by Bill Wallace
Although most people remember me only as a full-contact and point karate fighter, in 1968 and 1969, I competed in kata (choreographed combat sets), simply because when you entered a tournament, it featured competition in both sparring and kata. I used to train with Glen Keeney, who was a very good kata .competitor. When he would enter a kata division, I’d say “Well, heck. So will I.” I never won a kata competition. I placed second and third a couple times, but I was not a good kata competitor. Some people said that I had good technique, and I agree, but my heart was not in forms. I like punching and kicking toward people, not at the air.
A lot of the techniques you use in kata are not useful in an actual fighting situation. The blocking techniques are useful, but some of the striking techniques are not useful because your hands are open. You’re blocking and moving in a way you would never move in an actual fighting situation.
Most fighters have maybe five-to-seven techniques that they can deliver really well with power and speed. Kata, on the other hand, feature so many different types of techniques-different punches, different stances, different kicks, and different blocks. And you have to perform them all very beautifully. Kata competition today is done for beauty, not for the effectiveness of the techniques. It is a beauty pageant to see who dresses the nicest, and who can do the most somersaults or back flips to wow the crowd and win the musical forms. It’s not really martial arts anymore. It’s– like Jhoon Rhee has said– a martial ballet. It’s a dance. The kata competitors come out and do somersaults and back flips, and maybe throw a punch or one or two kicks. People like to see that, but it has nothing to do with the martial arts.
I was in the Cayman Islands recently, and I was talking to some kids who asked me if I could do back flips and such like they had seen in the martial arts movies. I said “No. Every time I’ve tried to do a back flip, I’ve landed flat on my face.”
People want to see the back flips and the somersaults in kata. It’s fancy, but it’s not kata anymore. When old traditional Japanese karate instructors look at that stuff, they just kind of giggle. They are probably thinking to themselves “Okay, fight me like that. Come on. Do a back flip. As soon as you land I’m going to take your face off.”
I notice that they don’t even call it kata these days. They call it “forms competition.” If they are going to allow these unrealistic kata at tournaments, they should have separate divisions for traditional forms and creative forms. Some people are very traditional. They see a guy doing a musical form and they say “What is this?” They don’t understand. They may be able to do an absolutely fantastic traditional kata, but the judges won’t even give them a decent score because there is this other guy who is dancing all around the floor.
The forms you see today at tournaments are pretty, but they really don’t have very much to do with the martial arts. That’s why very few kata competitors ever performed very successfully in sparring competition. George Chung did very fine forms; he was the national champion for several years back in the 1980s. But he didn’t fight that much. Charlie Lee was a national forms champion, but he never fought, from what I understand. Not that these guys can’t fight; they could be very good fighters. But in a real fight, you have to keep your hands in front of your face to protect yourself, and you can’t pull the hand back to throw that reverse punch you learned in the form. It takes a little too long. You sacrifice something in the techniques.
It all boils down to this: Are you going to make the technique effective, or do you want it to be pretty? I like effective much better.
October 1992
