Interview with Matt Thornton

A pioneers skeptic of the martial arts world

http://www.dirttime.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/matt-thornton-still-flying-the-aliveness-banner.pdf

He has some interesting thoughts of skepticism in martial arts and on gym culture towards the end, in particular about the 'hard man' image that you sometimes see in MMA in particular but I'm sure in other arts too.

Well, the martial arts con is like all cons. It
requires your willing participation. If you
want to believe that there is a silver bullet
out there that will allow you to take on
two football players, if you want to believe
that a famous 80+ year old kali grandmaster
actually picked up a bus using a secret
prayer on his body, if you want to believe
that the one touch KO, or no touch knock
down works, or that something silly like
silat, or wing chun, or any of the fantasybased
systems will give you that extra
edge, then you have already bitten the bait.
And for those people, there really isn’t
much you can do so long as they willfully
choose to keep the scales on their eyes.
But for those looking for the truth, then
it’s pretty easy to see what’s real and
what’s not. Just test it in an alive environment.
And when the teacher, guru, sifu
does his cool looking demo, watch the
feeder not the demonstrator. If the feeder
throws his punch or kick, and just locks it
out standing there for the showman to do
his 5 strike one and two step routine, then
you know it’s just a choreographed play.
The beauty of something like BJJ, wrestling,
or boxing, is that in the long run
being good at them is a lot like being good
at Spanish, or playing the guitar. It can’t
be faked.

Love it

Cheers Tim,

Den.