custom-made mouth guard fabricated by a dentist or orthodontist is considered by many to be the most protective option. The most effective mouth guard is resilient, tear-resistant and comfortable. It should fit properly, be durable, be easy to clean and should not restrict speech or breathing.” 

SISU says, “Mouthguards can also protect others from your teeth. Even if it doesn’t hurt you or you don’t feel it, you can easily injure another player with your teeth. If another accidentally smacks their elbow on your teeth, it’s highly unlikely for your teeth to break skin if you are wearing a mouthguard. “

OKAY! Whew, we have officially covered the usually boring, safety briefing stuff. Now lets get…real…(those three dots again). Martial stuff.  We are not playing soccer, but rather punching, palming and elbowing and even kicking the lower parts of heads as a matter of routine.

At the US Army military police academy back in the early 70s, some boxer MP cops ran a boxing program off-hours and weekends to augment the official “combatives” at the academy. As a Parker Karate guy, I signed right up. A coach handed me a little box with a mouthpiece in it and told me it’ll save my teeth and would teach me to keep my mouth shut when fighting. I didn’t know back then he meant shut for “all” fighting, not just boxing. In good theory, rep time wearing your mouthpiece should also reinforce your mission to keep your jaw closed when fighting, which we all know is a key structure for jaw break prevention.

A mouthpiece or two, usually quite nasty, can be found in all serious workout bags.  In the fight world, the mouthpiece helps us, does  teach us, requires us, makes us keep our mouths shut. Loose lips may sink ships, but loose jaws lead to medical operations. We would like to create the, dare I say “muscle memory” (note the quotes you anal retentive bastards), to keep our mouths shut in bare knuckle fights. But do we wear them all the time? Enough of the time, to create this habit? Do you?

People in the combat-sports-and-defense-business don’t always train with mouthpieces in. Class after class covering methods in kick boxing, boxing, Thai, Krav, combatives, etc. have people doing tons of drills without their mouthguards in place. Copious amounts of all kinds of training is worked on and during so, few even think about their mouth positions, their jaws at all, and least of all shove a piece in for every whole class. Think about this. Think of you. Think of your friends and classmates. Think about your school, organization. If you’re not actually sparring, are you wearing a mouthpiece all of the time? Some of the time? Never?  Do you practice for this? Or seemingly…ignore it? Is the idea ignored in your chosen course/school?

 

Numerous protected fighters have still had their jaws broken.

 

I was in a rather popular, international, Thai Boxing association in the 80s and 90s and passed the first 5 levels of 10. There was very, very little actual Thai boxing in the ring with this famous group, but rather a ton of mitt/pad work. There was no strict, organizational rule about wearing a mouthguard in training drills. In fact, think about the sound effects you hear in Thai. With every strike, with every kick comes the standard “whoosh” or swoosh” from pursed lips. The whoosh/swoosh is articulated, not muffled. Such takes a little free mouth and jaw manipulation. No mouthguards evidenced. Tons of class time sans the piece. What then about Jeet Kune Do? Wing Chun? How much time is spent working on a stand-off “duel” like two boxers, and doing entry tricks without an iota of concern about your jaw position. Karate? Stick work?

Now, if there is equal time sparring, you have time and grade wearing a mouthpiece and teaching your jaw to stay shut in a fight. (You can still exhale air malevolently with a mouthpiece). But, it must  be noted that breathing well and fully with a mouthguard is a constantly reported problem by many practitioners for all the obvious “passageway” reasons, and mouths tend to open. Jaws drop for air and from fatigue. Dangerous times!

While people can be assaulted on the proverbial “streets,” fights happen everywhere. Domestics in houses. Workplaces. Rec places …yes… country western bars, and 50% of all broken jaws come from  these assaults.  It stands to reason, you won’t be wearing a mouthguard when attacked. But you can practice in one and develop good , teeth-gritting, “muscle memory.”  

Are you? Is your school/course geared for self defense? The piece helps keep/train our jaws to be shut, like a prop, and secure when we are attacked in the “outside” world. In real life, we don’t have or fight with mouthpieces. They just don’t seem to be handy. They are in a smelly little container in gym bag somewhere. How does this spell out for you? We have to remember to close our mouths in the assaults or honor duels of our lives.

It’s just something for you to think about. It’s a topic practitioners should consider, discuss intelligently, and have an opinion on, one way or the other.

(One quick, side story. I know a Russian bar bouncer in Australia who had a  bouncer friend with a successful de-escalation trick. When the friend was having an elevated confrontation with a customer. The friend would put up one finger, reach into his pocket and pull out a mouthguard. He’d insert it. That act alone often quelled many disturbances.)

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Hock’s email is Hock@HocksCQC.com

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Boxing Glove Cancers, Your Fists On Your Face

I will start this essay off with the proclamation that I am an exponent and a proponent of boxing/kickboxing, all to the extent that or can be used in bareknuckle, non-sport self defense. When you fight you will not have boxing gloves, nor a mouthpiece. But, do these photos disturb you? They should.

They represents a GIGANTIC transition, mistake in “real fighting,” or…or…”non-sport, fighting.” Whatever you want to call it. This photo is representative of years of what I’ve seen. Decades even, and still do see it. That is placing your bare fists tight up against your face as some sort of standard fighting stance, misapplied from the Boxing “peek-a-boo.”

When teaching in the late 80s and 90s in my regular school, I taught in a city with two major colleges. The volume of people I saw come and go was remarkable. I never taught kids, Always adults. Many were students of other systems and I saw quite a number of folks whose definition of a fighting stance was to place their bare fists right on the their faces, or just barely off their faces, as in the photos above. Plenty also placed their finger knuckles right on their upper gum line or maybe their cheekbones. I interviewed them and
this hand-face positioning was leftover from boxing or kick boxing. Leftover big glove arts.

In boxing, everything is based around the big glove/ Every aggressive and defensive movement is centered around them. This does not automatically transfer over to bare hands.

Let’s jump right to my point. If you see this before you? Try and strike the bare fist glued on the face. Any strike you like. Hit it or them. It’s lunch. Lunch served up for you from yesterday’s leftovers. The original meal from yesterday? Sport, big-gloved boxing. It’s an odd leftover from that. It does not transition well. Hit the face via the fists.

Palms, hammers, and, we are going to discuss punching here. This is NOT an essay about fist-punching versus palm strikes. Lots of folks hurt their bare hands punching and remember…LOTS DON’T! Lots of people DO NOT break their hands punching. That’s another subject for another Training Mission book. Let’s take one thing at a time. This is not that time.

I would instead like to address the many “reality” training operations that way overuse big, boxing gloves in their classes, or some big glove boxing theories, ignorantly and innocently passing them off as self defense training. And the one major leftover – fists glued on face as some sort of fighting stance.

You see a lot of POSED photos with fighters and martial artists with their hands up and on, or almost on, their faces.

(note also the flagging thumb sticking up in this photo, another boxing glove leftover cancer.) Photographers try to get the hands and/or gloves up in the picture frame. These same people might not fight or use a stance like this, but the distribution of these photos help create the “fist on face” copy-cat motif. People will mindlessly replicate this. Even Instructors will mindlessly replicate this. And whole systems will too. Should folks without big gloves stand like this as some sort of official fighting stance? As a matter of system doctrine? I say no.

I have boxed and kick boxed since the 1970s. I still make my students kick box for various skills. And so many wonderful, important, simple things come from boxing. Examine it and experiment. Not everything transitions over to a crime or war survival struggle. Like gloves. Everyone knows, takes for granted, that you won’t be wearing big-ass, boxing gloves when ambushed, fighting wars, or arresting people, or as they say, “street fighting,” but I ask you to think this through, fully realize that some sport, boxing-big-glove, associated movements have some leftover cancers. Make the training mission connection.

If you are indeed a boxer, then you must wear boxing gloves. Same with Thai. You are a boxer! In western boxing, everything is about the big glove. Every aggressive and defensive movement is centered around those big gloves. If you are not a sport boxer? Don’t wear them, or at least limit them for very special purposes (more on that later.) The MMA glove is superior tool for MMA, and/or that real, street fight prep. Best? No gloves at all for prep, but with extended time periods on mitts and bags , MMA gloves can be a skin and bone saver and your training can endure longer periods.

I first saw these bare-hand, “strike-the-cover-hand” methods in JKD, FMA and Silat back in the 1980s. We did material about palm striking, hammer fisting and punching the opponent’s bare hands when they were on the face, or very, very close to the face, and “trapping/delaying” their bare hands when on their chest area, if they seemed pin-able. But for me and I know others, the training was so segmented, we never grasped the big picture. We would put our Thai clothes on and change mentalities and methods and then do that. Change clothes again and do something else. Rules. Segmented. We would box and just do that. Rules. Segmentation. Karate and do that. These rules and segmentations are not good. No blend. No evolution. Sometime, somehow, in the 1990s, the light switch came on for me to truly blend.

I want to make some quick points about this mistake.

  • Point 1: Getting hit like this is not good. I mean…think about it!
  • Point 2: Distance? If you are unlucky enough to be in some kind of fight, will there be a stand-off, “duel,” square-off situation? It’s possible. Maybe. Yes. If so, if you plant your hands on your face you are letting your opponent get closer in to you than if your hands were out, toward him more. JKD’s Larry Harstell once said in a seminar, “Make him earn that space, don’t just give it to him.” Your reaction time sucks enough already without allowing him to get closer in to you, shaving even more time off.
  • Point 3: He’s covered? If you are a regimented, segmented, programmed boxer wearing gloves and you see your opponent boxer lift his or her big, padded, boxing gloves up to their face, this is some proper, padded protection. You think…”oh well, darn, he’s covered right now.” To some extent with big gloves this is true. But when an un-gloved person follows this same gloved habit with bare fists, the regimented boxer might see this also, as “cover,” and still hesitate to strike because he thinks…“Oh well, darn, he’s covered right now.” Leftover thinking from gloved boxing habits. The bare-hand guy is not “covered/protected.” No big gloves! You have no padded gives. He has no padded gloves. If you have an open path to the head and hands on his face? Travel it. Hit them. Hit these bare fists on his face.

  • So, in bare knuckle fight theory, not big glove theory – and well, maybe in big glove theory sometimes too – hands always on your face like this is a problem.  Again, “Make him earn that space, don’t just give it to him.” People like to argue about fists-on-face as being fine, but they cannot win an argument on this distance issue. The “earn-the-space” distance issue alone wins the argument. Think about how many self defense people put up the classic “fence-thingy” – hands up, hands out, palms out to keep people away. Distance theory. Your hands can sometimes keep people away. Find your comfortable, performance spot.

Sometimes, this cover doesn’t work even when wearing gloves

Hand are fast, Your hands. His hands. Fast. And structural mistakes can be overcome by moving your hands around quickly as needed. Lots of people quickly and smartly use their forearms for sudden protection. Fast hands might save the bare-fists-glued-on-face guys, but, fast hands are no excuse to justify stupid doctrine. Most “fighters” retreat to forearm covers and hands way back in the instant that they need them, nicknamed “doomsday blocks.” They don’t use this position as a fighting stance standard. Once escaped, they return to “normal, up-front” hand positions.

I am writing here about maximizing potential strategies and doctrine. Know your goal. Know the best way to achieve it. Remove abstracts, or at very least reduce the abstract. In training, it is almost impossible to completely remove the abstract…because…it’s training. So, reduce the abstract where you can. This is a constant challenge.

Bare fists on face? I once again must resort to one of my hero’s remarks, champ Bas Rutten when he said on this subject “Ah, the meat-helmet defense. Would you put a focus mitt up to your cheek and let me punch it? No, because it’ll still KTFO. (knock you the fuck out)”

Several traveling seminar instructors these days, I think are running out of ideas, and have started to add/teach pure, BIG-GLOVED boxing.

Self Defense/Combatives Seminar: Learn to Box!”

I think this is a misleading mistake, unless they openly advertise –

“Self Defense Weekend! Plus – 2 hours of Sheer Sport Boxing.”

Okay then, mission properly advertised honestly and well stated. You’ll do self defense stuff and pure sport boxing. Or, how about –

“Self Defense Weekend! Plus 2 hours of Applying Boxing
Methods to Street Fighting.”

The word “applying” is key. There will be changes! Nicely advertised. But maybe with MMA gloves, we hope?

“BOXING! The Best Self Defense!”

No. Not alone. No. Every week the UFC is on TV, this mixed martial arts message is sent out to the world. Even neophytes can see that gloved boxing is not the ultimate solution to hand, stick, knife and gun fighting.

But this is not just a mistake of a traveling seminar person. This mistake appears in regular “self defense” classes in schools. If you do pure, big glove boxing as part and parcel of your self defense class you are off-mission. Not good. Not smart – especially when you could so easily fix that with no gloves or MMA gloves and a few short explanations. Many Krav schools have also added/introduced big glove boxing drills on mitts, bags, etc. to fill class time? Exercise? And appear to be more combative? Is this the best use of self defense class time?


Let’s not forget the mechanics of hitting. Hitting mitts and bags with big round, padded gloves is different than with MMA gloves or bare handed. It…feels…different. It feels different on your hands and in your wrists. Also, using your knuckles as striking point tools are easily lost inside the bulbous, boxing glove. Spending a whole lot of your self defense time hitting gear with big boxing gloves is just “off-mission.”

The MMA glove is better because in fights you need to hit AND grab and grapple. And for so-called “reality fighting,” on the “doctrine chalkboard,” MMA today is superior to “BJJ” and “Boxing,” because it already includes both as a mission. But if you just want to wrestle, or box? Fine! You do what you want and like. It’s your choice, your hobby, your fun, your exercise. Even your addiction. But addictions don’t always allow you to think straight. Just know what you are doing. Who, what, where, when, how and why. Know where it fits in the big picture.

Glove on a stick! An example of a training
use of a boxing glove. Stand behind a
trainer and poke it into openings.

I mentioned “special purposes use” earlier. I do love to see the boxing gloves on the walls where I teach. I need them sometimes as a progressive, handy tool. When do I slip big boxing gloves in when teaching? I do still use them when I think its appropriate. One example would be some ground fighting. Hero on the ground, trainer on top of him punching down. We are trying to get the bottom guy to do a move or maybe draw a knife or gun under some stress. I will ask the topside guy to wear one or two boxing gloves and give the bottom guy some safer, distracting flak. And, there are indeed times, when I think its appropriate, people need to just flat-out box for a host of skill developing reasons I seeking to work on, and the big gloves are a safer device in a progression to a bare knuckle goal.

So the “stance?” When I warn people about the fist-on-the-face-thing, they ask, “well, where should your hands be?” For a quick response? “Not there!” A vast, and I mean vast, majority of boxers, MMA and otherwise systems have their hands up but forward and off from their faces, in the upper window of combat. I’d say, a vast majority. And most keep them moving a bit anyway. A so-called fighting stance is about balance and power in motion, not a still photo, position. I could probably show 8 different photos here representing tons of boxing and non-boxing fighters with their dukes up in varying heights somewhat away from their faces.
For me, for my “business” (and yours?) I am not developing boxing-boxers. I am trying to study and utilize Boxing and Thai. I am trying to help the spread of “self defense” survival in a bare hand, stick, knife, gun world. Are you? What…is…your…mission? If you don’t already, please consider the necessary changes from sport boxing to the “hitting below the belt,” no rules fighting you claim to teach. One such examination involves the use of, or limited use of, or non-use of, the big boxing glove.

Are you killing time in your Krav classes? Making self defense people punch with big boxing gloves?

The main theme in the ballpark here? Let’s hyper jump right to it now. If you are solder-ing, LEO-ing, krav maga-ing, citizen-ing, or combatives-ing your way to real world, self defense? Your core punching research and study must prioritize BARE-KNUCKLE BOXING! Not just sport, big glove boxing of “western” and Thai. (And even in Bare Knuckle fights, they still wrap parts of their hands and their wrists. At any rate when the fight starts in the supermarket, or the factory floor, or the family picnic, you will not be wearing boxing gloves and your hands and wrists won’t be wrapped. And don’t put your bare hands on your face thinking your safe!

(Update: This essay was shared and re-shared from here over 150 times on the internet years ago, with a couple of thousand comments. People are still finding it and commenting. ALL positive but for TWO! Only two separate, Panantukan instructors claim that it is smart to start all fights from their face cheeks. They believe that their hands are faster if fired from the face cheeks. I couldn’t help but look up a video or two that one of them made and sure enough, it seems like one guy’s fashioned his entire system, for years, based on the fist on cheek fighting stance. This is a serious mistake. It would seem when overwhelming comments from veteran experts – oh, like Bas? – and some science and common sense comes along, the one or two, might change/evolve.)

More! Click here and watch Bas Rutten video test! Bare knuckle vs. MMA glove vs. boxing glove

More! Slightly off topic, but interesting – The Paradox of Boxing Gloves

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Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

See more on this subject here, in one of our bestseller videos, click here Boxing Outside the Think : The Other Hand

 

 

Hock's Blogs

“I AM LEFF.” – Remy Presas


Remy Presas frequently told this story in seminars. Many of us have heard this “leff story.”

After witnessing several bolo (machete fights) which I chronicled earlier on the Presas Group Page) , and after the somewhat underground “sport” of bolo fights began to disappear from deaths and maimings, rounded sticks replaced the bolos in fighting for money. (Not sticks shaped liked swords but rounded ones – something else I wrote about on the Presas page.)  Remy fought these fights for money in boxing rings, cockfight arenas and wherever betting groups might gather. He told us that after a while, numerous people approached him to teach them and their sons how to stick fight.

“But I am leff,” he told them. Left-handed. “And dey were right.” He said he could not teach them. They pushed the requests.

“But de money became so good…I become right.” He started to teach them the stick with his right hand. Much of it was longer range stick dueling (“of course, you could just hit de man in de head with a stick.” – he would often say, when discussing complicated moves.)

And as Remy has said often, the double sticks help teach the “other side” anyway.

In short, really short – lefty versus righty has always been a big thing in sports. The southpaw boxer. The lefty pitcher versus the righty hitter in baseball. Lefties are 1 in 10 people. This is an advantage for them simply because most sports folks and fighters have built up a “versus righty” repertoire, a library in their head, even like in their “subconscious” of what tiny steps and moves a righty does to hit, kick and position them. The most subtle increments are stored in the brain. We use them as tip-offs. We see less of these reps from a lefty, as there are less lefties.

“I become right. I become good.”

And he made a lot of money teaching righties. But still fighting too. (and he had a few jobs too. Working at a family shipyard and…not known by many, a barber.)

He would say in seminars about the money stick fights…

“Round one, I am right.
– Ding.
Round two, I am right.
– Ding.
Round three…I am leff. I win!”

His eyebrows would raise. We all would laugh. We got it.

Remy became as ambidextrous as possible. In close quarters, he could switch hands effortlessly and really foul up your brains. He taught this inside the newer tapi tapi. He taught this on the single stick versus double stick drills, as you must go single stick right and left-handed versus the double sticks. (Ernesto did this too.) These were Presas “leff” priorities which I can’t say I found “up front” in many other FMA systems.

(I remember one Inosanto seminar many, many years ago in Irving, Texas where, for about 2 or 3 hours on a Sunday, we did left-hand sumbrada. It freaked all the experts out. We became bumbling idiots)

“You must do boff leff and right!” – Remy Presas

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Hock’s email is HockHochheim@forcenecessary.com

Join this Facebook Presas memory page, click here

Hock's Blogs

My Mistakes in the Knife Teaching World.

.This is where I have fallen down. Where my knife course has fallen down. Before the fall, in the 1990s there was a “resurgence” if you will, a re-look, re-examination of older knife material (which essential was a lot of knife dueling). Some might call it “knife fighting,” but I don’t like that term. But you are still indeed, fighting with a knife when you are…fighting with a knife. Still, I don’t like many terms, images, messages, logos relating to the knife and knife fighting. By that time in the 90s, I was in police work for quite a while, both in the Army and in Texas, most of that time as a detective. I’d seen and experienced working on a lot of knife crime, as in aggravated assaults, rapes, attempted murders and murders. I myself have been attacked by both knife and ax.

I know the depressing, dark side, the wet side in juxtaposition to all the smiling people having fun, slap-dashing around in gyms playing tag with wooden and rubber knives. Knife training is often treated quite cavalierly. This doesn’t have to be the case as very serious cultures exist, like the culture of pistol training is quite serious and full of foreboding and legal scares. Careful, mature training cultures do exist, and this must certainly become true in knife training also.

In the early 90s, this edged weapon resurgence was sort of an international turning point in knife training. A reboot if you will? It first resurrected the old military knife courses and the semi-legendary names of yesteryear. They weren’t “kuraty” superstars. A sophisticated look at them however, revealed, they weren’t so sophisticated. So several of us, using the newer sports training methods of the time, and bolstered by years in Filipino martial arts or other historical backgrounds, stepped up and made “new” knife courses. Gone was the martial arts uniforms, belts, etc. We wore jeans with pockets and regular clothing belts. Street clothes.


Some of the 90s knife pioneers? James Keating. Tom Sotis. Kelly Worden, Bram Frank, Bob Kasper, yours truly, to name just a few, but there really were only a few of us. Paul Vunak is a late 80s pioneer in many areas. (Still, some of these guys were overdosing on knife dueling.) We wore shirts, jeans and shoes. I even taught at times in a suit and tie. Skeptical, we didn’t trust the old stuff and we didn’t trust the established martial arts either, even the Filipino applications of the knife are often tricky and  too “duely”. (Do you want to walk around wearing a vest with 12 knives? Seriously.) Be free. Think free. Be skeptical. Are you a replicator? Or an innovator?

Still, the old just helps the new. This was also part of a bigger “breakaway” from establishments that was going on in that decade. The world was seeing MMA (or at least ground wrestling) on TV like never before. And somehow a collection of old stuff, dressed in athletic pants, painted in the “Israeli mystique” – Krav Maga – was really shoved down the throats of Tae Kwon Do schools as mandatory, by clever (and insidious) shaming,  business groups, like NAPA in the 90s.

The “Mixed Revolution” was in the 1990s martial air! Jeet Kune Do was spreading into a heyday. Inosanto JKD/MMA was already doing Thai and ground, and so much more. Ever hear of “Shoot?” But, I guess the Israeli mystique was greater than the Bruce Lee mystique?

Mystique? Yes. Ever so important in advertising, sales and manipulation. That’s how we pick shoes, cars, purses and pistols (politicians, religions and…) Manipulation. More on that later…

My knife course had a few odd, infancy names in 1990 and 1991, but it was quickly called “When Necessary? Force Necessary: Knife!” But that 5-word title was a little long and clunky and it was shortened to just 3 words – “Force Necessary: Knife!” I do prefer the longer, clunky name, as it completely explains exactly what I mean to say. Only use that force necessary when absolutely necessary. But I got around the country and quickly, the whole world doing that knife material. Lots of traveling, lots of seminars.  It lead to being voted Black Belt Magazine, Weapon Instructor of the Year and also into their BB Hall of Fame. (back when readers actually mailed in votes.) I also “scored-very well” in the non-arts, growing “combatives” world.

Black Belt. Tact Knifes. Hall of Fames. TRS. Such was the jargon and the martial/political stage of the 90s. Today, it’s hard to grasp that the total, martial world communication back that existed was with a mere 6 or 8 international, martial arts magazines. That’s it! Try and list them. Yes, Black Belt, Blitz, Martial Arts Illustrated, Inside Kung Fu, Inside Karate. Think of some more. Try and list them. They were the filter for us all. Talk forums developed slowly later and now, like the magazines, are almost all extinct.

Now? Nowadays, I don’t know where the martial arts communication filter exists, specifically. The…web…the gazillions of webpages? The gazillions of podcasts? The gazillion of….Instagrams? Facebook? Yesterday’s business card is today’s webpage. And any dipshit can pay to have amazing looking webpages. The battle for exposure takes a business up and down many extremely, frustrating, costly roads.

Of course with all businesses, this 1990s knife movement kicked off a new interest and a fair number of new knife courses popped up through and to, by 2005-ish, often by less experienced, less organized people, and in my opinion doing less comprehensive programs. But this business evolution is to be expected. Invent a new “widget?” There’s a knock-off. Then knock-offs with an “S.” In the big picture of training and education however, not widgets, this can be a positive thing. Awareness. Curiosity. Growth.

So, when did I fall? It happened slowly and then one day you are down looking up. How’d I get down here? Not enough Instagram pictures? Some 25-odd years later, in about 2015, on a popular public forum someone asked me what I thought of Johnny Swift’s new, knife, quick-draw article. Of course it was named something super-spiffy like “Armageddon Instrument Production,” but it’s just knife quick draws. Brand new, Biblical-worthy advice Swift  preached, and published in the new amazing world of web-jargon magazines called something like “Organic Micro Evolution of Edged Prophetic Dynasty.” (I just made that magazine name up, but how far am I off? Have you seen these seminars names lately? Aren’t you impressed, or can you see right through the pretentiousness?) Twenty and 30 year-olds salivated! 

I read Swift’s ground-breaking, testament as featured in “Retrograde, Skill Supremacy, Fusion Elite Magazine” and I replied on the public forum –

“Oh, I have to like Swift’s article. It is virtually, word-for-word,
from my 1992, Knife Level 1 outline.”

My review/remark caused a lot of guffaws and a few smart ass remarks, among the 20 and 30 year old readers, most of whom were so submerged in modern “dynasty jargon” and up to their beards in mystique, and lost in the gazillion web world, they’d never even heard of us older guys from the 90s. I mean, who am I to comment like this on their latest fad-boy genius? I added that I was not suggesting that Johnny Swift plagiarized my outline, as it might have innocently been co-opted, or the older info has become so, ever so embedded into the “knife world” it was deemed as open knowledge. I get that. Sure. That happens. (That level 1 outline is/was free to the public and has been distributed for literally 3 decades, and my knife books have been for sale since about then too.)

I reminded the guffawers that the spread of education is a good thing and that at very least, I only partook in that process. I said that the old just helps the new, and you have to remember the old, so history doesn’t repeat itself. As a great gun instructor Dave Spaulding likes to remind us, “It’s not new. It’s just new to you.”

One guy was clever enough to say, “Well, sorry I missed you when I was 5 years old.” Ha! I told him that was a pretty damn, funny retort. It was. But missed me? Dude, I never left. But actually he never knew I was around to begin with. That is part of the mysterious “fall.” 

I added in that discussion with Mr. Wise-ass that the spread of education was a good thing, and I only partook in the process. Seriously, I frequently read as new, many old catchy terms, ideas, expressions I published and advertised decades ago.

My really big mistake in the knife world, training business is…I think, not emphasizing the knife training course only. Alone. My obsession was/is with covering the bigger picture. Hand, stick, knife, gun. That’s “where it’s at” for me (is that phrase too 90s? Yikes, maybe too beatnik 60s?). The 1990s evolved into the 2000s and my step-by-step into what I really wanted to do all along since the 90s. My goal is to create the best hand, stick, knife and gun courses. It’s a mixed weapon world. Each subject I have is a carefully constructed 4-pillar, foundation. But I think when you shoot for this holistic picture, each separate pillar seems to get a little lost, a little less appreciated, a little less noticed. It also makes me appear to be less specialized. This ain’t true. There’s a big mixed weapon matrix:

But anyway, back to the knife! Inside a comprehensive knife course is:

  • * Knife vs hand.
  • * Knife vs stick.
  • * Knife vs knife.
  • * Knife vs some gun threats.
  • * Standing, kneeling, sitting and on the ground.
  • * Saber and reverse grip experimentation.
  • * Skill developing exercises.
  • * Knife combat scenarios and situations.
  • * Legal issues and smarts.
  • * Who what, where, when, how and why questions
  • * Criminal history knife stories.
  • * War history knife stories. 

I do get a kick out of the occasional lame-brain who pipes up and says, “Knife training? Just stick the pointy end in the other guy.” Especially when these same complainers spend about ten thousand $$$ a year – plus – shooting at gun ranges. Why not just stick the pointy end of the bullet in the other guy, too, Brainiac? Is it all really that simple?

But, not focusing just on the knife is a marketing problem. I don’t advertise or highlight “just the knife” like other courses do. This is one point where I have really fallen down and why my knife course has fallen down through the years.

Another problem for me? No “flags.” I have no crutch system, no flag to fly, like Pekiti, JKD, Brazil-Mania, Krav. Silat. Arnis. Bruce Lee. UFC. It’s just little ol’ me flapping in the wind. I can’t draw in extraneous-system-people, capture super search terms, as some of those are obligated to attend, even arm-twisted by “the system” they’re in. Brand names are…brand names.

Plus, I avoid and dodge macho, death messages, grim reapers, and death images mystique. I would never advertise that I am “always bladed.” And I am not in any “mafia.” I am life-long cop. I fight the Mafia. I am not in any “cartel,” or a “cult” etc. Look, I can make the distinction between something that is a little fun and ironic and something/someone that is sick and weird. It takes a little investigation too, to not jump to conclusions, but sick and weird is sick and weird.


Various other ultra-violent, whack-job messaging should be reserved as a primer mentality for very serious, military, combat groups. THEIR psychology. Their prep. Not cops and certainly not every day, walk-around citizens. Mimicking them makes you look like a wannabe punk. Look at the lawsuits filed on cops and citizens. Go ahead, have a little death-engraved-logo on your cop gun and see what happens when you shoot someone. Have a patch or tattoo of a grim reaper with a knife, or a skull with a knife through it, and see what happens when you have to use a knife. We the police, the prosecutors search your history when you are in an assault, knifing or shooting. Mature survival is enduring the end game – as in the legal aftermath, is a big part of a well-thought-out, course. (Again, mature gun easily people understand this.)

Not like this silly fucker in New York for example – I read one New York City, very popular, international knife “cartel-liberty” group headline paragraph:

“I love it when I carve someone’s balls off and put them in his empty eye sockets.”

Shit man, you probably work in a fucking supermarket. And you think and talk like this? You need to be on watch list. These idiots give us all a bad name. But images and expressions like this, or near like this, this mystique, does attract a certain sick customer, usually young, or young in the brains anyway. (After my public complaints and comments on this, this moron took that line down.)

No Mystique? Which leads me back to the first paragraph. We know the established advertising fact the “the grass is always greener on the other….” side of the street? Other country? The sewers of Spain. The temples of Thailand. The monasteries of China? The borders of Israel…the…and so on. Me? I appear to be just a bland, white guy with some info. I don’t even have any tattoos!  Many well-known knife people are Filipino, just cause, because…they are Filipino. They may have never been to the Philippines, but they have an exotic sounding name.

And the serious military angle? Even with them, take a look at the most sophisticated, revered, respected, top-flight, Special Forces vets and most play it quiet cool like a gray man.

Lackadaisical about making rank and instructors. I don’t really run the classic franchise business as seen in self defense, BJJ and Krav, other combatives courses, and Lord knows, classic martial arts. I am often lackadaisical about promoting people and making instructors. Other systems do this like precision clockwork, where I fail to emphasize this. It does hurt the proverbial martial, business model.

In the same vein, I shun all titles like guro, grandmaster, sensei, etc. “It’s just Hock,” I say, which also does not fly well with some organizations who base themselves on this structure. Also, street clothes please. It’s almost like I am insulting them? I’m not trying to. You do whatever you need to do to survive.

After the fall. However boring, I still do see some “knife people” all around the world. There are “normal” people, martial artists, historians, survivalists and hobbyists, gun people out there, interested in generic, evolved, knife material. There are. And that is who I mostly see when the knife topic comes around. Since I disdain the crazies and the fringers, they usually avoid me too. I know they know, I don’t like them.

I always do a few hours of knife in every seminar and I do have the occasional knife weekend seminars when and where I realize I need to catch up with people’s rank requests. And, normal people can always, sort of, hide their knife interests inside a classic martial arts name. To me the knife is inside of, part and parcel of, hand, stick, knife, gun crime and war, survival education.

So, me. Boring. No mystique. Not isolating the knife enough. Not promoting people fast enough. No skulls. No flags. No carved out-eyeballs. No macho. Just generic methods. Here is where I have shot myself in the…well, stabbed myself in the foot, in the knife training business, even though just a few of us are those innovator pioneers and turned the tide in the 1990s into what it all has become today. For better or for worse. Maybe you young fellers will learn from my mistakes?

It’s always good to mention and/or thank your prior teachers once in a while. I always do. But, before you young knife guys make any sarcastic jokes about me again (and Kelly and Bram, et al?) Keep in mind…your modern instructors might have “peeked” at all my and our long, established materials, and would not confess to it. I might just be your grandfather. Our materials have become such standard doctrine that these young guys don’t even know of us. 

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Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

Get what is still called the greatest knife book ever, 1000s of how-to photos in the topics above, click right here. (Now in a second updates edition.)

 

Hock's Blogs

Three Pistol Breaking Points

(Everyone knows by now, I do not teach marksmanship. I do not have the patience nor the skills to do so. I cover only simulated ammo advice and scenarios. But I dared to write this once!)  

The first pistol I ever fired was in 1969. After that I’ve had 26 years of formal police and military training, intermixed with “outside” courses and courses after “retirement”, above and well beyond the original 26 years. While I have qualified expert several times early on in the Army and Texas police work, and for a brief period was even on a police shooting team, I was much, much younger and frankly, could see much better. I am not and have never been what you might call a “crack shot,” and now I get by.

Today, I can positively attest that I can pass the “Barn Test.” I can indeed hit the broad side of a barn. I have also investigated a thousand or two crimes and hundreds of violent crimes in military and civilian police work, and then some as a private investigator. I have attended numerous police forensic courses, some taught by the greatest medical examiners in the Unites States reviewing their cases. I have learned many things about shootings, and have strived to create the best, training doctrine. To paraphrase that kid in that movie, “I’ve seen dead people.” As well as survivors too.

(Teaching in a Finland gun range 15 years ago before such gun subjects became “popular.”)

I was frequently called in 1995 on the web, “a fool who plays with toys.” My have times changed. Since and today, my sole interest is interactive shooting with any kind of simulated ammo we have handy, in situations. (You must learn to shoot the doorknobs on barn doors elsewhere, just not from me.)

One pistol outline I wrote is about three, what I call, “breaking points” in shooting pistols in gunfighting/combat situations, to organize my teaching thoughts and outlines. Dissecting and probing these 3 breaking points have been helpful for me in experimenting, organizing and teaching pistol material.

  • Break One is the breaking point on a pistol trigger.
  • Break Two is the physical breaking point, spatial decision to go from one-hand to two-hands, or vice-versa.
  • Break Three is that physical and time breaking point where you have the time and space to go from an emergency aim to a serious, dedicated, front and back-sighted aim.

“Break One,” is the breaking point on a pistol trigger. Gun scientists will say “the “blade” of the “trigger system” is the exposed portion of the overall triggering mechanism. That is the part where the shooter applies finger pressure to fire the gun. Mere mortals simply call this – the trigger. The trigger “breaking point,” is that precise point in which the pistol cracks-off/fires. I will also avoid stepping into the world of hyper-mechanical, gunsmithery and if you need to know more about this clockwork? Ask some experts for the details.

But, the finger-trigger squeeze is a big deal in hitting stuff. The further away from the bulls eye or bad guy, the more the trigger squeeze becomes a big deal. The trigger squeeze topic enables me to touch upon what interests me on this subject, as in the finger position on the trigger.

For me, I know what it is like to be under great stress and grab a sudden “handful of gun,” from a holster, which, for us mere mortals, can mean a range-imperfect attachment to the grip, and next a range-imperfect finger inside the trigger guard. Your hand can really become…a blob. I know, I know, I know, the “square-range” people will insist that you must complete so many more bazillion reps to insure the acquisition of the pistol each and EVERY time is a pure, robot-replicated magnificence. But the world is a chaotic place and drawing, and combat is usually in awkward positions, times and places. 

Years ago I realized something. When possible, in emergencies, I had noticed I did not have the advised, advertised fingertip pad on the trigger. My trigger finger was much deeper.I rushed to a hot call-scene, pulled my pistol. We quelled the problem quickly and I happened to look at my gun. Despite military, police and citizen shooting class training for years, I still had an imperfect “handful of gun” and a full finger into the trigger guard.

Not doing that picture perfect grip and trigger touch when falling down a flight of stairs, leaping from your car, or while being choked? Many will suggest adding another bazillion reps. But really that next bazillion should be done in that awkward positions/situations too! Not just standing on the range. Reduce the abstract!

We have situational pistol grabs affecting the finger on trigger position. Through the decades, I have learned that every hand is a different size and every handgun is a different size and fingers different lengths. You have to learn to bond with your hand on that gun to maximize this attachment. I mean, a hand is a hand and pistol is a pistol, yes…but…size matters. My challenge in recent decades is working with my pistols from desperate, realistic situations. This involves for me, more finger on the trigger and in the trigger guard. My best finger position is different on my 5-shot snubby than my .45.

That big “handful” of gun. It can be hard to be “first-padding” your trigger when your blob clutches your gun from your holster. I know some of you are vomiting now, but this consideration is a deeper, personal step in my training, “my-hand-my-gun-my-finger.” Nowadays, think of these range-safety, insurance rules, the growing amount of places where a person cannot draw from a holster to rehearse the grip and draw, offering even less of an opportunity to work on this hand acquisition stuff. You didn’t do it enough before and now “they” are making the opportunities even less. But you can still try to “squeeze in” the best trigger squeeze (and finger positioning) practice at the range.

The group-think/group-teach range method is the heart and soul of the shooting business and the operating methodology of civilian, police and military instruction. It simply must operate-function in assembly-line, range instruction mode, and not so much “your-hand-your-gun-your squeeze” personalized, problem-solving.  This equation also takes you back in time to your handgun selection. But, some agencies and militaries issue guns and you have no choice in the matter. Your income may offer you no choice. Factors other than finger position and trigger squeeze may offer you no choice. This pistol selection is another topic.

 And I learned later I could shoot well with a deeper finger. This idea was quietly spoken years ago, because it was taboo to say otherwise. But many big name, super gun guy vets have come out in very recent years supporting the realistic “more finger on trigger” idea in customized cases. And I appreciate the support. It was lonely out here in outer space.  When people like Pat McNamara and Tom Givens started writing about this finger insert problem, I know it gave me the confidence to voice my opinions too. And now? I see this idea problem raised everywhere! This expression “the size of the gun, the size of your hand” is popping up everywhere.

Your best squeeze might not be your group’s best squeeze. Your personal achievement is getting that “straight back” pull, with your size hand, your size finger and your size gun, in what you perceive to be a the oh-crap, moment-grip. It might be that, the first “pad” of the finger  squeeze (very unnatural for most folks), might instead be the middle of the finger for you. Or even the bend of your finger. In all the pistol qualifications I’ve done, when at long distances, when trying for higher scores, I always seemed to shoot unnaturally.  How about you?

Anyway, this first breaking point I like to think about here is when the trigger pull fires the pistol. How much finger? The challenge remains how do you physically translate this personal affair into sufficient, scale training methods and class time in an assembly-line, world of group instruction? In other words, how can a range instructor, with a line full of people with differing hand shapes and guns, fix everyone’s shooting? (This is another reason why I do not teach marksmanship.)

 

“Break Two,” is the physical breaking point, spatial decision to go from one-hand to two-hands, or vice-versa. There is a close quarter measurement in inches, feet and yards where you must hold your pistol back and with one hand away from an enemy. Some call this a “retention” position – which is a fine name for it.

But, we all really would agree that shooting with two hands is way more solid and wiser, UNLESS YOU ARE TOO CLOSE TO THE ENEMY! And close statistically happens a lot. Experts say about half the time, give or take, we are “close.” Define close?  I don’t want to argue exact footage here, or the percentages either, but you will hear experts spout that 40% to even 60% of all pistol shootings are…quite close. Yet, trained folks still like to shove the gun out, arms extended, into a two-handed grip vs paper targets, training partners and real bad guys. Also, lets add “up high” too, high enough as in eye level, to get that mandatory, sight picture.

Too close, way out and high. We can’t shove the gun out and high too close to the bad guy. And a bazillion more reps will not solve this situational problem. Yet, “muscle memory” (please note the quotes on that phrase as it is an expression) has us shove the gun out and up anyway.

Now, I am not making up a problem that doesn’t exist. I have been doing, teaching very close, simulated-ammo situations for decades and I see this a lot in training people, also in training photos and instructional films. Magazine articles and books often depict a two-handed grip too close to an enemy. How did this two-hand, extended grip become mindless, mandatory muscle memory for so many civilians, police and military, no matter the distance? I have an idea. They call it…training. Actually, training too much for events least likely to occur. Two much distance shooting and the absolute, almost biblical adherence to two-hand, sighted instruction.

Here’s a dangerous example. I started to witness this “muscle memory” in the 1990s. When showing lots of civilians, police officers and soldiers pistol disarms, I started seeing that when the good guy disarmed the pistol from the bad guy, said hero would usually, next take this newly acquired pistol into a two-handed grip and virtually shove the gun right back at the bad guy, sometimes near or even inches from his face! This put the precious gun right back inside the bad guy’s range to take back and, or disarm. We know better than to do this, but it still happens.

Common, modern police training suggests the danger zone is “two giant steps and a lunge,” from a suspicious person. Give or take, huh? Someone excited can really spring off and perhaps surprise you from further out than that. Making things worse, many trained and even untrained, instinctual fighters will instantly chase their lost gun. Some call this “weapon recovery” and that’s good name for it. So they chase their just-lost-lost gun and you have helped him by shoving it back in his can-do range. Do not return his lost pistol back into his recovery space with a mindless two-hand, extended grip. As an aside, when I correct this? The heroes will agree instantly, almost with a “duh,” self-head-slap, but after 5 or 6 more reps…they FORGET…and return that pistol shoved right to the bad guy’s face with a two-handed grip. It is hard to alter this repetition training.

How to fix this in training? For an example, let’s round off a number to easy-math, 100 rounds per training session here. You typically start the day very close to the paper target and do some shooting. Maybe so close you get to slap the paper target with your free hand. Or elbow the paper target and draw and shoot. One-hand, shooting stuff. You are in the pistol-back, retention grip position. It’s really hard to screw up at that distance. Center mass torso shots. You’re killen’ it! All so easy. Too easy! The staff has to start moving you back. Next, maybe 5, feet? In fact, it’s still too damn easy!  You are performing like John Wick! And the rangemaster knows this and he has to challenge you, by God! Okay, you’ve shot your 5 or 10 beauty rounds, too close and too perfect. Your gift, high score shots are over, Mister!

So, out of those 100 rounds, you might shoot 10 or 15 very close? 10%. 15%. Even though a high percentage of shootouts are quite close like this, the rangemaster starts moving you back very early in the gun day. He’s supposed to make it tough! You move back and then start shooting immediately with two hands, back, then back, then back some more. This course is now become almost all two-handed. At the end of the day, you’ve shot 10-15 rounds with one hand. rather close, and EIGHTY- NINETY rounds with two hands and back and back and back. Run the numbers of a 500 round course. 50 rounds close. 450 rounds two-handed. How about a 1,000 rounder day? A major preponderance of 2-hand shooting.  We have created an all-purpose, “muscle memory,” two-hand grip, arms extended shooter. Grab the gun, go to two-hands.

An idea involved in this distancing method also is, if you improve your distance, bulls eye shooting (with two-hands) it will automatically improve your bulls-eye shooing in closer distances. Yes. Yes, it will, but it also is furthering and creating the two-hand monster when in a one-hand world. Most rangemasters have kind of, inadvertently, created a two-handed monster.

So, later in real life, then the crap hits the rotating blades, what do you expect the replicating robot to do? Thoughtlessly, mindlessly draw and shoot with two hands, extended arms of course, very often too close to an enemy, who can slap the gun aside, grab, arm wrap, try a disarm, whatever. What else can we expect from them? We…made…them…do…this. And without simulated-safe ammo training versus a real person, we have not taught them the feel and savvy of distance versus a real person who can reach and charge in.

I believe that a properly trained, responsible gun-totter, must be free to make a conscious decision, each and every time they pull a gun, to end up with a one-hand or two-hand grip, based on the geography of the situation, NOT from the mental detachment, or target practice boredom, or the bad math of a civilian, police or military rangemaster.

In much further experimentation, practitioners must experience – feel – the distance of an attacker. Feel the distance. Like a football running back versus a linebacker. Or a football receiver versus a defender. That kind of intimate feel. The physics of a fight. It can be surprising how far away is actually safe for a two-hand grip. In other words, you might think that a two-handed grip is okay and you are still too close to his sudden dash and lunge at your gun. People still use the term “force on force,” training, but whatever you what to call it, you have to do a lot of situational training.

One-hand grip. Two-handed grip. Two-handed grip to one-handed grip. One-handed grip to two-handed grip. In summary, this breaking point is your personal footage when you really need and can safely hold a pistol with two hands or one hand. Perhaps people need to spend a little more time live fire shooting closer with one hand. Closer, in direct relation to the who, what, when, where, how and why they predict they will be shooting. We all vocalize this, and know this, and say we know this, but the challenge remains how do you physically translate this into sufficient training methods and time, in an assembly-line world of group instruction?

 

“Break Three” is that physical and time breaking point where you have the time and space to go from an “emergency aim” to a serious, dedicated, front and back-sighted aim. “Emergency aim.” Oh boy, a tenuous term, huh? One might want to say something like “point-shoot” instead, or something fast and frisky. The gun world has become such an anal retentive, obsessive hole of hair-splitting viewpoints, and growling complaints. It can be a minefield to leap around with these terms. And what a “claymore” the term “point-shooting” is, huh? But I think you know what I mean when I say “emergency aiming.” People have been close to enemies, barely put up their handgun and shot them successfully. Maybe from hip or rib height? No sight acquisition. No two-hand grip. They did officially “aim? So to speak. Kinda’? But not by the rigid definitions of many an instructor as they did not completely acquire the front and rear sights in that one perfect, breathless union.

You can better understand the meaning of this by two extreme examples. In one, a ground fight – a guy is over you with the tip of a Bowie knife about to pierce your eyeball. You have his knife limb in a death defying grip, and you pull a pistol and shoot him in the torso. Not much “sight-acquisition” going on there. Not much two-handed grip, jibber-jabber. The second example is that of a sniper, working to shoot a seated despot general having several tequilas on a jungle patio, half-a-mile away. Lots of prep time. Breath control. Terrific finger position on trigger. Windage check. Okay, well…yeah…that’s with a rifle, not a pistol. But you get my overall drift.

The clock and the yardstick. Time/No-Time? Space/No-Space? Sights/No-Sights? I think that real life often happens somewhere closer to the no-time clock. And then often too, in no-space or not much space, yardstick.

I recall a era, a rant-rage period, when gun guys preached the absolute, mandatory acquisition of sights each and every single time you shoot. It was/is MANDATORY. I remember an instructor (with no real world experience by the way) who ran a somewhat successful range business, lecturing this point. EACH and EVERY time the sights must be accessed, no matter the time or distance,  or you are wrong, wrong, wrong no matter the situation. Otherwise, you are screwing up the space-time continuum of the universe. I recall these instructors also demanded a two-handed grip EVERY time too. Maybe this rant-rage-speak, this type of advice, is still as around in some gun circles? I don’t know. Maybe I have tuned them out. But, these people need to read the news more. Look at youtube shootings. (Many of these naysayers, did naysay BEFORE the proliferation of youtube shooting films. I wonder if they still sing the same tune now?) 

On this subject, Warrior Poet Society, Ranger war vet John Lovell observes that his range class shooters, when doing for force-on-force, shoot low a whole lot – “The shooters were quite literally AIMING LOW. Again, WHY IS THAT? I and others have a theory on why we miss in fights but not on the range. When we are afraid and are presented with a threat, we REFUSE TO ALLOW anything to block our view of that threat. This means, your fear response refuses to allow your sights and gun to block any part of your view.” So, the gun is lower and the shots are lower. I can see that (no pun intended).

I would like to add that after some 25 years of organizing simulated ammo shooting, people often shoot at where they look. A lot of opponent’s guns and gun hands are shot. That might be where they are looking and might also be, that when shooting center mass, the guy’s gun hand is up and gets in the way. But, Hips are shot when the other guy tries to draw his pistol. 

In summary, this third breaking point is deciding when you can unofficially aim, or officially aim. The challenge remains how do you physically translate this into sufficient training methods and time, in the common, assembly-line world of group instruction? One universal solution to these problems is do more live fire, close up. Shoot more with one hand. Another big, big solution for me is to do way more safe ammo, interactive exercises. Way more. Lots more. You learn and better relate to the chaos, and actually experience the distances.

Some Suggestions…I know I have pissed off a lot of gun instructors through the last 26 years, even some recently, when I’ve said, “you are not really learning how to gunfight unless you are shooting at moving, thinking people who are shooting back at you.” People who make their living and own shooting range property for marksmanship hate to hear that. They shouldn’t, as they could do this material also. Simulated ammo in scenarios. Pissed or not, growling and grumbling aside, this idea really marches on. Thank goodness this has been a growing trend. You’ll find it in civilian, police and military training. Not enough, but it’s growing. Far from me being called on the web “a fool who plays with toys.”

A “gun day” training. I suggest people shoot their real guns for starters. Then after a point, after shooting to familiarize yet again with their real guns, next spend some considerable time doing safe ammo training versus a training partner.  You might choose a 20%-80% split? With the 80% being scenarios. Or 50%-50%, Whatever, but if you are not doing a LOT of interactive training, you are missing out on a lot of vital, preparation opportunities. This stuff should not be ignored, and should not be done rarely like a novelty. Some people think I am endorsing paint-ball games on a basketball court, when I talk like this. No. Something better organized (though a little paintball might go a long way with moving our stiff and fatty asses.)

The Three Pistol Breaking Points Summary. Pistol shooting training can be a personal process. You might think of a few more breaking points to suit your ideas and outlines. Go for it. But within my three…

  • Hand sizes are different. Gun sizes are different.
  • Understand the stress grab and drawing from awkward positions.
  • Find your best finger position for a squeeze, gun-by-gun.
  • You cannot/should not always shoot with two-hands.
  • You cannot/should not always shoot with one hand.
  • You cannot always shoot with an acquisition of sights.
  • There is probably a good chance you are doing too much shooting with two-hands in comparison to close quarter incidents/statistics.
  • Through experiments with training partners and safe ammo, know the best distances for single and double-hand, pistol grips. Use safe ammo that does not hurt. There is no reason to use painful Simunitions on your friend who is trying to help you.
  • Train with safe, simulated ammo in likely problems first, then unlikely problems next.

None of this is an excuse not to become the best marksman you can be. This is just some stuff to think about, and stuff I worry about from a training doctrine perspective. Using the three breaking points nickname have helped me focus on these subjects.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

Get Training Mission One and Training Mission Two books, in ebook, paperback or collectable hardcover editions. Some 4,000 how-to photo in hand, stick, knife and gun and some 450 pages. Click here

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Will the Real Dr. Winston Clancy Please Stand Up? (Or… How to Throw a Man Out a Helicopter Over the Gulf of Mexico)

Will the Real Dr. Winston Clancy Please Stand Up?  (Or… How to Throw a Man Out  a Helicopter Over the Gulf of Mexico)

After I retired I did a 3 year stint in private investigations in Texas. Then Jane got a job in northern Georgia. I was licensed in Texas, and knew no one in Georgia, so I did not renew the TX license. (Jeez what a money racket that licensing was! I write all about that in my police book).  People are morbidly interested in my “private eye” days.”  The topic sometimes comes up and they ask, “Were those days like the Rockford Files?”

I tell them “Oh yes. Exactly, except there were no car chases, gun fights or sex. ” But there was certainly some “Rockford” weirdness. Like this – one of my PI cases.

Through the years I’d met an architect from the Miami area I’ll call Phillip for the purposes of protecting the so-called innocent. But ol’ Phillip was not so innocent. He was longtime married in Florida but when his national business took him through the Dallas-Ft. Worth area for various periods of time, he would often appear at various functions with a knockout Dallas “cougar,” blonde, hanging off his arm. 

Hey, I liked Phillip. He was a macho guy, an alpha male. He was a skin diver, a hang glider, a sky diver, and an overall adventurer. Carefree. Careless. He would often ask me and mine to accompany a group to a show or a concert. In the limo, he would often lean over and ask me, “Are you packing?”

I would squint a bit, half shake my head, and give a quarter smile. “Yeah,” I’d whisper. I usually had my .45 or a small revolver.
He’d get a kick out of that. I didn’t know why. I never did quite figure out the guy and why I was his sometimes pal when in town; was it me and my charm? Or because he liked having me and a gun around?
Phillip. Carefree. Careless. Careless? One year he corralled me at a big north Dallas house party of the well-to-do with a certain pleading eye that was not so carefree.

“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.”
With a Seven and Seven in my hand and a beer in his, he steered me over to an empty front room of the house. He told me he’d lost over two million dollars. And he was not alone. Several of his East Coast friends and associates let slip about the same amount. He and those other friends and associates had invested millions in a Texas oilman-driller named Dr. Winston Clancy and his latest “sure thing” oil well. This was his latest oil well drilling project in west Texas. Let me be more specific. Phillip had even introduced those friends to Clancy and gotten them involved.

“I am pissed. My friends are pissed at me. And I mean I can’t have some of those people pissed at me. The well was a scam. A con.”
“What people?”
“People with money. People with bad friends. Some think I am in on the scam!”
“What do you want, Phillip?” I asked.
“I want to find the son of a bitchin’ bastard,” he growled.
“And if I find him?”
“Hmmm, yeah, well. Let’s take one step at a time. You find him first.”

Okay. I’d go that far. We’d see what happened next. I couldn’t, I mean I shouldn’t get involved in any violent debt collection. Shouldn’t…

“Okay, when can you fill me in on everything you got on him?” I asked.
“Tomorrow. Can you meet me tomorrow?”

He turned toward the big archway. “Michael!” he shouted into the living room.
Michael, the stock salesman, walked up to us.
“You have a business card on you?”
“Ah, yeah,” and Michael opened his wallet and gave him a card.
“Okay. Thanks,” Phillip told him; and with a light, friendly push, he steered him back to the party.

“Can you meet me here tomorrow at 2 p.m.? This is a local office where I set up shop,” he said, and he handed me the business card. It was a finance office in north Dallas.
“Okay.”
“Hock, this is no favor. I am going to pay you for this.”
“Okay.”

And the party resumed. Phillip acted very normal, very typical the rest of the night, his usual gregarious self. But I noticed his attention span drop when others were talking a bit too long. He often stared off with the blank expression of a guy in a jam. What “friends” might go after old careless, carefree Phil?

I showed up at the finance office the next day dressed appropriately, but not too much, just good jeans, boots, white shirt, and a blue blazer. That’d get you inside anywhere in Texas, in a millionaire’s club or a slum crap game.

Phillip was summoned to the lobby by a beauty behind the front desk, and we entered a stately conference room. Phillip stepped out. I got a cup of coffee, top-notch of course, unlike that law office mud; and he returned with a stack of books and files.
We went over his mess.
“Here is a book he made of his prior successes.”

He handed me a large hardcover book like a textbook with color pictures. Or more like a school yearbook to my mind. There was a profile on Clancy with a color photo of our con man with a white cowboy hat standing before a wall of photos. One photo was of a luxury yacht. I looked on. Clancy had a plush office all right, full of leather furniture, statues, paintings of cowboys and cattle, and a giant, ornate dark wooden desk. The walls were full of oil well pictures. Problem was, he apparently was, as we say down here, “all hat and no cattle.” Problem was, it was as realistic as a cardboard set of J. R. Ewing’s office from the old TV show Dallas.

The rest of the book was a series of successful wells drilled all over. Snapshots of the drills and the roughnecks displaying good all-American hard work and sweat. Photos advertised the eventual pumps, the happy and rich landowners, and the happy, happy investors raising drinks and grinning from ear to ear. I thumbed and fanned through the pages.

“Some of those stories were real, the thicker chapters, and some were not. A lot were not,” Phillip said.

Clancy claimed he had an amazing success rate in finding oil in the ground. Winston Clancy looked the total oilman package: that hat, Western clothes, and expensive Western jewelry. He bragged to Phillip that he’d earned a doctorate in geology at SMU in Dallas, and Phillip got some of his Florida and New York friends involved with that “sure thing.” Clancy even flew to Miami and met them all at a dinner party at Landry’s Steakhouse. Winston had the schematics, maps, geology reports, and what-all to convince people that his next well was sure to be a gusher. A gusher! Glasses were raised in a toast. Riches to all!

In the end, Clancy walked away with millions in investment money from his far west Texas oil well project.
“In the beginning, we got monthly progress reports and some photos with them. A look at the site. Breaking ground. The well under construction. Then those reports came every two months. Then three….”
“Then none,” I said. (This tactic was not new.)

This actually was not new at all. I’d worked cases like this before as a police detective. Bad news for Phillip, though. You caught the guy, and you put him in jail. The guy got convicted, and the scammed money was already spent or well hidden. The courts made him pay a dribbling amount of restitution to the victims. They never got real recompense. Clancy got out on bond or served a short prison hitch, and he was out. But then, I was no longer in the “catch and release” game. I could play other games.

I found some of the news reports in the stack. Eight-inch by 17-inch sheets of paper, folded in half, and stapled together. Picture quality not good. Must have been run on a basement copy machine. Envelopes?
“You have any envelopes?”
“Somewhere.”
He sat up, leaned across the table, and shuffled through the pile. He found one. An actual stamp was used on the envelope. Postmarked Dallas.
“All these have the same postmark?”
“Don’t know. Threw them away when I got them.”
I got a bunch of details from Phillip and the pile.
“Let me take this book,” I said, grabbing up the advertising, rah-rag yearbook.
“Okay.”
“I’ll get with you if I find anything.”

I left the office with a plan. I drove straight to Mockingbird Lane. Why, you ask? Because that book was made just last year, printed by a book company on Mockingbird Lane in Dallas. I’ll just call them Scuttle Press for this story. The name was in the fine print in the opening pages and on the spine.
“I sure need to talk with a salesman,” I told the receptionist at Scuttle.
“Yes, sir, may I have your name?”
“Hock.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Hock.”
As I suspected by looking around the stately lobby full of samples, this outfit would make any book. School yearbooks, textbooks, anything. A smiling face met me within minutes, and we walked off to his office.
“This is going to sound crazy, but I need to find someone. I have found myself in an oil deal. The land is rich with oil, and we need a driller. A real wildcatter. Someone with Exxon gave me this book and told me flat out to find this guy for the job!”
I slid the book across his desk. He spun it for a look.
“Y’all made this book for him!”
“Is … is his address not in here?”
“He’s moved.”
“Oh.”
“I have to find this guy. Is there any way you can help me? Any info on him? A phone number? New address?”
“Well, I don’t know, that would be….”
“The whole purpose of your making this book for this man was to advertise his business! That was what he wanted you for. I, sir … I am business!”
“Let me see what I can do for you.”
He took the book and left the office. I think he fell for my tall Texas tale.
About 10 minutes later, he appeared with some copy machine papers.
“All we have is this Dallas address. That might be the one he moved from. And this phone number. Those books were delivered to that Dallas address.”
“Oh, oh, thank you,” I said. I got the sheet of info and the book and left Scuttle Press with the scuttlebutt.

The phone number? A Houston prefix. After a while, you got used to a lot of phone numbers from working cases; and this one was in the Houston area. But was I going to drive straight to this Dallas address and find this swindler?

It was rush hour now, and Dallas could be a bear like any big city. When I got to the house, I sized it up. Not a super nice house or neighborhood. Nice enough, but not super nice. Not oilman nice, anyway.
I walked up to the door and rang the bell. Nothing. I took a peek into the front windows. You guessed it. Empty. Empty and no “For Sale” sign to be seen. I wandered around the backyard. No signs of life.
There was always next door!
“Hello, I was looking for the folks who lived next door.”
“They moved a few months ago,” the lady who answered the door told me.
“They? He and his wife?”
“Yes, I think, I don’t really know if they were married or not.”
“Uh-huh. Do you know where they moved?”
“I don’t, but Melinda across the street was friends with the lady. She might know where Melissa is.”
Melissa? Okay, long story short, with the same story of me hunting for an oil expert, Melinda told me that the Clancy clan left for Houston. There was more to the neighborhood visit, but it turned out to be unimportant for you to know. Suffice it to say, I learned a great deal about “Mrs. Clancy,” and the city of Houston was second on my list to visit.

First trip on the list? First I absolutely had to drive out to the supposed oil well site so that I could confirm, with my eyes and without a doubt, there was no well.
Back at my home office, I called a Texas Ranger I knew in Austin who I worked with when he was a local highway patrolman and who owed me a few over an old missing person’s case. I gave him the Houston phone number, told him I was investigating a statewide oil scam crime, and asked for his help. This was a Texas-sized problem, and I would fill him in on the end result for his intel when I was done. I needed the address of that phone number plus any and all the horsepower he could muster up on the house where the phone was installed. Residents. Utilities. Etcetera.

Two days later, I was on my way out to west Texas. Easy run. I found the tract where the well was supposed to be and, well, no well. I snapped a few photos of nothing. No permits were filed at the county. I made the long drive home with real confirmation of the scam.
I waited for the Ranger’s call and got it a few days later. The house belonged to a Melissa Keefus. Utilities, too. Two cars were registered to the house, both in Melissa’s name.
But some other info from the house, stuff I won’t mention here, had the name William Alex Sanford. The Ranger said Sanford’s mug shot matched the photo of Clancy I had faxed him. Yeah, that’s right, mug shot. The name belonged to a con man on parole with mucho prior arrests for swindling and fraud. This was the real Dr. Winston Clancy.

Right after that, I took one of two drives to Houston to this Clancy-Sanford house. Another decent neighborhood, but no millionaire digs. And good news for me, the garage was on the front of the house. If it had been out back, I’d have had a little trouble parking back there and waiting for their cars to come and go; and at the same time, I’d have missed any action at the front. I had a truck and a four-door sedan at my disposal, the sedan being the most boring and overlooked car. I watched the house at various times of the day. And at the end of the two trips, I tallied up several sightings of Melissa and one of the mysterious Doctor himself, Mister Clancy.

When I got back home, I made the phone call.
“Phillip?”
“Yes.”
“This is Hock.”
“Yes.”
“I found our doctor. He is in Houston.”
“Oh, that is great news. Great. Tell me about it.”
I gave him the synopsis.
“All this will be in a report I will mail you.”
“With a bill for your services,” he said.
“Okay. What happens next?”
“I’ll handle it,” he said.
“You will? How? What?”
“Not to worry, Hock.”
“I had to pull in some favors to get this info. Clancy is a parole violator, and a Texas Ranger now knows about this. I promised him a full report would be forthcoming. I assume eventually his parole officer will be officially notified by the Ranger.”
“Hmmm. Okay.”
“What I meant to say is this. You couldn’t collect much from a guy in jail. And you would be the complainant who the parole officer must contact to see if his guy was still committing crimes. There had to be a crime report for him to work on.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, this could be a bargaining chip to use with him. Against him. To get your money. I could…”
“Don’t worry, Hock. I got it from here.”
“Okay.”

And with that, we hung up. I sat quietly for a moment at my desk staring out the window. What would happen next?
I prepared a bill and shipped it off with some photos. I got over $5,000 plus expenses. Not a bad haul for the 1990s. About two weeks later, I sent a packet as promised to my Ranger friend in Austin. He would do with it as he wished. Tell parole? Open his own investigation? Stick it in a pile in a corner? And, that was that!

Until about one year later. A dinner party, and who was there? Phillip and the cougar! He waved across the room; and about an hour in, he ushered me out to the backyard.
“Thanks for all your help and that … deal,” he said with a smile.
“It worked out? What happened?”
“I told my Florida friends. Retired friends from New York. People who knew people. Doctor Clancy was kidnapped one night.”
He smiled broadly at me.
“Ah … what?”
“He was kidnapped. Duct tape on his mouth and hands. Everything. They tossed him in a car and drove him down Galveston way. The Gulf Coast somewhere. They put him in a helicopter, and they all took off over the Gulf. They opened the side door of the chopper and hung his ass about half out of it. They told him to pay us back; or they would do this little trip again, only worse for him.”
I smiled back at him.
“They drove him right back to his car. They stayed in Houston for the week. We got our money back by the end of the week.”
What could I say to that? I nodded my head and laughed. He laughed.
“Happy ending, huh?”
“Happy ending,” I repeated.

I would see Phillip a few more times. Then I heard he had a terrible accident hang gliding. He just about destroyed his shoulder. He was getting way too old for that stuff. I also heard he divorced his wife and took up with the cougar woman. There were a few natural deaths within that group of friends, and Mrs. Cougar returned for the funerals. All connections dwindled away.

I worked another oil well case around that time. Two rival oil companies were fighting over  a well in the south. One illegally took it over and I was hired to go there and take it back. I picked up a gang of the kicked-out, rough-neckers and we cut the gate chains and ran off the illegal crew. Our guys held wrenches and tools. The other guys, pretty much knew they were there illegally and took off.  But that’s another story. 

Justice does come in all forms. Sometimes it comes in the cold, cold midnight wind off the Gulf boosted by helicopter blades at about 300 feet above sea level.

********

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

This is excerpted from Hock’s true crime book. Thousands sold all over the world. Get the ebooks. Get the paperbacks. Find them, click  here

 

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The Dead Baby

Through the years, I worked several cases involving dead babies. Dead babies in murders and car wrecks. Frozen in cars. A rape. Beatings. But one was by far the weirdest and most ironic.

In Dallas, Texas, in the last few years, the city had started what they called a Baby Moses program. This program was where unwanted babies could be dropped off at fire stations and safe havens with no questions asked rather than be abandoned or killed. As I watched this news feature about the new program on television, my mind flipped off into the various dead baby cases I had worked in the past. Would the Baby Moses plan have helped? All had a snapshot stain in my brain of a telling moment or two. But … one sight, one night sticks in my mind.

That case involved what was probably one of the most ironic moments of my life because it was intertwined with the law, races, friendships, death, abortion, poverty, education, and, … well, so much it was too hard to categorize it all. I will just have to tell you about it, and I promise you won’t know what to do with it either.

I will start by recalling a guy named Sam Till for you. Many of our officers knew Sam Till. Sam lived in one of the projects or “poor” parts of our city; and, yes, it was the black part of town. Sam was a Vietnam vet and a retired, high-ranking Army NCO. He was a hard-working, ambitious person and ran two successful businesses. One was a large, citywide sanitation company; and the other was a well-established funeral home. On any given day, you might spot Sam supervising a garbage truck or even loading one on a route; or he might be giving a sermon at a funeral or driving the limo to a graveyard. He often came to crime scenes and collected the murder victims or scraped together what was left of accidents and suicides. Sam, like the other funeral home folks, would transport the bodies to the lab for autopsies if needed. Sam pitched in and did it all. Yes, Sam was a black guy.

One day, he and two workers saw a crazed man beating one of our officers and trying to take his pistol. Sam and the men jumped on the criminal and saved the day and the life of the already-unconscious officer. Sam was one of the locals who renovated his house and remained in the projects as many successful people did at that time. It was where he grew up! Where he wanted to be. He was even mildly involved in city politics and become involved with various good causes. He had several good sons who stayed out of trouble despite where they lived.

During my years as a patrolman or a detective, Sam supplied me with a lot of information about people he knew and suspected of crimes. I could go to him anytime for intel and gossip. He in turn would give me a phone call if he thought he’d discovered something. I think he knew I meant well for the community. He also knew that one of the most influential people in my life was a black Army NCO named Gaston; and, therefore, I mustn’t have been much of a racist. But racism was an overall problem back then—not as bad as before the 40s, 50s, and 60s, but still bad in the 70s and 80s.

I was a fairly “new” detective in 1981 or thereabouts (technically “new” as Texas goes as I was one in Army) . I was dispatched one chilly, early evening to meet a patrolman about a “family” problem in that part of the city. When I arrived at this sprawling, older home, a patrolman introduced me to a mother and father. The parents had become burdened with a problem, and neither they nor the patrolman knew what to do about it.

I first met the officer standing outside on the walkway and alone in the dusk.
“Hey, Hock,” the patrolman said. “We’ve got a problem here. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with it.” The officer shook his head. He opened the front door and steered me in.
What is there not to know? I asked myself. Then I found out.

“Sandra has not been well, and her friends have told us something,” the mother spoke up. “Sandra was pregnant. And we had no idea.”
Pregnant? No idea? I saw the family color portrait on the wall. The parents were big people, and I mean really big people. Sandra, who looked to be about twelve years old in the picture, was a very, very big girl. We all sat in the living room.

“Her friend told us she was pregnant, and she had the baby,” the father said. “Sandra has not been to school in a week. She’s been throwing up … we just thought … we just thought she was sick.”

“Where is the baby?” I asked. “Is there a baby … yet?”
“No one knows,” the officer added.
“Sandra’s friend says she had the baby last night,” the distressed mother said.
“Where?”
“In there,” the father said, pointing to a bedroom.
“In there. Have you looked yet?”
“No, Mr. Hock, we were afraid to look.”
“Any … ahh … crying or…?” I asked with trepidation.
“No. Sandra is in there now. She won’t open the door.”
“Well, Mrs. Rankin, this is your house; and you can go anywhere in it. Let’s go,” I said.

We all stood, and the mother announced to Sandra that we were coming in. Sandra wouldn’t unlock the door, so I kicked it open. The bedroom was quite large, yet it was stacked and cluttered with … with just about everything you’d find in a teen’s room at the time times 10. Clean clothes. Dirty clothes. Furniture. Some stuff just stacked and other things grossly shoved and tossed everywhere, all atop a dirty carpet and a few pieces of old wooden furniture.
The mother started to explain to her why we were there. Sandra was now about 15 years old and still quite a large young girl, much larger than the photo I’d seen in the living room. It was possible to live around her and not detect a pregnancy? I guessed. Possible? As they talked, as she denied, I started prowling the room, lifting, and looking. And then I spotted a newborn baby pushed against the wall and buried in towels and clothes. Dead.

The parents knew I’d spotted something. I must have grunted or something. And in an instant, they charged over to look. They moaned and screamed.
“Don’t touch,” I said quietly. Regretfully. “Let’s all get out of this room.”

I left the house for my sedan radio. I requested our crime scene man, Russell Lewis, to come as well as my supervisor, Detective Sergeant Howard Kelly. Kelly called the house phone, and I ran down to explain the deal to him. He would contact a Juvenile Division Detective to take over any investigation, but that wouldn’t be until tomorrow unless something unusual happened. It was my mess until then. I hung up the phone. I knew the girl would eventually be charged for something that would probably be impossible to prove or disprove back then. Stillborn? Starved? Killed? Not too sure what the prosecutors would do. But my involvement would be temporary.

Now, I am trying to keep these details brief. Russell came. We snooped around, and he took pictures. Then he left. What came next is why I write this…

A funeral home was called to handle the dead body after we processed the crime scene. Sam Till’s was next on rotation and took the call and drove right over as soon as he could.

As soon as he could, because he was still in his garbage truck! Not the usual Till funeral van, as Sam was out delivering a truck to his office and was already nearby. Sam came in and was greeted by the parents as though they were longtime friends. He sat with them. He listened to them. Sympathized with them, as Sam always did so well. There would be a proper funeral. The family left the house for the police station, where I would later collect some preliminary statements.

Then it was just me and Sam. The baby would next go to his funeral home and as soon as possible be driven to the Dallas County Southwest Forensics lab for an autopsy. Sam had a white towel in his hands, and we walked to the bedroom and up to the baby. He was talking about something to me the whole way. I don’t remember what. He grabbed this baby by the ankles, and with it hanging upside down, we went back out on the street. While we discussed whatever it was, he laid the towel down on the passenger floorboard of the garbage truck and laid the baby atop the towel. We said goodbye.

He roared the garbage truck engine as I walked to my car and unlocked the car door, but I just stood there for a second, you know? What just happened? As he drove away in the garbage truck, I stood rather dumbfounded on the city street; and I knew I had just witnessed a most ironic, twisted, odd, social statement or situation. I mean, how can I describe this? The words “dead black baby born in secrecy and removed from the slums … in a garbage truck at night.” Is that how the report could read?

I have a vivid memory of that moment in my head.  Standing on the street watching the garbage truck drive away. A memory, to this very day, I still just don’t know what to do with.

*********

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

This is excerpted from Hock’s book by Wolfpack Publishing Kill or Be Killed, True Crime – Detective Books. Click here

 

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Pre-Fight? What About Pre-Crime?

“Keep your ‘scene’ just a ‘scene,’ and not a crime scene, baby.” – Kojak

There has been much ado these last years in training/seminar circuit about pre-fight indicators. Instructors present a list that has actually been around since the 1970s. So new? No. Just new to new people, that is. Through those early years the list rarely filtered down into the local “kuraty” clubs, so to speak, so its arrival decades later, was big and big business for some. It is shocking to me that so many martial veterans were unaware of these set-ups.

It seems that most pre-fight indicator lists, and their courses, however have been mostly about “boys in bars fighting.” Not about criminals and crime. NOT a pre-crime confrontation list! The pre-assault advice covered is usually  what an angry person does just before he or she hits you. Which is a crime, but not always a premeditated criminal plan-ambush. Not that these emotional “sucker punches” aren’t important too, and  criminals about to attack you also have biological symptoms too. So for the record, we list are the classic tips.

What are Some Tip-Offs He May Attack You? This info was first taught to me in the 1970s at military and Texas police academies. I’ve collected it all, adding some, and the list is in my teaching outlines since the 1990s and in Fightin’ Words book. My Training Mission One book is all about hand, stick, knife and gun Stop 1 “collisions,” that is, all the things that happen before physical contact from sniper range to stand-offs. Since you are not reading those now, you are reading this, here are some of those trouble-tips.

Now, I do not want you to over-emphasize this information as some kind of cure. Just read over the list and keep them in mind. The list was created and repeated here because these tips/events have happened. I have seen them many of them when dealing with people for decades in this upset and angry, drugged or drunk “people business” called police work.

When a person becomes stressed, angry and aggressive, his or her body might react, not always, but sometimes demonstrates some changes. Here are some of these changes that research, history and experience may induce a sudden attack/leap upon you. Many people suggest that in a real fight situation, a person has no time to read these clues. Sometimes, yes, I agree. But, this is not always true. Sometimes there are confrontations and people do have the time to see these tip-offs. Every professional and every citizen needs to read this list and at least become aware of these points.

Obviously the clues vary from situation to situation and person to person. But, better to know these on the list, than not, or to ignore they even exist. I have seen them unfold myself on police calls and arrests.

  • His eyes bulge.
  • He has that 1,000 yard stare.
  • He suddenly seems to ignore you.
  • He squints.
  • He assesses your body parts and gear as potential targets.
  • His mouth becomes dry, creating odd lip and jaw movements.
  • His teeth clench.
  • His voice changes.
  • He actually, clearly voices violent intentions.
  • His words become spastic and distracted.
  • He twitches.
  • His nostrils flare.
  • His breathing increases.
  • He takes one big sudden breath.
  • His face color changes, maybe reddens or pales.
  • His veins bulge.
  • His chin tightens, or drops.
  • His neck tightens.
  • His jaw juts (dumb but he still does it).
  • He babbles as though his thoughts are not guiding his voice.
  • He doesn’t babble and actually vocalizes his plans of attack.
  • He actually tells you his plans! “Why I’m gonna…”
  • His arms swing, maybe with body turns (a big deal and easy cover for a sucker attack).
  • His fingers and fists clench (blood leaving those extremities).
  • His fingers drum surface tops.
  • His hands shake.
  • He extends a hand to shake yours. Could be a trick.
  • Hands go to weapon, carry sites on the body (previously listed)
  • He turns away (critical sucker punch set-up).
  • His hands and arms travel to near obvious pre-fight postures and positions. He positions his hands high on his chest, neck, chin or head. Raises up to  seemingly innocent, high positions as in a fake head scratch, like a yawn or a stretch.
  • He strikes a pre-fight posture, such as a boxer.
  • He raises from a seated position.
  • He tries to wander.
  • He bends slightly at the knees. (A sporty-like body crouch is never a good sign. I want to say in my experience that I have found one of the biggest tip-offs to trouble is a crouch! Bending at the knees. When the other person crouches. This is a springboard to athleticism. Not only might they attack you, or run off, but in the mixed weapon world we live in, people have a tendency to crouch and draw knives and guns.)
  • He gets too close.
  • His body blades away from you.
  • He suddenly takes off his shirt, jacket or watch.
  • He “expands” his chest.
  • Heel and toe tapping.
  • Positioning near potential improvised weapons.
  • Shirt lift about his belt line (this is NEVER a good thing).
  • Keep adding to this list.

Pre-Crime. But, what of pre-crime indicators? Planned criminals can display none of the signs. They can smile, act and approach with a trick, gimmick or question. I am not sure that the average Joe and Joan grasp the fact that the thrilling, pre-fight indicator list can be quite different than the pre-crime indicator list. Oh, and I can hear the snoring already beginning because this now reads like…“crime prevention.” BORING! Huh? Crime prevention is often cluttered with “locking your doors,” and “putting up outdoor lights,” and…and…still awake? Still reading?

How does one…pre-crime? How do you detect an ambush crime? Pre-crime studies are different than pre-fight studies. And I believe that while many virgin schools and virgin seminar attendees are so happy to hear about all the “fist clenching” and “1000 yard stares,” that the presenter and attendees miss the crime prevention aspects.

Collecting criminal intelligence in general and in your area in important. Stopping rapes, robberies, abductions/kidnappings, home invasions and murders. Who, what, where, when, how and why do you get ambushed into a crime? Sometimes there’s a little overlap between the two categories, sure. But pre-crime is different and diverse. For example, there are usually little if any pre-fight indicators in a criminal ambush. Many criminals just ambush you from behind. The element of surprise has defeated the greatest militaries of the world and it can defeat you too. 

What can we do to make pre-crime sexy again? It’s hard. Publishers use to create a fair amount of crime prevention books years ago. They were quickly rendered onto the Dollar Sale table. No sales? No more books.

People do somewhat remember The Gift of Fear. Why? The stories, that’s why. Years ago, Gavin Debecker wrote that entertaining book, The Gift of Fear. First editions really promoted an ESP-ish, Spidey-Sense as the gift. Neuro science developments in the 2000s proved otherwise – that it wasn’t magic, rather we react from learned behavior. Your “gut” instinct is almost completely a trained mind from vast sources. The Gift stories were thrilling (psychology has already proven that stories and “war-stories” are the best, longer-lasting teacher). But take out the cool stories? And what’s left, the skeleton of advice? Strip out the tales and you have a BORING crime prevention hand-out from your local police department. “Lock your doors.” “Put up lights.” “Watch out for strangers.” “Watch out for dark places.” Etc. Yawn.

The routine crime prevention pamphlet can leave something to be desired. It usually lacks a certain first-person, in-the-moment advice from…stories. Whereas watching a news story about an unlocked door, and a sobbing crime victim, is a better teacher than a McGruff pamphlet.

Geography, plus architecture, plus criminal mind. For one example of a study area for pre-crime in the “where” category, I wrote about this in my book Fightin’ Words. I worked a rape once by a bus stop. In the daytime, this ¾ enclosed bus stop looked normal and safe. A curved sidewalk ran behind the little clear, plastic edifice. In the middle of the walkway, beside the curve was a small grassy area, then tall fences of an apartment complex. This area had a gigantic bush-looking tree next to the sidewalk. Looks safe and normal. In the daylight. But at night? It was a trap. Poorly lit. A college girl walked by and was snatched by a thug from behind this bush. When called out to the case, I saw this scene at night and could see what a trap it was, from a criminal mind perspective. Daytime? No. Night time, yes.

An equation for trouble. Who, what, when, where, how and why? These questions can be investigated with good intel, research, experience, and an adequate mind, to predict crime scenes. With the “who, what, where, when, how and why” questions.

  • Who are you as a victim? Study victimology.
  • What crime could occur?
  • Where are you most or partially vulnerable to crime?
  • When are you most or partially vulnerable to crime?
  • How will the criminal approach?
  • Why are you there? Why are you still there?
  • This is just the beginning of the exam…

Hey, I let’s make crime prevention interesting again! I mean, doesn’t “Pre-Crime” sound cooler than “Crime Prevention?” We can do this.

“Keep your “scene” just a “scene” and not a crime scene…baby.”

(Just a side story about the crouch. Years ago I attended at Simunitions course alongside some police officers, some military and some gun instructors. Long story short, I shot a man with a camera. The suited-up trainer stood before us and did or did not do something. We students didn’t know what he planned. The guy’s hands were behind his back. He put a hand up front and held an old an old school camera and I drew and shot him in the chest. One-handed. The other attendees hemmed and hawed, “Hock shot a cameraman!”

The training was filmed and at the end of the day we watched and commented. My cameraman/death part came up and I squirmed a bit in my chair. But then we saw why I drew and shot? The trainer crouched. Deeply. His hand came out like a fast pistol draw. His hand on the way, twisted into a vertical looking grip. His eyes inside his face shield went wide.

This all happened so fast, I nor anyone caught this to comment on at the moment. But on the film, we got to see why I drew and shot. “No wonder he got shot,” One said. The trainer had completely replicated a pistol quick draw but produced a camera instead. This is not how a person, when questioned, would show he held a camera in his hand. But…I still shot an innocent person. At least it was in training. Gun people in training need to have humans in front of them doing things like this. (The crouch is almost always a  real sign of pending trouble.)

___________

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

Get the book Fightin’ Words, paperback or ebook, click here

Hock's Blogs

Who Do We Fight? Drunk Uncles, Criminals and Enemy Soldiers!

 

I worry about the “who, what, where, when, how and why” questions.  In my courses and should be in your courses  too, part of the “Who Question  is “who do we fight?” Well, we fight three “enemies.” 

  1. Your “drunk uncle”
  2. Criminals
  3. Enemy soldiers

1: Who? Drunk Uncles:  “Drunk uncle” is a metaphor that means all your relatives, near and dear, near and far. Kin folk or those close enough to be. It is very common in life to fight people that you do not wish to really hurt. Like your drunk buddy or uncle/relative. In police work we are also expected to fight but not really hurt people unless things get really “out-of-hand” and the situation escalates. But in person-to-person, poke your buddy’s eye out, bite off his ear, hammer-fist his throat or neck, smash his face, break bones, shatter his knee, and then see what happens to you. Usually, often, jail and lawsuits. Lots of money and problems. There is a whole lot of domestic violence out there, and violence on, and from, “who you know” is a big problem. (Remember, there are many intricacies in the complex laws of family violence, lest of all assaults and self defense.) 

2: Who? Criminals: Essentially speaking, a stranger, (or for that matter even a friend, uncle or not, officially becomes a criminal when they assault you. You could just lump your uncle into this category once in a while too.  But, what crime is being committed? Who, what where, when, how and why? The level of crime, the exact situation takes the exact temperature of your hot, lukewarm or cold response. Crime by the way often starts out with a trick ambush, which is a deep dive study also into the “what, where, when and “how” questions.

3: Who? Enemy soldiers: We know what those are. We usually like to kill them from as far away as possible, but often can’t do that either. Consider the military “rules of engagement.”

Civil law, criminal law and the Geneva Convention, as well as human ethics – look at fighting these three “bad guys” categories differently. Our responses and solutions confronting  said “uncles, criminals and enemy soldiers” are very situational and may be:

  1. Surrender.
  2. Bargain (talk, show weapon, etc.).
  3. Escape (orderly retreat – you leave or he leaves).
  4. Hurt, on up to maim.
  5. Kill.
  6. Detain, arrest and-or take prisoner.

Of course, not necessarily in that order. All are worth exploring in training through the “who, what, where, when, how and why” questions. All have happened and will happen. I make it a point to cover all of the above in the Force Necessary courses. 

Since we are Force Necessary and not Force UNnecessary, I have done sports and arts for decades. I investigate sports and arts. I only borrow and raid from sports and arts for practical applications to solve these “uncles, criminals and enemy soldier” problems. Sports and arts are great laboratories, but it takes constant vigilance to know where to draw the line between art-sports and survival.

*****

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

Get the book about all this and more, Fightin’ Words, click here

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You Who’s on Fire!

Our tenement apartment building was ravaged by a fire two days before Christmas way back in the 1950s. This put us homeless on the streets of Union City, New Jersey. I was about five years old. Our apartment had been two rooms, a kitchen and a living room. No walls. One big open area. My parents opened a couch into a bed, a “hide-a-bed” as they called it, right in the kitchen-dining room area to sleep. I had some kind of small fold-away bed, too. The apartment was one small open area with a bathroom about three or four stories up. Millionaires had elevators. We had creaky stairs. My grandparents lived upstairs.

The fire was one of my earliest memories. My mother, grandmother, and a wee, small boy (me) were walking up Bergenline Avenue when my mother spotted thick smoke in the late afternoon sky ahead of us.“Look, Momma, look at that smoke!” my mother said to my grandmother.“Oh, I hope it’s not our place!” my grandmother said. I heard that. I remember that. I saw the smoke clouds too. I remember that because it was indeed our building. Within minutes, as we got closer and closer, we knew it was.

My grandfather had been napping upstairs on his couch. The fire-truck sirens woke him up; and he ran upstairs to the sixth floor, broke down a locked door, and rescued a crazy old invalid lady. He threw her over his back and ran down the stairs. Firemen saw this and helped him at about the second floor. They said she screamed and grabbed at all the banisters along the way down.

Then he spent the rest of the time helping firemen with the hoses on the fire trucks behind the building. I still vaguely remember seeing him in one of those white tank top, muscle shirts and dress pants, covered in soot, and helping the firemen. His t-shirt was tucked in. He wore a dress belt. Even at 5, I was impressed with my grandfather that day. A rescuer. A helper in an emergency. He was a hero at least that day. He was pretty much a loser in life, an ignorant, unemployed, or poorly employed drunkard in fact, but not that afternoon. The inconsistency of heroism. According to Julius Caesar, “All glory is fleeting.”

The building was quickly gutted. An old tinderbox. We lost everything. We retreated to the nearest safe street corner with the rubberneckers. And another first memory of mine was seeing my father walking down a side street to us. He got the call about the fire at his factory job, and they let him off work. He took the bus up Hudson Boulevard from Jersey City. It was dark by then. Flames, sparks, and smoke curved over the side street. He was just a silhouette on the city sidewalk under this blazing red overhead show, but I recognized his walk.

An Italian guy owned a furniture store on that corner. He and his wife let us wait outside the store in the vestibule after my dad got there. My mother was typically hysterical. My dad, ever the WW II vet used to the slog of life, was calm. I remember his crouching down to a squat and lighting a cigarette with his big, heavy lighter, the flames and smoke in the distance. Years later I saw a photo of him in his scrapbook down in that same squat at a calm moment at the Battle of the Bulge. His forearm was resting on his knee, the ever-present Camel cigarette dangling in his open hand.

The fire raged on, and we couldn’t leave. We didn’t own cars! And we didn’t have anywhere to go if we did. Our relatives lived miles away; and they were also poor folks in small, tiny, shared apartments. The store owner and my dad towed some old used furniture out of the store and into the dirty hallway outside it.

That night after the fire was extinguished, we slept out there on two or three used couches under some mover’s blankets. The owner had to eventually lock up the store and go home. Unable to fall sleep on a small couch, I saw my dad pee in the street in the middle of the night. Later, I did the same. I lay there on the couch looking out at the dead-of-the-midnight street. I guess a sense of fleeting detachment stuck with me from that moment. Plus, I saw the calm of my father. The heroics of my grandfather. My hysterical mother. My first real memories of life came from that night.

They took up a collection at the can factory for us. I remember that. We begged and borrowed for a week or two here and there, much of which I can’t remember except for feeling like a refugee. It was a moving blur. You know, there weren’t many hotels back then, not like there are today. And I don’t know what we did that actual Christmas Day. Where did we go? There was no official Christmas that year. My parents cobbled it all together and got another apartment on a street closer to the Hudson River in a small city called West New York.

They are all dead now. Only I remain. I think about that fire just about every Christmas. Not every Christmas, but many, especially as I get older. I did this time. I think about sleeping in that dirty hallway of the furniture store. I learned that things could go to hell in a minute, blow up, burn up, and disappear. Best not cling too dearly to things. Best not.

Everyone is dead now, but me. I think about that fire just about every Christmas. Not every Christmas, but many, especially as I get older. I did this time. I think about sleeping in that dirty hallway of the furniture store. I learned that things could go to hell in a minute, blow up, burn up, and disappear. Best not cling too dearly to things. Best not.

I learned that you could look up in the sky and see smoke and then look down and realize that it might just be you who’s on fire.

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

This story appears in Hock memoirs/police books. Get the paperbacks or ebook downloads, or collect the beautiful hardcover. Click here:

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WHAT are you Wearing?

WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?

(Or how I learned to not wear a baseball uniform when practicing Tennis…)

(If you are happy camper doing classic martial arts in classic uniforms? Gis. Barefoot? You are just drawn to the idea? Then ignore me. What do you care what I think? This is just a personal rant.)

I was invited by some folks to a big reunion in the Philippines the other day, and I had to gracefully back out again. Because…because I just don’t go to such things. I am kind of a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit well in most places. When they asked why, one of my rambling answers was, “…yeah and you know,” this…that…“and I would have to wear a uniform, and…” 

Wearing the martial arts uniform. How many times have I dodged events through the years partially because I might be, I would be expected to wear a uniform? Thinking about it, I have not worn a gi of any system in probably in some 20 or so  years. Wow. I don’t have THAT uniform anymore. Nor any uniform. No black belts shoved in a corner. There are all long gone. I don’t recall throwing them away, but they are simply gone from my closets. And I’ve had many a gi since 1972. Kenpo. Karate. Kempo. Jujitsu (old school, not just wrestling). Aiki-Jitsu. Modern Arnis. Arnis de Mano. Not counting Thai shorts. All…gone.

I did show up, non-uniform, at a few events many years ago. One time in the 90s, I taught at a big event in San Francisco alongside Wally Jay and Uncle Bill de Thouars. There was about 300 people there.  ALL in gis except me and Dean Goldade. We wore t-shirts, blue jeans and shoes. We really stuck out like sore thumbs. Like disrespectful bums. I hear now that t-shirts and gi pants or sweat pants are acceptable in some big events and gatherings. Which may get me back in circulation?

Being a “60’s, redneck-hippy,” I kind of rebel against uniforms. I had to wear an Army uniform and a police uniform. And I was detective for a long time, and had to wear a suit and tie for many years, and that is kind of a uniform in a way, but a step aside a regular uniform. On special assignments we wore only the smartest, tactical of clothing for what we were doing. The ultimate goal, I think. Which is getting to my point about playing dress up…

But I am a little twisted. Decades ago, I didn’t get into the martial arts to be a “martial artist.” I just wanted to learn all the …you know…the secrets…of fighting. And, through those decades, where else could you go to learn such things? I started in Parker Kenpo in 1972 and the classes were draped and adorned in classic uniforms. I mindlessly accepted this policy as an annoyance. Terrible, huh? Then, in police training in 1973, I noticed that when attending the – what has become defensive tactics – classes, police showed up in sweat pants, athletic shoes, t-shirt and usually brought along their pistol belts.  At least they wore shoes for God’s sake. At least they brought their belts, but many times they did not wear the belts unless the training switched to gun-related stuff. And what’s with the sweat pants? The clothing question remained for me since 1972.  Why are we not training in the clothes that we will probably be fighting in?

I’ve always analyzed stuff through the “who, what, where, when, how and why” questions?  

  • WHO am I to be wearing a uniform? WHO is he?
  • WHAT exactly am I wearing? WHAT is he wearing?  What gear?
  • WHERE will I be fighting? In terms of smart and,or common clothing for the location?
  • WHEN will I be fighting? In terms of clothing? Season? Night? Day?
  • HOW will I fight in these clothes?
  • WHY am I REALLY dressing in training this way, anyway?

WHAT ARE YOU WEARING? (and why?)

In my classes, in my school I operated years ago in north Texas, there were no uniform requirements. People could wear whatever they wanted. Several of my students were cops and they would show up for class in their actual uniforms, which I encouraged. I know this is not good for school sales and the school-money-systems set up by the franchise programs today. I sold and still sell t-shirts, but they are not required. I understand the requirement though. The whole group-thing, and the martial uniform is supposed to create all kinds of group psychological “unity,” – yeah – I know, but I didn’t care about all that sales structure stuff. I mean we are not preparing a military unit where such group/unit psychologies really shine. 

Through the years I have seen all kinds of “fashions.” Some random notes on the fashion subject…

  • The old Jeet Kune Do guys and gals were often seen in the 80s and 90s in tank tops and really short, shorty-shorts. I did that too. That changed through time. Thank goodness. I was tired of trimming my pubic hairs.
  • The US Army, for example, did do much of their new combatives courses in an Army uniform, sure, but…a lot of it barefoot! (The whole “save-the-mats,” forever thing.) And the real sin – mostly WITHOUT standard gear like helmets, belts and backpacks, etc.  
  • The newer looks of Krav Maga dodge the classic uniforms, but many if not most, require you to wear their sweat pants with stripes and THEIR t-shirt. The whole sales/branding thing of businesses. (I get it! I understand the process. Do you as a student understand the process?)
  • Some of the BJJ gis look to me like walking, color billboards. Huge swaths of colors. How about those checker pattern ones from Korea? Warning! Watching them in motion might cause seizures! (As an aside, as a clothing anecdote, I noticed  that there are a number of BJJ guys who slip on blue jeans and have instantly/suddenly become hand, stick, knife, gun masters. The martial, underground call these people, “BJJ in Blue Jeans.”)
  • Then there is the “no-gi” “BJJ-ish” crowd. Sounds smart, I mean who wears all those pajamas “in the street” when they wrestle? Yet, they seem to be tossing aside the classic uniforms for modernity, but have instead switched over to like…rubber, skin-tight, Spiderman suits (what colors and designs!) and they are still…barefoot. It’s like they said, “Hey, let’s trade in that silly old, gi, bulky, uniform idea,” (for yet another silly, skin tight, but yet rubberized one.) You end up with the same abstract problem for “the street.”
  • One of my friends is an ex-ninjitsu player, with many trips to Japan under his belt. He told me that the Japanese people are mystified as to why Americans (or anyone) still dresses up like a ninja. He said they feel the same way as most Americans feel in general about people dressing up in Civil War clothes. Then imagine if Japanese people came to the USA and dressed up in Civil War clothes. (I personally don’t care about this at all, I just find this observation amusing.)
  • Some Sambo uniforms are interesting, with the typical gi top and tight shorts underneath. I think Sambo is great but at first glance, don’t you look and think they forgot their pants? Then after a bit, you get use to the idea.
  • How about those extremely, cumbersome Aikido outfits? Kilts gone wild.
  • In the 1980s, I once attended a “Plain-Clothes” Shooting course, for detectives, put on by retired FBI agents.  We wore what we wore, which at the time for most of us was suits and ties. It was actually very informative, full of great “cop” tips” and very much to the point.
  • The group pictures where everyone is dressed the same sure look nice.
  • If you are training to fight in a Thai boxing match, and you train in Thai shorts? BINGO! If you are training to fight in a Judo meet, and you train in a Judo gi? Bingo! And so on down the list. But what if you take, say… like, Kung Fu to learn to fight an urban rapist or an urban attacker? (What about “rural” attackers?)  It’s still abstract dressing and I think some bingo numbers are missing off your board.

In seminars, I ask attendees to wear street clothes and shoes. We need pockets and belts. Even if they wear “street short pants” they still have pockets and a belt. A shirt over your gun is important, as is a holster. Don’t just show up with a rubber gun and no holster (and belt.) If you have a fixed-blade training knife, you need a sheath to draw it from, else you probably would not have a fixed blade knife with you, walking around the farm or downtown. (This is a BIG disconnect in training schools. A zillion, rubber, fixed-blade knives and no sheaths.)

And, no need to overdress in my seminars as though one is being dropped into Cambodia for two weeks (unless, of course, you are actually being dropped into Cambodia for two weeks). I always wear mat shoes, as I hope every attendee will too, because we often don’t know where I will be teaching and if there is a “no-shoes-mat-rule? We respect that. I, at least will then wear socks because I must hide my horrible Amazonian Jungle, Toe Fungus. Believe me I know CDC is happy that I am not passing this strain around on your mats, around the world. (I know of a system that actually sells socks with their logo on it.)

As a so-called, “self defense instructor,” or whatever it is exactly that I am, I have made a rule for myself I always hope I can remember and consider when drawing up outlines, books and teaching – “reduce the abstract.” This is not easy challenge, given the circumstances of your school or your training grounds.  I have fallen short of this self-imposed standard many times, but I try.  But please consider the phrase, reduce the abstract. And one way of reduction, is to dress right for the who, what, where, when, how and why of your perceived fight. Now, we cannot create 10 or 12 movie sets with a group of improv actors to make everything seem ever-so-real to a student, but we can at least… at very least… dress appropriately.

You don’t find tennis players in practice wearing baseball uniforms. Baseball players are not practicing in football uniforms. Army soldiers do not practice in scuba suits. Know your goal, your mission and dress accordingly. I know people love to belong, love immersing themselves into groups. They love clubs. Tribes. Teams. And showing their pride. This usually means outfits and outfitting the outfits. I get it! I really do. Again, If you are happy camper doing classic martial arts barefoot, in classic uniforms? You are just drawn to the idea? And you understand the questions I am asking? Then ignore me. Ignore this. This is just a personal rant. Who cares what I think anyway? Doing any of the aforementioned things is better than sitting on the couch. I only ask that you at least kick around this idea, understand it and can articulate your opinion on these types of fashion choices.

So…WHAT ARE YOU WEARING!!!! And why?

Signed, The Perennial Outsider

********

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

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Harvey, Give Me the Shotgun, Or Else!

“Harvey … give me the shotgun, or ELSE!” (and other Harvey tales.)

That was the time when cops usually got killed, I reminded myself, looking at an angry Harvey Wilson with a 12-gauge pump aimed at me. But I thought since I knew him, I could talk him down … I thought….


The first time I met Harvey Wilson, he was drunk riding a horse. Not too unusual since, after all, it was Texas. It was a bitter cold winter night, about 2 a.m. back in the 1970s; and Garry Burns and I were on patrol when we spotted Harvey slumped over the saddle. Harvey had a barn on the back of his one-acre lot with a house in the city limits, and apparently this horse didn’t know the way home to the barn. Or it was on a walk, and Harvey was just there bouncing along for the ride. We coasted up beside the horse and rider.
“Harvey!” Garry shouted.
No answer.
I pulled up far enough ahead that we both could get out.
The old horse walked up to us. We grabbed the reins and stopped the gelding.
“WHAT?” Harvey snapped awake when the horse stopped. “What!” and then started kicking at us.

Harvey was a hard-working stout, black man in his late 50s at the time, living alone in a neighborhood of welfare cases, drug addicts, screw-ups, and fuck-offs. Harvey was a little rowdy and tended to “pull the cork”; but despite the whiskey, he was always at work the next day. That night he fussed and kicked at us enough that Garry decided Harvey needed to spend four hours in our urine-and puke-stained, stinking drunk tank. In other words, he was arrested for “drunk in public.”
We hauled him off the horse and cuffed him in a frisky little wrestling match, all under the big eyes of his calm horse. I put Harvey in the front seat; back then in the pre-cage days, that was where we transported prisoners so we could watch them as we drove. Garry got in the driver’s seat, and I climbed up into the saddle. I rode the horse to the city animal pound while the dispatcher paged out the on-call animal pound worker to meet me there.

Not six months later and alone this time, I repeated the whole drunk-on-a-horse affair again with a smashed and frisky Harvey. If you looked at Harvey’s file, you’d find multiple drunk-in-public arrests. Still, he never seemed to hold a grudge and always held down a job. On weekends you’d drive by his small wooden house; and he would be painting, or cementing, or fixing something. Salt of the Earth. Every once in a while when I was on Saturday or Sunday day shift, I would pull over and get out to talk with him for a few minutes.
“Whatcha’ doing, Harvey?”
“Ohh … oh, fixin’ to clean out my septic tank lines,” he would say softly and breathlessly and rest on a shovel and tell me the symptoms and cure for his latest housing ailment. When he was sober, he was just a fine person.

Then I happened to notice a fairly new red Camaro started appearing; it was parked on the street outside Harvey’s house. One day I saw a very attractive black girl, say in her late 20s or early 30s, pulling up in it and walking into Harvey’s house with her arms full of shopping bags. She entered without knocking. The car remained there night after night. I asked Marvin Hayes, a retired postal worker and a neighbor down the street, about this mystery car and curvy girl.

“Harvey’s got him a girlfriend. YaHeah! And I means to say girl! Young! She’s a sweet young thing, too. From Dallas. I don’t know how they met. And I don’t know how he keeps her. But he bought her dat dere car, you know?”
“NO!” I declared. “The Camaro?”
“Yes, he did. Bought her dat car and, and jewelry, and, and I don’t know what all. YaHeah! I hopes he knows what he is a doin’. Cause you know, this kind of business don’t end well.”

You can say that again. I ran the license plate of the car in the hopes of getting her name and seeing if she had a criminal history. The plate was still registered to a car dealership in Dallas. Back then it used to take a while, maybe even a few weeks, to catch registrations up on NCIC.

In our squad meetings, the sergeant read us the daily blotter each day, the list and quick summary of the events since we left the day before. Over a period of three weeks, there were several domestic disturbance calls at Harvey Wilson’s house. There was already trouble in paradise. I never caught a single one of those domestic calls at Harvey’s house until one Saturday afternoon.

Neighbors reported another fight. When I pulled up, that girl was almost through packing her Camaro. She looked up and smirked at me and continued yelling over her shoulder at Harvey, who was up the small hill of his front yard and by his front porch. When I climbed the small incline, I got my first full, look at Harvey. He was holding a pump shotgun at port arms. His eyes were red and wet, and the veins and muscles in his neck bulged. I knew if I drew my pistol, that action could be a catalyst for him to react and shoot me or her, or both of us. I could just tell. And that is how many, if not most, cops are killed in domestics. Thinking about these things. Feeling them. It’s a gamble.

“I’ll kill her!” he yelled.
“Harvey. Put down the gun. You can’t kill anybody,” I said.
“BITCH! I’ll kill you, BITCH!” he yelled. He was barely paying attention to me and watching her pick up her suitcases from the lawn.
“I bought that car!” he said.
“It is in my name, mutha-fucka!” she yelled.
He pointed his gun at her. My thumb undid the snap of my holster, and I grabbed a handful of my pistol handle. I did not draw the gun yet.
“Harvey. Harvey. Harvey,” I repeated calmly. “You can’t kill her. You can’t kill her over a car. You know that. Give it up man. You can’t be doing that. Put the barrel down. Let her go. You shoot her, and your life is over. She ain’t worth it!”

I inched closer and closer, and he got madder and madder. He was losing it. He waved the gun over to me, inches from fully lifting the stock to his cheek and shooting.
He glared and gritted his teeth, and I could see his fingers moving in waves on the gun. The barrel wandered from me to the girl, then to no one, and back again. During a wander, I got close enough to lunge out and grab the weapon with both my hands and pulled the barrel up and the stock down. With a motion not unlike rowing a double oar of a canoe, I ripped and rolled the gun from his grip.
The girl slammed the car door and burned rubber down the street. Harvey’s little temporary paradise … was gone.
I ran the pump up and down, which spit out the shells across the manicured lawn. When it was empty, I laid it against a porch railing. Harvey sat on the stairs of the porch. I sat down next to him. Marvin had witnessed the whole thing from next door and walked over. He was probably the one who called us.
“Man! Fuck!” Harvey said. “Did I get fucked?”
“She was no good,” Marvin said. And I agreed.

We sat there on the steps for about 10 minutes talking. My backup squad car drove up and stopped. I waved him off, signaling it was all over and everything was okay.
I got up after a bit and said, “Harvey, I am gonna take this shotgun in with me for 24 hours.” I saw Marvin nod his head at me. “You can come down to the station and get it tomorrow.” I picked up the ejected rounds on the manicured grass.
“You got him, Marvin?” I asked.
“I got him. I got him,” Marvin said.

We used to have a policy where we would extract guns from a hot situation where there might be more violence or suicide and lock them up at the police department. Just a local practice. The owner would have to go see the police chief and talk to him and retrieve the gun. And, Ol’ Harvey did just that. He picked up his gun the next day after Chief Hugh Lynch had a word of advice or two for him. Harvey remained quiet and behaved himself with the ladies from then on.

One morning some 10 years later, when I was a detective; and we got a call of a body found near some undeveloped land in the southeast part of town. A cable man and a railroad agent were surveying land to bury some lines near a run of tracks when they stumbled upon a body not that far from the road. It was not uncommon to instinctively dispatch an ambulance to a body like this, and the dispatcher did.
When I got there though, I was surprised to find EMTs feverishly at work at the scene. The railroad man walked up to me and said, “He wasn’t dead! We thought he was dead, but he wasn’t.”
I walked past the agent and to the action. The techs were working on Harvey Wilson! Harvey was dressed up in a suit and looked like he was pulverized to a pulp. He was whisked to the hospital and lay there in intensive care for days in a coma.

I went to Harvey’s house, and Marvin and I tried to reconstruct his last healthy day. One thing for sure, Harvey’s pickup was missing; and I put out a “BOLO” on the truck. We searched his house and found his insurance papers; and through a local agent, we confirmed the license plate number. I was frozen stuck in a bad, violent case with no leads, conjuring a range of hypotheses, and hoping the truck would show up somewhere, or Harvey would just wake up.

The hospital called days later. A nurse said Harvey was up and trying to eat. You know where I went, straightaway.
“What happened, Harvey?” I asked him.
“John Wayne Williams. He asked me for a ride. Then he pulled a gun on me. That skunk fuck. He made me stop the truck out there on Morse Street. He beat me up with his gun and robbed me. Left me for dead meat in the woods. I thought I was gonna die.”

John Wayne Williams. Local gangster. We’d gotten word of his recent parole, and you could bet how long before he would be in violent trouble again. It was that inevitable. And he was indeed a skunk fuck. I got a probable-cause, arrest warrant for Williams, and Danny McCormick and I hunted around day and night, and found him in about two days. He was a muscular, 6 feet 6 inches of smartass ex-con; and when we spotted him in a housing project, parking lot, we both drew down on him with our .45s in case he still had that pistola and to avoid going hand-to-hand with that big bastard. We ordered him on his knees with his hands up and cuffed him quick. He did have a pistol on him. Instant legal trouble for a parolee.

At the station Danny and I interrogated him. He played dumb. We never found that truck. In those days, vehicles were easily stripped and sold for parts in chop shops either out in the county or in Dallas or Ft Worth. But with Harvey’s testimony, I sent him up for the “big bitch (life,)” as this was his third felony. Third time was a bad charm In Texas.

Harvey was never quite the same after that near-death beating. Within a year thereafter, he died of natural causes. Heart attack. One of his kids drove in from Oklahoma and sold the house. New folks lived there quickly. Then Marvin, the old postman died too. After awhile, when you work in a city, so many houses, street corners and buildings, whatever, where ever, you have a memory attached to them when you see them. Places. People. Usually bad memories. I try not to visit my old city anymore, for that reason. Way, way too many bad memories.

***************

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

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Calm Down About Calming Down!

I wonder…has the de-escalation fad sort of died down?

It seems like it was all the rage a while back. Everyone was preaching it in seminars like they were doctors of psychology (you just need to be a doorman, right? Who needs a psychology degree if you were a…doorman?). That subject, and the secret tip-offs subject of “Pre-Fight Indicators,” – as some now call it now, were all the fads.

If you hear all about it once, maybe twice in seminars, how many more times do you need to hear it? But in these seminars, there are always new people mixed in with you. And new people need to hear this stuff at least once. Or, once in awhile. There are new people attending all the time that need to hear this stuff. So, you’re stuck, bubba! And, what’s wrong with a little review anyway? So, you hear the one about “calming down?” As the comedians would say, “have you heard the one about…”

Maybe not? I do realize with the rabid, total invasion of BBJ and MMA, perhaps a whole lot of training these days is just about sport fighting, sport wrestling and exercise/fitness and not much about talking and survival. Some Kravs cover this topic. But, there’s not much on de-escalation in the sporty world, is there? Why should there be?  Yet, despite the gap, the fad seems fading? Me, not being in any of those officially, I’ve covered that stuff for decades as part and parcel of my courses. Stop 1 of my Stop 6 course covers this, though one must continue to communicate throughout the Stop 6, throughout the whole fight if needed.

Decades? Is this advice decades old? In policing this stuff is, as they say, “old hat.” The first list of fight pre-cursors …er …I mean…”indicators…I saw was in the military police academy in 1973. (How’s that for new?)  And the list hasn’t really changed much. My collection/list is in a chapter in my Fightin’ Words book for all “rookies” to see and vets to review. And in police work, we have been, and are, all… about… de-escalation. I attended my first police, “Verbal Judo” class in the 1981. It has always been vitally important in police work to have a “way with words.” I like to say that if I were involved in hiring new police officers, I would seriously examine how “charming” they can be. How witty. How improvisational. How…calm. Charm and calm can go along way in the world, in policing, in arguments. Then sometimes…not. The gambling outcomes, should not cripple you.

So, I myself yawn when I hear people clamor about this-or-that, Joe Blow’s seminar on de-escalation and…”oh, oh my GOD! “And…did you should hear the fight precursor tips!!!! Joe Blow is like Moses!” Folks, those tablets came down from the mountaintop decades and decades ago.

And many of the people who teach this material are really good people, smart and mean well. There’s a good chance they have never been in a fight themselves. Or a victim of a crime? (It is hard to de-escalate a guy with a knife or a gun, who just wants your watch. Think about it. De-escalate by…giving him your watch.) These de-escalating instructors are usually masters of the art of regurgitation. Repeating the words of “elder” others over and over. Hey, that’s the education system. So what of this advice about telling people to “calm down?”

After all, we need these pieces of advice and the masters of communication, because the internet says, “Verbal De–escalation is what we use during a potentially dangerous, or threatening, situation in an attempt to prevent a person from causing harm to us, themselves or others. Without specialized training, we should never consider the use of physical force.” I might add here that there are “third party” de-escalators and times when you are one of the “one versus one.”  

So then, have you heard the one about…calming down? Speaking of regurgitation from the masters… I heard yet again about an attendee of such training. He said, that they said – the instructors that is – that one thing you should NEVER say to de-escalate a situation, NEVER, EVER, NEVER, is to say “calm down.” This ALWAYS makes matters far, far worse, they proclaim. This advice always gets the surprise gasp and laugh from the crowd.  

“Ooohs.” and “Ahhhs.”

But, this is often an inexperienced, regurgitater, trying to sound all…”insider-ish,” veteran and cool. I just don’t believe this is always true. Here’s why.

First off, I have been dispatched to a whole lot of domestic disturbances, arguments and fight calls. And also, when damage was done, I had to investigate them. A whole lot in 26 years. I want to tell you that “situations” are different. They are different. And at some points in various situations, using the term,  “hey, let’s all calm down here,” and variations thereof, does not ALWAYS create World War Three. It depends so much upon (did I already say situation?) the old “Ws and H.” Most of you know by now, I always analyze the world through the Who, What, Where, When, How and WHY recipe.

“And at some points in various situations, using the term,  ‘hey, let’s all calm down here,’ and variations thereof, does not ALWAYS create World War Three.”

Who? Who are you dealing with? A guy who wants to fight every Saturday night and it’s getting near midnight? Who are the onlookers – are we in a show of some sort, where people cannot back down? Who are you anyway? Someone with any speech finesse? A bit of a negotiator? 

What? What is this confrontation about anyway? What are your personality skills to handle it? What are your physical skills to handle things if they go south?

Where? Where is this happening? Private? Public? Again, are his or her “friends” around watching and the loudmouth must put on a show of some sort?

When? Has this confrontation gone way beyond asking for the classic “calm down?”

How? How can you calm this down? Separation? Your tone? YOUR calmness? How else can you say “calm down?”

Why? Why should any party in this mess calm down? Why do you care? If it’s about you? You’re involved? Why are you still there?

Keep asking the “Ws and H” questions about this subject and you’ll think of even more.

One of the worst ways and types of “calm downers,” is when a verbally, skill-less person, obnoxiously shouts, “CALM DOWN!” Almost like a bully or disliked boss would. If that kind of jerk says just about anything it might never work anyway. And therein lies the real problem. Are the two words “calm down” the real culprit to peace? Is it the messenger too? The message or the messenger? There is a lot more going on here than just two “taboo” words.

I think much of our interactions in life are scripted. The script of life. Just about everything does have a script. A script at a fast food window. A script when you enter your office or job. A script at dinner. Your skill at improv, at going “off-script” is important. So, at worst, what are some of the typical, scripted responses to your “Let’s all calm down” proclamation.

  • “Don’t tell ME to calm down.”
  • “YOU calm down, I….”
  • “Calm down?! Why should I calm down?!”

“Line! ?”  The actors whisper on stage when they forget their next line. What’s your next line in this script? Better write one or two ahead of time.

But in summary, I just hate to see people and the police completely stripped of this “calm down” term and idea completely. It is not so taboo. This phrase has and will work. I’ve done it. I’ve used it. I know, I know, I know, a couple of you out there will have some “calm-down-failure” stories. Sure. Probably because of the “who, what where, when, how and why,” and not just the phrase itself. And sometimes because some numb-nuts out there just wants to fight you or them and was drumming up an excuse to do so. He might just want your watch? In that case, anything you say will be over-ridden.

But the term has and will work in some situations, I just hate to see it completely erased from your options.

Okay, now calm down, I’m just telling you the truth about calming down.

*****

Hock’s email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

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Remy Presas and Ernesto Presas – It’s a Macho Brother Thing

“It’s a Brother Thing?” 
There was and is always a lot of talk about the various feuds between Remy and Ernesto through the years. How friendly were they? Could they work together? We have covered some of these stories on the Facebook Presas Tribute page, But, I can write about what I think was one of their last interactions. A final phone call?

In the 1990’s Remy married Canada’s Yvette Wong. She was a terrific girl and a Tai Chi instructor who had a Tai Chi video distributed by Walmart. Many of us met her in the 1990s and we all were very impressed with her. I know I was. Soon he had kids with her! (I can still picture Remy pushing a baby carriage.)

Then…then…disturbing…he suddenly picked up with a Dallas area woman that was, frankly…a mere shadow of a woman compared to Yvette. WHAT? We all asked ourselves. HER!? Really? And he wound up living at her house very near to where I lived. Near the DFW airport. We all felt sad for Yvette and the kids up in Vancouver. I had Remy’s new phone number with this Dallas girl, and while it was nice to have him nearby, but jeez you know? Yvette!

Ernesto came through the USA. It was about…1998? And once again stayed with me for a while for our seminar as well as passing through to some of the others. On this trip he mentioned Remy a few times and how much he missed him and wished he could talk with him. Ernesto was really a “true-blue” family/loyalty kind of guy. Well, hell…I had Remy’s local phone number and he wasn’t that far way. I told Ernesto-

“I have his number. He lives now in the next city from here.” (they might even…meet?)

He wanted to talk to him. Hmmm, this is tricky for me to be in the middle of this. But, I got the number out and dialed it. I got Remy on the phone. Ernesto stood looking out the balcony. Nervous. Waiting.

“Remy…hello…yes…hey, I have Ernesto here in my apartment. He says, he says he really wants to talk to you.”
“Ern…esto?” Remy said.
“Yes.”
“Ahhh, is something wrong?”
“No. He just wants to talk with you.”
“Ahhh, okay.”

Whew! I handed Ernesto the phone and he sat at my kitchen table and they talked. I tried to make myself busy around the apartment. From what I could hear from Ernesto’s part, it was going very, VERY well. I was feeling good about this. This call lasted about 20 to 25 minutes, during which Ernesto told Remy that he was his brother and he loved him. The phone call started winding down. It was going so, so well!

Then…then…Ernesto asked.
“Can you…can you helpa me, become more pamous?”

Crap. I knew instantly that was not good. This was not what Remy wanted to hear. And from Ernesto’s face, I knew that asking that question was a mistake. Remy immediately got mad. It almost seemed like that request was the real secret reason for wanting to talk with him. Which it wasn’t. I guess the conversation was going so well, Ernesto just asked. The decades old, sort of rivalry they had reared up again. The whole, younger brother vs older brother thing, doing the same business thing.

Ernesto hung up after that request and shook his head. I don’t know what Remy said but it was not good.

“It was good to talk to him.” Ernesto said. “But, he becomes mad at me at the end.”

Yeah. You have to think that Remy spent his whole life slowly developing contacts and having seminars and working, working, working to establish this…list. The hard way. The “original” way. A path-blazing way. Very few people were doing seminars back then. He and just a few others kind of “invented” the path. And to…to give it away or give a portion away, is very difficult.

Many of us use to think how cool it would have been to have at least one big, Presas Brothers weekend seminar. If I were involved, I could have organized it in Kansas City, center of the country for all to get to. But it would and could never happen. I do believe if Ernesto had not asked that final question, while things would have been so friendly and so fine, and a good memory of what I think was maybe their last conversation (?) Remy still would NOT actively help him or do something with him like a seminar.

In the end I don’t think that Ernesto needed the help anyway. He was doing fine. What would a Remy and Ernesto seminar be like? Look like? Would Ernesto people like to delve so deeply into Tapi-Tapi? Would Remy people like to get back into longer-range, head-banging?  Would something happen, or be said and the two would stop talking?  It’s just a….a macho brother-thing of two macho brothers trying to do the macho “seminar” thing.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Hock’s Email is HockHochheim@ForceNecessary.com

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