Reza's Introduction to Wing Chun

My name is Reza. I am originally from Iran. Back in 1978-79. I went to study in England, in particular, Bradford West Yorkshire.  I used to play ice hockey as a hobby.  

One night on the way home from hockey, my cousin  and I noticed in a dark alley close to to the rink there’s a guy who’s fighting three other guys. At that time I didn’t know what martial art was. I just heard of karate and wrestling. I was only 14 years old. Wrestling is Iran’s national sport so I had experience in that.  

To me the person being attacked by three guys looked incredible, just like some kind of movie hero. What he was doing was extraordinary. He handled those attackers like it was child’s play. I was so excited. I told my cousin about what I saw and that got both of us even more were excited.

That same night my cousin and I started looking for a Karate club. I thought the guy in the alley was probably doing some kind of Karate but all I was able to find was White Cloud Kung Fu Society. That sounded good enough to us so we decided to enroll.

I’ll never forget the first class. There were 15 students.  I was waiting for the teacher to come and tell us what we’re supposed to do. After a few minutes I saw the same guy who I saw in that dark alley fighting other guys.  I was very excited but scared at the same time. I found out that he taught Wing Chun Kung Fu from the Ip Chun lineage. Ip Chun was Ip Man’s son.  

I had no idea what Wing Chun was and didn’t care. I just wanted to do what this teacher did in the alley that night.  

To make the story short, after hard training for the first six months with conditioning and non-stop straight punching practice, he started to teach me some basic blocks. I used to go for 3 nights a week at three to four hours per class and trained other nights with my cousin who was four years older than me.

After one year training my teacher asked me and the other new students why we wanted to learn martial arts? My answer was for combat and self defence. I didn’t know what I was about to get into. I’ll never forget that class.  When I said that, he broke my nose on purpose during the practice. We always had bucket of ice in the class. He grabbed some and put it on my nose. I was so upset I didn’t want to come back again.

The next class he told me he did me a favour because when you first break your nose it ‘s very painful. It makes you almost pass out. The teacher said, it’s better that something like this happens in the club than in street. Years later in my life, it finally made sense to me.

Our training was always close range we never threw punches that didn’t touch our training partners. The teacher thought that was a total waste of time because you would never get the true feeling or the proper timing to react to punches and effectively deal with them.

He used to make us stand in the Karate Sanchin stance to build up our leg muscles. This stance is very similar to the Wing Chun “Goat restraining stance.” When we were told to do a drill, we were told how to do it only once. Then we were to drill and drill until he told us to stop. There was no talking allowed or else we would be punished with many push ups. We didn’t stop until he said to stop.

I remember for the first couple of years my lips were constantly cut open on inside from getting hit all the time in training. The training was always close distance with contact. We used to call it semi-free practice. That meant half speed and half power.  

This was a very good system for actual combat.  Today it might be called a form of contact sparring but our training was always with control and based on actual technique not just hitting each other to score points. These days I see the point method used by a lot of schools but we never did that.

At the end of each class we always had a 30 minute sessions for street self defence such as getting out of head locks, take downs and various Judo throws. We also had various different types of kicking drills which Wing Chun typically did not have. They taught a complete package for any kid of attack.

I always volunteered to be the dummy to be used to show all the technique in the class. It was a very hard and painful experience but it toughened my body with the constant falling and heavy blows I received.  

I stayed as a beginner for three years before I was graded. For grading, we went to Blackburn. There were lots of other students from other branches. We had to do non stop training for eight hours. There seemed to be non-stop drills, conditioning  and semi-free street combat scenarios.

If we made it through that torture, we were allowed to go to the next level. Only 50% of the students would pass. I worked hard so I passed.  At the grading I finally met Derek Gordon the main teacher for our club. All along I was taught by Peter who was one of his senior instructors.

 Derek Gordon was one of the pioneers in England to bring Kung Fu to the UK in 1962.  He had years of Karate and Judo in his background. Then he met Ip Chun during a visit to Hong Kong and that changed his life and teaching method. His approach to me was the true meanings of martial art. Martial art was designed for self protection during crisis. It wasn’t designed for health benefits nor keep an art alive.  

Over the last few decades many martial arts have completely changed, going more towards socializing and health benefits just for marketing reasons because you can get more students that way.

I used to ask my teacher how can I be sure if my training was good enough? How do I know if I can really use it in a fight scenario? He used to say you would never really know until it comes time for use. You can do the same drills over and over for years and years but it doesn’t make you a better fighter. I still believe that.

When I teach, I am not promoting fighting or to be a trouble maker. The times though have definitely changed. Only if you have been in a real fight situation can you judge what may work what may not. Also every fight is different. My teacher was very harsh but honest with us throughout our training. That is why I always respected him. Later I had to leave the club in order to study in the USA. After that I moved back home to Iran for six years.  

I later moved to Canada. All these years I continued training in Wing Chun and also Taekwondo, wrestling and Modern Arnis.  I think it is the combination of all these arts which makes my Wing Chun more applicable for realistic street self defence.

When I moved to Canada I tried to find a good Wing Chun club and unfortunately I wasn’t able to. I joined a club in Victoria back in 2000 but I left after one year their approach wasn’t for me. Then I joined another club and the same thing. I didn’t think what they taught would really work on the street. After that I heard about Ray. At first his methods looked the same. It still looked very soft to me and just old routines with typical Wing Chun moves.

One day when I trained with him, I tried the practice to the ground. He gladly followed right along. I was surprised because no Wing Chun teacher ever would do that. But he went for it as I expected from a good teacher and it really changed my mind.  

His knowledge about other arts was awesome. Being from Iran, my wrestling was of course better but I appreciated his effort and that was what I was looking for.

The other Wing Chun clubs told me that the fight will never be on the ground but I knew that wasn’t true and all the UFC fighters prove that in every fight.  So I am glad I joined and have been with him since then. Ray always treated me as an equal so now we both share our knowledge of more than 40 years of martial arts with our students.

I haven’t talked about my real fighting experience because I don’t think those stories help any students, and I think this is not an appropriate place to do so. I have never started any fight and I always encourage students to never fight.