He Was Crazy…And He Studied Korean Karate With Me.

[I:http://www.aikido-judo-karate.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/AlCase7.gif]I doubt whether most schools, be they Kung Fu or Wudan or Aikido or whatever, have ever had a crazy guy in their school like Mud Car. We called him Mud Car because that’s what it said on the license plate on his car.That car, more than anything else, summed up Mud Car.

He had tied parachute webbing across the insides of his car because he felt that that material was best for holding his car together on the inside. He had fire extinguishers fastened to every surface on the inside of his car. He had a dial on his dashboard to give extra power to his tail lights, and he turned it whenever he faced away from the sun so that drivers behind him could see when he braked.

This was just the surface of Mud Car, though. The most impressive thing that Mud Car did was commit to memory the times of all the stop lights in the whole town of San Jose. He could travel across that large town without ever having to stop for a light.

Unfortunately, when it came to the karate, he was just as crazy. He couldn’t stretch his limbs, couldn’t control what his body was going to do, and, because of this lack of control, it hurt to work out with him. Just being in his presence you could feel the firecrackers in his mind exploding into the universe.

One day he interrupted the instructor to complain about a pain in his leg. “It doesn’t hurt me that much, but it keeps nagging at me, do you know how to make the pain in my leg go away?” My instructor looked at me with murder in his eyes, I suppose he didn’t want to look at Mud Car because he would kill him, and he blurted, “Hit your leg with a lead pipe…that’ll make the pain go away.”

I suppose the ability to drive other people insane is the deciding point in this matter of whether a person is goofy or not. Because of this Mud Car never made it to Black Belt. He just didn’t have the mental maturity that is the mark of a black belt.

One day, however, a new instructor came to the school, and Mud Car was promoted to Black Belt within a month…and then he left the school. He had achieved his goal, and that was all he wanted, and the new instructor knew that was the best and most efficient way to get rid of Mud Car. Yet, I missed Mud Car.

He was crazy, but so is the guy who attacks you on the street, so if you could last a session with Mud Car without getting injured, you knew your art was effective. Furthermore, there was a shift of standard here, for Mud Car was promoted because he could drive people nuts, not because he was good. Finally, I think that is where the True Art started disappearing…schools, even schools like Tae Kwon Do or Kenpo or classical karate, did not administer soothing discipline to the insane, they just promoted them to get rid of them.

If you want to go crazy through the martial arts…drop on by Punch ‘Em Out. If you want to go sane through the martial arts…try Monster Martial Arts. 2