Dr. Dave Wink and the Crazy Guys with Sticks

 

I studied a variety of martial arts before having the privlielage to study Pekiti-Tirsia under Grand Tuhon Leo T. Gaje, and Pentjak Silat under Suyardi "Eddie" Jafri in the late 1970’s and early 80's. I was also fortunate to be able to become great friends with Eric Knaus, whose association and friendship is responsible for our current style.  It was this period that we discovered that full-contact weapon fighting was experimental ground for analysis and the development of different fighting technologies and training methods. It was this period of my career that opened both Eric and myself to the idea that there has to be a method to test and develop fighting technologies.  

 

As my career moved on, I left California for Boston where I had limited time but got to train with Andrew Lin and Tony Mara, where we continued the full-contact stick fighting tradition at MIT.  After that I came to the DC area to work at NIH and work out with a fellow scientist, Ray Nims. But our careers accelerated at the expense of training. 

 

However in the mid 1990’s, Ray, Dave Bucheimer (an outstanding master of Tang Soo Do) and I established the Central Maryland Martial Arts, which, for the next 17 years would, be the experimental laboratory for our new edition of full-contact fighting.  The addition of Harry Hines and Brad Grenke to our group, that same year, provided invaluable analysis and developed new techniques and insights into different aspect of weapons fighting.  These talented, intelligent, and funny guys fostered new aspects of fighting I thought not possible as well as a great sense of humor.  We saw this as a science research project. 

 

At one of our seminars, we fortunate to have Jim Tirey, Maggie Osborn, and Warren O’Hara attend.  We notice the incredible synergy with what they were practicing and our perspective, which began a new era in our approach to different fighting as well as a great friendship.  Over the last 20 years we have explored the physical and mental aspects that make up a state we like to call “spontaneous mastery”.  With Tirey’s extensive special operation training and outstanding jiujutsu, we were able to forge new applications in weapon fighting. 

 

In this seminar, we would like to share our successes but more importantly our failures to provide insight into how to train in weapon fighting and empty-hands verses weapons.  We have referred this to as "The Position and Power in Real Time”.  These principles are a result of a collaboration of many people to establish critical principle for effect full contact fighting.  Despite our age and failing body parts we hope to provide some insights into platforms that may help perfect some of the techniques in stick fighting and empty hands verses weapons.