The Jigsaw Juxtaposition

        
 The following post is an excerpt from the upcoming book Martial Logic by Paul Green




     You know I tend to read alot and do alot of research when I'm not teaching. I have alot of friends in the defense industry and sometimes I like to bounce ideas around with the ones that I respect. Often I'll look at a thread on facebook or some forum just to see what people are talking about and more often than not lately it seems to be things like which is better striking or grappling. At other times it's some dumb ass that thinks only striking works or vice versa with grappling and that the other camp is full of crap. The problem is in some instances both are right and wrong at the same time. It seems to me that it isn't what they are saying if it's in the proper context it's that they are not clarifying what they mean to the other people. This usually results in a big long thread with people arguing when they are basically saying the same thing but none of them have the ability to communicate what they mean to each other. The point of this section is to clarify where some of these tactics fit best and where they don't and compare the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle these legends in their own minds have created in regards to grappling vs. striking.
      Context is very important and there is no one catch all situation. I want to cover about three different situations where these things come into play based upon what the individual instructors are trying to focus on, or rather the group they are trying to teach. As far as which is better it really depends on what the hell you are doing. A mugging type situation is going to be inherently different from two guys at a party getting pissed off about something and decide to take it to the back yard. It's even more different when you’re in a professional setting such as police or security of some kind. These things affect what tactics make sense and what tactics don't fit. Let's take a look at each of the three.

The Self Defense Situation

       Now first I want to explain what I mean by a self defense situation. I mean they are all self defense situations but what I am referring to here is a robbery type thing or some type of attack where your best course of action is to flee for your safety.  In situations like this grappling can be kind of pointless. Let me set this up. A girl is at a party and has to use the bathroom upstairs. Everyone else is in the living room downstairs and in the kitchen. One of her guy friends is drunk and has a crush on her and has decided to make his move. He stops her in the hall as she tries to exit the bathroom and starts flirting heavily. She say he's drunk and she isn't interested right now or maybe she doesn't see him that way and just wants to be friends. Well he doesn't like that and there is no one around so he decides he's going to take what he wants. He just got turned down and his ego can't handle it so he tries to shove her back into the bathroom. Does she drop and pull guard and go for a wicked bad ass helicopter sweep? No, that wouldn’t be a wise move for her to do. She screams for help as loud as she can and claws the hell out of his face. Maybe she catches an eye and knees a groin and runs back downstairs for help and safety. You’re trying to get out of there why would you want to tie up with someone. The best course of action is getting out of there as quickly as possible. This is where incapacitating blows would come in such as eye gouges, groin attacks, throat punches, ear slaps, etc. The only way you may need to use grappling here is if you end up on your back and need to use leverage to get them off of you. Even then the right shot could get you out of there. This is also the situation where they are the most likely to have a weapon of some kind. If a knife threat is not already taking place it could be shortly so time is of the essence. A little awareness and avoidance training can go a long way in this situation as well but we will be covering that more in depth in another section of this book. This could also be something that could happen on the job if you’re a supervisor and you have a disgruntled employee were a verbal de-escalation technique may serve you better. Once again we will cover that in a different section as well. One of the ways I do see a grappling tactic being used here is if there is some type of edged weapon involved and you are able to capture the weapon bearing limb and control it while you perform some blunt force trauma with the other hand. If you’re talking about a situation where striking is better then, this is it. This is where it shines. In most instances here grappling is pointless when all you want to do is flee.

Get Your Scrap On

       This is about as common as water in the ocean. Big Merle and Cletus are at a party. They both get to drinking and having a good time and Cletus notices Big Merle talking to some girl he wanted to talk to. He doesn't like that at all and he suddenly thinks he should whoop Big Merle's ass for doing such a thing. Well Big Merle doesn't quite think Cletus can whoop his ass so they decide to figure it out outside past the tire swing where it's safe away from the pickup trucks (wouldn't want to ding those...I mean hell it's a damn truck!). So a crowd gathers around to see who can whoop whose ass. Both have friends there watching to make sure it's a "fair fight." Though sometimes you will, you’re less likely to see a weapon brought out in this situation. There are too many witnesses and too many people to scream foul. This isn't the old west anymore. I hear it said all the time," There are no rules in street fighting." My reply to that is this.......bullshit! I understand there is no referee (though sometimes there actually is a referee...seriously). However, even outside the fact that all states have some form of judicious use of force law that you need to memorize, in most situations like this there tends to be some form of social conduct involved. You see in this situation alot of times the fallout from the fight can be more dangerous than the fight itself. This is one of the ways that mma and street fighting are different. Both of these guys have friends there. If one guy starts "fighting dirty," meaning the use of the aforementioned eye gouges, groin attacks, etc. He becomes a social pariah. Rules or not if Cletus pulls that crap Merle's friends are gonna think he's a punk. Maybe they decide to jump in the fight now and beat Cletus down, then his friends jump in and you have a huge battle royal type deal. I've seen this happen at house parties. I've seen this happen in clubs. I've even seen it happen at sporting events. It's common when alcohol gets mixed with stupidity. There doesn't even have to be a girl involved it could just be the good old fashioned, “He was looking at me sideways." It could be my personal favorite," Hey mother fucker why you eye fucking me?" Someone could have just farted in the other person's general direction. Who the hell knows with some people? It could be a million different things that started it. My point here is depending on how this is handled it may not be over when the fight is over. If one side feels wronged then maybe the next week they are all out somewhere else and another fight starts based on the previous fight. Maybe this time someone gets stabbed or shot because egos are bruised. It sounds crazy but this is what happens every week somewhere in the United States and I bet it's happening all the time in other countries as well. Sure some punches will be exchanged but if Merle gets Cletus on the ground and controls him with something and talks him down and isn't hitting him or trash talking maybe some of Cletus's friends tell Cletus enough is enough and they break it up and go have a beer. I've seen this scenario play out alot as well. Hell I've done it! Do you see how different this situation is than the one before it? In this situation using grappling instead of trying to maim the guy got you alot further and could potentially stop alot of fallout from ever taking place. I can't tell you how many times when I was younger I saw guys beating the crap out of each other then an hour later they are doing shots together at the bar, mainly because one knew when to knock it off. In these situations you aren't trying to flee. If all you know how to do is strike and the guy covers up and dumps you on your ass you could be eating knuckles. No one has to be a grappling expert to tackle someone everyone pretty much knows how to do it. Do you need to strike?Yes! Do you need to grapple? Yes! Personally in these situations I prefer grappling because I can use it to limit the other person's offense and I usually have an arm free to convince him to stop fighting.

The Professional 

      You’re a police officer and you've just given a field sobriety test to a guy that failed it badly. This wasn't at a checkpoint he was weaving on the interstate so you stop him and you’re alone on the side of the road. You go to handcuff the suspect to arrest him but he yanks his hands away and resists. This is his third DUI and he doesn't want to go to jail. He decides to knock your ass out and run. They rarely think about the dashboard camera at the time. So what does the officer do? He pokes the guy in the eye and runs like hell screaming for help down the interstate right? Of course not, that even sounds stupid! It sounds stupid because this isn't self defense as we've defined it. This is a completely different situation. This is your police, security, bouncer type stuff. It is a little different than the other two. In this scenario the person you’re fighting may be trying to flee as opposed to just standing there and fighting you. As you can guess grappling and restraints become more important in these situations. I've seen people recently claim that restraints don't work and I want to address that in this section. If restraints don't work then every bouncer who ever broke up a fight is hallucinating. I must be clinically insane because when I was bouncing for 10 years all those fights I broke up and held the people outside for the police were figments of my imagination. That and every suspect who ever tried to keep from getting handcuffed all got away and the streets are full of them running around. Well obviously none of that is true. If someone says restraints don't work the reply should be," no...YOUR restraints don't work.  Here's the thing with that. There are alot of really bad restraint programs out there. They tend to teach overly complicated fine motor techniques that would never work under stress if being applied by someone who doesn't have alot of experience. So what happens is you get martial arts types that come from striking based arts with poor grappling that take these shitty programs. They can't get the stuff to work so instead of looking further they just dismiss an incredibly important part of training and their students suffer for it and have incomplete training. Part of me thinks they never wanted it to work in the first place. There's a form of cognitive dissonance called, "Adaptive Performance Formation." The term itself was coined by Norwegian social and political theorist Jon Elster.  Basically what it is referring to is this:

Someone wants something

They can't attain it

They convince themselves it isn't worth having and criticize it

       There's an Aesops's Fable that illustrates this called," The Fox and the Grapes." In the story the fox sees some grapes he wants to eat but they are too high and he can't reach them. He can't figure out a way to get those grapes so he just tells himself they aren't worth eating by saying they probably aren't ripe or are too sour or something. Frankly that's all it is. Forget about fine motor and go for gross motor. On a side note I find that it's normally the restraints they teach for hospital employees that tend to be the worst.

      The simple fact is in this situation if you got someone that doesn't want to go to jail and they are barreling down on you so fast you can't get a punch off or you got dumped on your ass because you thought you could get to a weapon and were standing too close and misjudged the distance you better damn well know how to grapple and if you don't know how to restrain someone properly then you’re going to be on the side of that road fighting all night long.

     So in conclusion you can see that these situations are very different. Someone who only teaches self defense to the public is going to have a very different view than someone who only teaches police, and neither of them are going to have the same view as someone who just flat out teaches people how to fight. All of them have something to offer in the context of what they do but what they do is different. It is a different tool for a different job. As long as everyone understands that then it's fine. When people don't understand that then you have a problem. When you have a self defense instructor trying to talk about police tactics or a defensive tactics instructor trying to apply their tactics to self defense when the rules of engagement are different, you get jacked up stuff like a military firearms instructor telling civilians it's better to be judged by twelve than carried by six when the fact is that is only a valid statement when those are the only two choices (that's rarely the only two choices). It's just apples and oranges. Hopefully this clarified some things and when you see those arguments on the internet you can laugh because you know where all the pieces of the puzzle actually fit.