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Beyond Animal Day? |
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I'd like to start by saying Thank You to everyone who has sent their responses for my recent "What's Your Animal Day?" article. Jim is an old friend from way back during my Doorwork days in Coventry. I met Jim through Geoff and a mutual friend Ian McCranor. Jim's martial arts background is predimonantly Boxing, with him being a Professional Boxing Coach, but also Muay Thai, under the auspicies of Bob Spour and various other grappling arts. With a wealth of knowledge and a heap of very real life experience, Jim is more than qualified to make comment on my own articles and I thank him for the response he sent to me. Jim is now an Artistic Director for ArtsNation Community Theatre, a non proffit making organisation who help people who suffer from social exclusion problems through the media of creative arts, such as theatre and comedy. An incredibly worthy vocation in my opinion. So it is with great pleasure that this weeks article is courtesy of Mr Jim Burns................... BEYOND ANIMAL DAY I read with interest Al Peasland’s article which discussed Geoff Thompsons’ Animal days. I never had the pleasure of participating in, although to be honest, at the time I was somewhat of a purist with regard to the fighting arts in that to me boxing and Thai boxing were the only genuine ‘full contact’ fighting arts. This thought process came out of ignorance as much as naivety, I had little understanding of the grappling arts, a flaw in my armory which has since been rectified. I did witness these pressure testing events on several occasions and what I saw was very similar to what I was witnessing as a night club doorman, which in my opinion proved that Geoff was ahead of his time as a martial artist. Al was right in his description of Geoff’s original ‘concept’ of pressure testing fighters, stepping outside the box, pushing the envelope etc. In effect, Geoff was trying to simulate ‘real life’ combat and speaking as an interested onlooker he succeeded. What I found interesting about Al’s article was his view both as a practitioner and combat theorist. Like Geoff Thompson, Al has moved on from the physicality of animal day, contextualizing the concept of ‘animal day’. There are countless people living normal lives, working in every day jobs, going about their business blissfully unaware of the phenomenon which was animal day, they are also even more blissfully unaware that they face their own animal days in every aspect of their daily lives. Whilst reading Al’s article I was reminded of a job interview I attended a couple of weeks before. I prepared by researching the company, studying the competition and rehearsing a twenty minute presentation I was to give. On the day of the interview I felt I had prepared myself sufficiently enough to put up a good performance. What happened was an unadulterated disaster, the formal interview turned me into a mumbling idiot and the twenty minute presentation lasted about ten minutes and left me feeling like a quivering wreck. So what went wrong? I had researched and prepared myself, I wore my best ‘interview suit’, I made sure I arrived early enough to compose myself. On reflection I was reminded of the story of the coward and the hero told by Cus D’Amato to Mike Tyson, he would say; ‘The hero and the coward are in essence the same person, the only difference being that when faced with a confrontational situation the coward runs away but the hero confronts the problem’. On the day of my interview my confidence ran away leaving my body a quivering wreck to face the onslaught of question after question like a ship in a storm without a rudder. What actually happened was that I had an ‘animal day’ and failed the test. This is, I believe, the point of Al’s article. Animal day is a metaphor and can morph into any part or our lives. Whenever we are confronted by a confrontational situation, be it an angry boss or a tailgating motorist, we are faced with our own very personal animal day. It is not a physical confrontation, there are no rules, no referee, like Geoff Thompson’s original concept, we have to deal with whatever is put in front of us. So how do we train for these metaphorical animal days? In some respects a physical animal day is easy to prepare for, weeks spent in the gym improving fitness, gaining strength, building confidence. But where does this confidence come from and what is it based on? Broad shoulders and narrow hips do not make a good fighter, ask Frank Bruno. This is the essence of Animal day theory, not putting the drills and strategies learned in the gym to the test, but challenging the individual to carry on when his/her system has failed. It was from this starting point that Geoff developed an ideology which transcended the physical. What we are really talking about is psychology, sociology and several other ologies to boot. Yet the problem still remains, will reading Freud or Jung equip us with the necessary tools? Will Kantian theory come to our rescue when the chips are down? The answer is no. Geoff’s whole point was to pressure test martial arts theories, to try to establish if they worked in the real world. Freud and co will give us many answers, they will explain behavioral traits but they will never give us what we need to face our own animal day each and every day, in the same way that a boxer can hone his body to perfection but as I have told my students many times, you can’t train your jaw. If a boxer is ‘chinny’ there is no amount of physical training he can do to improve it because when I fighter takes a hit on the jaw, it is the psyche that has the final decision. Having re-read this article I have come to two conclusions; firstly, it has been a long time since I put finger to keypad hence the fragmented grammar. And secondly, what we are really talking about here is something that cannot be taught, it is a process that has to be internalized and dealt with in our own unique way. We can study psychology which will help as drilling on a mat helps, we can learn about sociology as we learn about techniques, but the truth is, when we are confronted by an animal day, only we have the answers, only we can make the final decision as to how we will react, everything else is just theory. I once heard that when a Karate grand master reaches the grade of Tenth Dan he puts his black belt aside and dons a white belt to donate that he has completed his physical journey and is ready to begin his spiritual journey to enlightenment as a novice. I don’t know if this is true but is sounds like it should be. Having trained with and spoken in great depth to Geoff Thompson and Al Peasland over many years, I believe that they have both donned a metaphorical white belt and set off on a journey of self discovery which in itself could be described as an animal day, as we all know, the path less traveled is the hardest path to follow. Jim Burns Stay Safe and Have Fun Al x
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