Chapter 13 : The Secret to De-Fanging The Snake
When two street fighters are engaged in a edged weapons match, 99 out of a 100 times, the victor will be the person who understands “De-Fanging the Snake”. When we use this expression, the snake refers to the opponent and the fang refers to the weapon. So de-fanging the snake simply means, cutting the opponents weapon hand(once the tendons and ligaments are severed in the hand, the snake is defanged, at this point one can kill it or let it go).
Approximately 1 in 100 weapons fighters actually know and apply this principle. And if you are lucky enough to be one of those people, who know to attack the opponent’s weapon hand you will be in the 1% of people that are victorious in combat.
Lets say out of 10,000 legitimate weapons fighters, the top 1 % of these folks, all know the principle of de-fanging the snake. So that would be 100 people. Now lets say you take 1 person out of this 100, and teach this person our “flash-light” principle. He would beat the other 99 people, 99 out of 100 times.
De-fanging the snake and then applying the “flash-light” principle together will make a world class knife fighter. So by now, you must be asking your self, what in the heck is the “flash-light” principle.
Most individuals that pick up a weapon, usually hold it incorrectly(As if they were boxing). This incorrect method of holding a knife not only points your weapon directly at your own face, it simultaneously leaves your hand wide open for an attack. In order to prevent this, we point the tip of our knife directly at the opponent’s hand. Now when the opponent tries to cut your hand, he gets his own hand cut. The tip of the knife serves to protect your hand. When the opponent sees this strategy, they will cease coming in directly, and start tacking in at different angles. So in order to prevent this, we simply imagine our knife as a flash-light and we attempt to illuminate the opponents attacking hand. Where ever this opponent moves their hand, the tip of our knife follows. It is important to note, that this action need only take place at the wrist. The rest of the arm should be snuggled up and actually touching the body.
When one’s knife hand is about a foot from the body and one’s arm is touching the body, and only ones wrist is moving, continually following the opponents weapon hand, in conjunction with Mohammed Ali type of footwork, this is as close to an air tight defense that one can posses. Now out of this continual movement, combined with our flash-light principle, if we want to apply offense we simply lash-out and cut the opponent’s hand. Most of the time this is an angle 2 trajectory. That is an extremely quick snapping motion, however it is imperative that the knife returns back to the flash-light instantly. If you can picture the scene, one is way out in long-range, dancing around with foot-work like Mohammed Ali, the knife is close to the body, and moving independent of our footwork, and there is an occasional lash out at the opponent’s hand, de-fanging the snake, and return back to flash-light.
So we have footwork, faking, flash-light, and the occasional defang.
Training Drill:
After 30 years of various evolutionary training methods, I can give you the single best. Yes the bulls-eye of all training methods with a knife. Buy a laser pointer, duct tape it to your knife, spar with whomever, and log several hours keeping their hand illuminated. After several hours of this type of sparring, you will notice that your wrist appears to have a brain of its own, moving in one direction and your feet independent of the wrist will have a brain of they’re own moving in yet another direction. When two of my very top knife fighters, say Cruse and Singh, are engaged in sparring, it usually takes between 5 and 10 minutes for somebody to score 1 point. And if you think about it, putting so much emphasis on defense, is a logical paradigm when you are fighting with a razor. Welcome to the world of world class.
Please check the Table of Contents for links to other chapters of this Online Book.
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