August 20, 2006
Chicken Soup for the Street Fighter
By WARREN ST. JOHN
LAST November, William Graham was minding his own business on karaoke night at a sports bar near his home in Miami when things took a nasty turn. On the other side of the bar, he recalled, a drunk couple was arguing. The woman gave Mr. Graham a look, which her boyfriend apparently didn’t appreciate. He approached Mr. Graham, 44, flicked a cigarette at him and challenged him to a fight.
Unfortunately for the aggressor, Mr. Graham is a passionate student of the art — scratch that — the act of street fighting. He owns approximately 20 DVD’s and books on street fighting, many of them by the brawling guru Paul Vunak. One is perfectly suited for karaoke nights that get out of hand: “Anatomy of a Street Fight.”
Mr. Graham recalled his training, and what happened next at the bar was not pretty. He first went in with his thumbs for an eye gouge before letting loose with a “straight blast,” a flurry of driving blows to the midsection (“Bruce Lee’s favorite,” Mr. Graham said). The aggressor fell to the floor, at which point Mr. Graham applied a choke hold until security separated and dismissed the two — through separate doors. The whole episode lasted less than 20 seconds, Mr. Graham said. In the end, the aggressor was vanquished and Mr. Graham’s manhood was intact, just as his videos had promised.
His opponent was in a state of disbelief after the fight, Mr. Graham said. “He thought we were going to do the whole boxing match thing. He wasn’t ready for a poke in the eye and a 50-yard dash down the centerline.”
If Mr. Graham decides to hone his technique by purchasing more instructional street fight videos, he won’t lack for options. Once the purview of a few paranoiacs and survivalists, street fighting tutorials have proliferated through online retailers, driven largely, they say, by the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the Pride Fighting Championships, two televised no-holds-barred, mixed martial arts fighting leagues.
Don Wasser, the president of PFS Video, a company in Pennsylvania that has produced street fighting videos since 1991 — including Mr. Vunak’s classic “Barbaric Biting: How to Instantly Get Out from Under a 250 lb. Man” — said sales of his company’s street fighting videos had increased 50 percent in the last four years. He attributed that growth to fans of ultimate fighting, which has drawn a large audience through pay-per-view broadcasts, and more recently through the Spike TV series, “The Ultimate Fighters,” which follows contestants as they train and compete.
“It was slow at the start,” Mr. Wasser said of sales. “But in the last five or six years it has just exploded.”
Mr. Wasser said most of his customers were not interested in spending a lot of time learning traditional martial arts in a dojo, or fighting academy. Instead, he said, they liked the idea of sitting on a sofa and picking up a couple of nasty out-of-the-box maneuvers, just in case they encountered some bullies in the real world.
Mr. Wasser said he thought of himself as being in the business of building confidence, and through customer surveys, he said he’d come to know his clients’ psychology well.
“The guys who are playing football aren’t looking for confidence — they’ve got it,” he said. “It’s the guys in the chess club who are looking for confidence.”
Experts in personal security generally agree that getting into a fight is an extraordinarily bad idea. Lose and you may end up in the hospital; win and you may end up in jail or in court facing lawsuits. The prevalence of weapons these days adds to the danger, they said.
“You never want to engage somebody physically because you never know what you’re up against,” said Donald R. Henne, a former New York City police lieutenant and now a director at the security firm Kroll. He said he found the idea of street fight videos laughable.
“Those individuals who fight in ultimate fighting are highly trained athletes who work out constantly,” he said. “It’s like watching a video of how to fly an aircraft and taking a seat in a jumbo jet and saying, ‘Yeah, I could fly this thing.’ ”
But Bruce Corrigan, a former marine who teaches fighting classes and stars in a video series for Mr. Wasser, said that customers for his videos followed a different creed: “Better tried by 12 than carried by 6,” he said.
With titles like “Brutal Head Bustin Secrets,” “Ghetto Blocks” and “Delta Mojo,” street fighting DVD’s may be the digital age equivalent of manuals once advertised in the backs of comic books, all promising young men the secrets of dealing with bullies who kicked sand in their faces or tried to steal their girlfriends. As with those old ads, the promotional material for the videos is often comically hyperbolic: “What the World’s Most Dangerous Federal Agent Knows About Filthy, Illegal, Real-World Lethal Hand-to-Hand Combat — That You Don’t Yet,” declares the Web page for “Brutal Beyond Belief,” the street fighting DVD series by a supposedly top-secret government operative who goes by the name Dr. Violence. “Much of this stuff is over-the-top nasty!”
Production quality in the videos varies widely, and typically feature a motley assortment of former military personnel, martial artists and in some cases, even former gang members willing to share survival skills they’ve picked up on the streets. Violent backgrounds, real or hyped, are considered a plus.
One video, produced by a company called TRS Direct, promotes the expertise of an instructor who “trained KGB hit-men, Kremlin bodyguards, elite paratroopers and big-city Russian SWAT teams.” Another champions an Israeli fighting technique “that FREAKS OUT Even Hardcore U.S. Soldiers.”
But despite the promise of exotic fighting methods from around the world, most street fighting videos boil down to the same handful of moves: foot stomps, larynx jabs, eye flicks, crushing elbow blasts, shin kicks and head butts, which are delivered ruthlessly upon a thuggish looking cast of soon-to-be vanquished aggressors.
It turns out that many people who buy street fighting videos do not actually do a lot of fighting. Michael Rigg, the director of sales and marketing at Paladin Press, a company in Boulder, Colo., that publishes many street fighting tutorials, said he trains often in mixed martial arts, though he has never fought.
“I’m a good liberal Democrat,” Mr. Rigg said. “But I would take a piece off of you and give it back to you if it came to that.”
Marc Gould, a 50 year-old medical technician in California and a fan of both Ultimate Fighting Championship and street fighting videos, said that while he knew a lot about fighting, he hadn’t been in an actual fight since childhood. But if trouble found him, he said he would be ready.
“Elbow strikes are my favorite,” Mr. Gould said. “In order to get out of a street fight, you’ve got to do damage real fast.”
In some ways, the street fighting video industry is set up like the pornography industry. Individual performers work through privately owned distributors for $500 to $1,000 a video, which can sell for $19 to $79. Some use pseudonyms. Jim Grover, a performer in Paladin Press’s “Situational Self-Offense” series, is actually a security expert named Kelly McCann.
Because videos pay so little, instructors have to make a lot of them to earn a living. Jim Arvanitis, who bills himself as an expert in the fighting style of the gladiators, has made 21 videos. He said the work allowed him to hone moves that might otherwise land him in jail.
“You can’t just go around picking on people and going to bars giving people dirty looks,” he said. “So you make videos.”
Mr. Wasser said his company was planning to release 10 new street fighting videos this year. Nonetheless, he said he considered himself something of a pacifist. “My wife knows I’m a manly man,” he said. “I’d rather not go to a hospital or a police station tonight. And these days, everybody’s got a lawyer.”
Chicken Soup for the Street Fighter
By WARREN ST. JOHN
LAST November, William Graham was minding his own business on karaoke night at a sports bar near his home in Miami when things took a nasty turn. On the other side of the bar, he recalled, a drunk couple was arguing. The woman gave Mr. Graham a look, which her boyfriend apparently didn’t appreciate. He approached Mr. Graham, 44, flicked a cigarette at him and challenged him to a fight.
Unfortunately for the aggressor, Mr. Graham is a passionate student of the art — scratch that — the act of street fighting. He owns approximately 20 DVD’s and books on street fighting, many of them by the brawling guru Paul Vunak. One is perfectly suited for karaoke nights that get out of hand: “Anatomy of a Street Fight.”
Mr. Graham recalled his training, and what happened next at the bar was not pretty. He first went in with his thumbs for an eye gouge before letting loose with a “straight blast,” a flurry of driving blows to the midsection (“Bruce Lee’s favorite,” Mr. Graham said). The aggressor fell to the floor, at which point Mr. Graham applied a choke hold until security separated and dismissed the two — through separate doors. The whole episode lasted less than 20 seconds, Mr. Graham said. In the end, the aggressor was vanquished and Mr. Graham’s manhood was intact, just as his videos had promised.
His opponent was in a state of disbelief after the fight, Mr. Graham said. “He thought we were going to do the whole boxing match thing. He wasn’t ready for a poke in the eye and a 50-yard dash down the centerline.”
If Mr. Graham decides to hone his technique by purchasing more instructional street fight videos, he won’t lack for options. Once the purview of a few paranoiacs and survivalists, street fighting tutorials have proliferated through online retailers, driven largely, they say, by the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the Pride Fighting Championships, two televised no-holds-barred, mixed martial arts fighting leagues.
Don Wasser, the president of PFS Video, a company in Pennsylvania that has produced street fighting videos since 1991 — including Mr. Vunak’s classic “Barbaric Biting: How to Instantly Get Out from Under a 250 lb. Man” — said sales of his company’s street fighting videos had increased 50 percent in the last four years. He attributed that growth to fans of ultimate fighting, which has drawn a large audience through pay-per-view broadcasts, and more recently through the Spike TV series, “The Ultimate Fighters,” which follows contestants as they train and compete.
“It was slow at the start,” Mr. Wasser said of sales. “But in the last five or six years it has just exploded.”
Mr. Wasser said most of his customers were not interested in spending a lot of time learning traditional martial arts in a dojo, or fighting academy. Instead, he said, they liked the idea of sitting on a sofa and picking up a couple of nasty out-of-the-box maneuvers, just in case they encountered some bullies in the real world.
Mr. Wasser said he thought of himself as being in the business of building confidence, and through customer surveys, he said he’d come to know his clients’ psychology well.
“The guys who are playing football aren’t looking for confidence — they’ve got it,” he said. “It’s the guys in the chess club who are looking for confidence.”
Experts in personal security generally agree that getting into a fight is an extraordinarily bad idea. Lose and you may end up in the hospital; win and you may end up in jail or in court facing lawsuits. The prevalence of weapons these days adds to the danger, they said.
“You never want to engage somebody physically because you never know what you’re up against,” said Donald R. Henne, a former New York City police lieutenant and now a director at the security firm Kroll. He said he found the idea of street fight videos laughable.
“Those individuals who fight in ultimate fighting are highly trained athletes who work out constantly,” he said. “It’s like watching a video of how to fly an aircraft and taking a seat in a jumbo jet and saying, ‘Yeah, I could fly this thing.’ ”
But Bruce Corrigan, a former marine who teaches fighting classes and stars in a video series for Mr. Wasser, said that customers for his videos followed a different creed: “Better tried by 12 than carried by 6,” he said.
With titles like “Brutal Head Bustin Secrets,” “Ghetto Blocks” and “Delta Mojo,” street fighting DVD’s may be the digital age equivalent of manuals once advertised in the backs of comic books, all promising young men the secrets of dealing with bullies who kicked sand in their faces or tried to steal their girlfriends. As with those old ads, the promotional material for the videos is often comically hyperbolic: “What the World’s Most Dangerous Federal Agent Knows About Filthy, Illegal, Real-World Lethal Hand-to-Hand Combat — That You Don’t Yet,” declares the Web page for “Brutal Beyond Belief,” the street fighting DVD series by a supposedly top-secret government operative who goes by the name Dr. Violence. “Much of this stuff is over-the-top nasty!”
Production quality in the videos varies widely, and typically feature a motley assortment of former military personnel, martial artists and in some cases, even former gang members willing to share survival skills they’ve picked up on the streets. Violent backgrounds, real or hyped, are considered a plus.
One video, produced by a company called TRS Direct, promotes the expertise of an instructor who “trained KGB hit-men, Kremlin bodyguards, elite paratroopers and big-city Russian SWAT teams.” Another champions an Israeli fighting technique “that FREAKS OUT Even Hardcore U.S. Soldiers.”
But despite the promise of exotic fighting methods from around the world, most street fighting videos boil down to the same handful of moves: foot stomps, larynx jabs, eye flicks, crushing elbow blasts, shin kicks and head butts, which are delivered ruthlessly upon a thuggish looking cast of soon-to-be vanquished aggressors.
It turns out that many people who buy street fighting videos do not actually do a lot of fighting. Michael Rigg, the director of sales and marketing at Paladin Press, a company in Boulder, Colo., that publishes many street fighting tutorials, said he trains often in mixed martial arts, though he has never fought.
“I’m a good liberal Democrat,” Mr. Rigg said. “But I would take a piece off of you and give it back to you if it came to that.”
Marc Gould, a 50 year-old medical technician in California and a fan of both Ultimate Fighting Championship and street fighting videos, said that while he knew a lot about fighting, he hadn’t been in an actual fight since childhood. But if trouble found him, he said he would be ready.
“Elbow strikes are my favorite,” Mr. Gould said. “In order to get out of a street fight, you’ve got to do damage real fast.”
In some ways, the street fighting video industry is set up like the pornography industry. Individual performers work through privately owned distributors for $500 to $1,000 a video, which can sell for $19 to $79. Some use pseudonyms. Jim Grover, a performer in Paladin Press’s “Situational Self-Offense” series, is actually a security expert named Kelly McCann.
Because videos pay so little, instructors have to make a lot of them to earn a living. Jim Arvanitis, who bills himself as an expert in the fighting style of the gladiators, has made 21 videos. He said the work allowed him to hone moves that might otherwise land him in jail.
“You can’t just go around picking on people and going to bars giving people dirty looks,” he said. “So you make videos.”
Mr. Wasser said his company was planning to release 10 new street fighting videos this year. Nonetheless, he said he considered himself something of a pacifist. “My wife knows I’m a manly man,” he said. “I’d rather not go to a hospital or a police station tonight. And these days, everybody’s got a lawyer.”
![[rolleyes]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/042.gif "Roll Eyes [rolleyes]")
![[smile]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/001.gif "Smile [smile]")
![[thinking]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/010.gif "Thinking [thinking]")
And no, that is NOTwhat I'm referring to, you perverts! ![[wink]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/002.gif "Wink [wink]")
