Wing Chun Fighters Lose Again

(HD, Full)Wing Chun Master Ding Hao Gets Knocked out in 72 Seconds | (高清完整版)崇武英雄江门站咏春丁浩72秒被KO

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•Oct 21, 2019

 This has been happening to Wing Chun people since the 1970's when they got beat badly by the Thai fighters in Thailand and the Karate fighters in Japan.  Quite often “Dojo” fighters think they can win in a ring fight but they can’t. You have to train for that. Rvry art has all the techniques required but almost every non-ring art does not include MMA training in their program.

Even the best Wing Chun people in the 1970’s got beat. Two of Wong Shun Leung’s students got their arms broken trying to block round house kicks using the “Dojo” Gan sau and Kwun sau techniques. Wong Shun Leung told me this.

It seems that Wing Chun and Tai Chi fighters who try to fight MMA people have not learned anything about ring fighting at all or in the idea of cross training against other fighting styles. 

In 1973 and early 1974 a promoter in Hong Kong wishing to capitalize on the Kung Fu craze got a few untrained fighters that nobody ever heard of and sent them to Thailand to fight, advertising this as the fight of the century to test Kung Fu against Thai boxing. This event gained international attention. The promoter made a lot of money at the expense of making Chinese Kung Fu a laughing stock.

After the match various articles offered all kinds of excuses of faking such as in the photo above. But clearly there was no faking in the match, the Kung Fu guy just had no serious training. In the photo above the Thai guy just kicked low, the Kung Fu guy tried a downward hand block and then got kicked in the head. The kick is not a sweep-kick but a roundhouse kick.

The faking was that the promoter billed the fight as Kung Fu Masters fighting Thai fighters. That’s not to say that a Kung Fu master would have won. Most classical martial arts students don’t train hard like a professional fighter does and almost no classical martial artists train for MMA type of fights.

The same kind of promotion schemes are still being used today in 2019 when so called Kung Fu masters get beat by mediocre MMA fighters.

 Wing Chun "Dojo" fighting is fun but classroom drill are just to introduce beginners who have zero concepts about fighting to the wonderful world of martial arts.

Unfortunately Wing Chun has become a joke. However the same applies to other classical arts as well. People also don't take Tai Chi, Aikido even Karate seriously either. You can't take a classical art to the ring against Modern MMA fighters. These arts don’t have the training routines required to be an MMA fighter.

  If an art loses in the ring, there is a good chance that the art may also lose in the street or in the real combat that they say the art is really designed for.

 The ring losers often have no ring experience or any other kind of experience other than classroom drills. If that's the reason for their losses then how about street combat? Nobody has experience in that either. But experience in street combat either gets you killed or a one way ticket to jail.

Real fighting is often against armed opponents or multiple opponent situations and weight classes are not a thing. Even the successful MMA fighters who beats up all the classical martial artists on a regular basis, may not succeed in these situations either but because they train harder with their more realistic sparring and conditioning and being at least physically fit, they might have a better fighting chance.

 I think the problem is that Wing Chun training has stayed in the 1950's and for most people they are happy with that. Maybe only 1% of the people in any martial arts ever really turn into fighters anyway.

 For media attention they call any Wing Chun fighter a Master or the Wing Chun guy self designates himself as a Master because he can beat up all his classmates. I have never heard of any of them. The Masters to me now exist outside of China and you can probably count only a dozen people who are Masters. Some of the top Wing Chun fighters that I have met don’t even call themselves Masters or Grandmasters. There are no Wing Chun fighters that I have seen who come close to being top MMA fighters or who can match the likes of Mike Tyson in the ring. Ring fight training and street fight training is different. Both of these can end your martial art careers quite quickly no matter who you are. That’s why 99% of martial artists do neither and that’s why martial arts is still a very popular activity.

The Wing Chun kind of embarrassment  happened also to the Tai Chi people in 1954 when some Tai Chi master went up against a white Crane Kung Fu master. Both of them looked like they had never had any kind of fight but before the show started they displayed some beautiful Tai Chi.

Real Kung-Fu challenge match: Tai Chi vs. White Crane – recorded in 1954

In 1953, Wu Gongyi was challenged by Ch’en K’e-fu, a well-known Tibetan White Crane teacher who was nearly twenty years younger than the Tai chi master. After accepting the challenge, the fight was scheduled to take place in January, 1954 with all the proceeds going to charity. They were to fight within a boxing ring and there were to be several rules for the match, including no throws or joint locks.

The fight itself turned out to be even less skilled than your average bar brawl and the contest lasted not even a full two rounds before the judges called an end to the fight, declaring the contest a draw. This was done to ensure that there was no loss of face to either party. Although anti-climactic, the bout resulted in many new students for the Wu family school and even a martial art teaching contract for Wu Ta-k’uei from the Kowloon police.

All the classical arts have some beautiful concepts and beautiful movements. Chinese Wu Shu is the most beautiful but maybe also the least effective in real because they never fight real fighters and real fighting is never beautiful. People do not do Wu Shu because they want to fight. They do Wu Shu because it is a real ART just like dance. Movie fighting is all like dance.

 Mike Tyson is one of the best ever. But when they asked him if he could take on some of the current champions from Russia, he honestly replied that he didn't know because each generation of athlete get better with more scientific training, better coaching, better conditioning, better nutrition etc. You have to keep up with the times and can't rest on the laurels of past classical fighter stories and assume that will still work today.

 The founders of many classical arts of the past would probably all get totally demolished by a modern ring fighter. That's not to say that classical arts have no benefit.

 Real fighting often leads to real injuries where you have to give up any kind of martial art altogether. If you don't get injured, then probably it is not realistic fighting. How many martial artists really train martial arts for real fighting? If you want real fighting then train six months and then sign up for a war.

 The Roman Gladiators did real combat but that may not sell well national television today.  Most of us seem to be more civilized that that. If you really want to do ring fighting then you should train in the arts who are good at that.

Some of the top MMA people have a classical background actually but they had to train and train to make that stuff really work in the ring.

For fighting, you need a coach experienced in the type of fighting that you want to do. You can't just rely on empty talk that some martial art really works. For fun, fitness or for leaning classical martial arts for beauty and form and for a lifelong hobby then classical martial arts are the way to go.

Real combat is not pretty. Real combat ends someone’s life.

Alan Orr is one wing Chun teacher who trains his guys for MMA fights. He is the student of Robert Chu from Los Angeles. Robert Chu was one of the top Wing Chun teachers that I have met and felt.

When some people watch Alan Orr’s fighters they say, that’s not wing Chun. The problem is that people associate Wing Chun with movie choreography. Wing Chun movie choreography from Donnie Yen or from Bruce Lee is also not Wing Chun.

Final Thought

I would say the more civilized a society gets, the less interested society becomes in violence and violent sports. So eventually I see MMA will decline as boxing has and as the Roman Gladiatorial fights have.

However the classical arts will always have a large following because there is a higher level to achieve than just bashing someone’s face in.

That’s maybe one reason why China went the Wu Shu routes which is popular around the world. Each performance is interesting. I don’t find MMA really interesting or artistic or a healthy activity. Maybe it’s just my age (74).

For our Chinese New Year’s demo we considered showing the full practical application of Wing Chun as a Military and street effective art. However the organizers of the event said that the audience which will consist of more than 1000 Chinese people said they don’t want to see that. Chinese martial art to them is more about ART than about COMBAT. The Ip Man Donnie Yen series is more about the ART. The movie “The Grandmaster” did a very good job on that.