One of the major influences in my martial life was Ray Medina. One of my best friends Roger White and brother cop (patrol and detectives), and Roger introduced me to Ray in 1986 because he knew my personal frustrations with classic martial arts, dating back to 1972.

Ray was already a karate-kickboxing champion fighter in our region but he’d discovered the Bruce Lee world, Dan Inosanto and Paul Vunak. Jeet June Do and Filipino martial arts, Thai, Shoot, Silat and that unique street fighting that Vunak pioneered in the 1980s. Ray was traveling back and forth to then the “Mecca” – Los Angeles for all this. And was addicted to seminars.

I “hired” Ray to teach me and basically several days a week for years we’d meet. At this point money was no object. Addiction is addiction. We’d meet up and I’d ask, “What are we doing today, Ray?” And it took a while to figure it out but basically we did what HE needed to work on, not me, which meant him beating me up quite a bit, under the guise of teaching me. BUT…I learned a lot. You can still learn a lot that way and of course I got to experiment on him too. I recall that Inosanto said that he did this with Bruce Lee, and Lee would wind up beating Dan up a lot. “Basically I was Bruce’s punching bag,” Inosanto said once.

Ray and I started hosting the big names in our city. I began attending seminars with him and I quickly learned that we were both interested in visiting systems and arts, but only to learn how to beat them. We were like spies in ememy camps. Many if not most seminar (and class) attendees attend to learn those arts, embrace them, get rank, to eventually teach them. Early on I learned that our spy motive was to learn how to beat what every one else was doing, not replicate it, join it, or worship it.

True, we were both card-carrying martial addicts, but for Ray he was spying because of the fighter in him. For me, I was spying because I had to arrest people. So, we would study material with the sole purpose of beating it. Inadvertantly, we did learn other systems and arts but sort of, from this ass-backwards, spy way.

Ray eventually died of a stomach cancer. Through the years he knocked me out several times when kickboxing, but he also knocked some sense into me which was worth more that those occasional, nausea-LSD-like, TKO dreams and the occasional vomiting.

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