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| Charlie Suriano |
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When we first meet in Melbourne, Colin Smith comes across as quiet and unassuming. During the shoot he’s more than happy to take direction from our photographer and his mentor Keith Geyer, 7th Dan, who has come armed with a few concepts in mind, having once done a similar shoot for Blitz. However, only a few days later when we sit down for a chat in the living room of Geyer’s Box Hill home where Smith has been staying, the Shotokan stalwart reveals another side to himself. He’s no less accommodating, polite, and generous with his time, but is brutally frank when it comes to his opinions on the state of Shotokan karate and those teaching it. It’s refreshing in many ways, and certainly makes for a lively conversation.
Smith has been immersed in karate a long time — long enough to become jaded with those he sees as watering down the art that has long served as furnace and forge for his spirit, as it is for many men who follow the path of karate without compromise.
Smith has been on that path since the age of 16, when uncharacteristically (he describes himself as the typical nerd) he wound up in a street fight and got a beating. It was at a friend’s suggestion that Smith took up karate, and it was only by coincidence that he chose the dojo reputed to be South Africa’s toughest. The famous Orange Grove Shotokan dojo, headed by renowned sensei Stan Schmidt, just happened to be on Smith’s bus route. So, in January 1978, just after starting university, he joined up — but little did he know what was in store.
“After about three weeks, I thought, ‘what am I doing here? My hips are sore, my legs are sore’…” he recalls. But any doubts about his chosen path dissipated on his first encounter with Stan Schmidt: “I saw this man come out of the change-room. In those days, he must have been six-foot-three, 200 pounds — a fantastic looking athlete. I was transfixed by this man. He walked behind the reception and was greeting people… He had a distinct, very powerful aura. I knew right then in my third week of karate training: this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Smith still recalls the first time he sparred Schmidt, as a Blue-belt. “What he would do was shove his right-hand in his belt and fight you with one-hand. Not something arrogant, but he knew it was a totally unfair fight. But instead of bashing the guy, he would teach you while he was fighting. So, he’s only got one arm, but he’s using his legs and he will force you to deal with the pressure.”
Kasuya’s Spinning Shuto-uchi
Undeterred, Smith trained with fervour and before long had an invitation to attend the ‘early-birds’ class at 6:00am every weekday. This class, for instructors and budding Black-belts, has since become famous around the karate world for its tough reputation, rivalling that of Japan. The reason, ironically, is that South Africa was one of the few major countries to which karate had been exported, but had no resident Japanese instructor. The Japanese weren’t keen to make the long journey to South Africa, where they were essentially second-class citizens under the racist Apartheid regime. So instead, the South Africans went to them. “What went on in the JKA [Japan Karate Association] instructor’s class was replicated in South Africa in our early-bird instructor’s class. And that’s why it was so tough: because we did it the Japanese way,” Smith explains.
Both Schmidt and Keith Geyer — who, along with his brother Derrick (now deceased), was then the chief instructor’s assistant and one of South Africa’s star karate fighters — spent months at a time training with the top JKA instructors in Japan. In Geyer’s own words, “it is difficult to explain the ferocity of the [JKA] classes”. Smith, however, remembers well how this do-or-die training was imported to South Africa and made the rule in Schmidt’s dojos.
“There were people that would come and they would see it and it was just too hard. And that was the Stan Schmidt message. You either got that message or you retreated out the door,” says Smith. “You may have been buddies off the floor, but the minute the class started there was gut-wrenching tension because you knew this was business. It was serious business and it was a dangerous environment. It was not for the fainthearted; you had to know what you were doing. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you had to catch on really fast. Especially when it came to kumite [sparring], because we lived in a tough society. We had crime everywhere: hijackings, muggings… So when we did our karate, we trained with a deadly seriousness.”
The kumite in those days, and especially in Schmidt’s dojos, was considerably different to the World Karate Federation-rules matches common in dojos today. While blows to the face were controlled, body-hits were full-contact. And the prevailing rule among the early-birds was that you defended yourself in any condition or situation, as they all understood there would be no stopwatch to save you if you didn’t. Fights regularly went for 20 minutes with no break.
Schmidt’s classes were structured just like those in Tokyo: kihon, or basic technique, then around 30 minutes of kumite or other fighting drills, and kata at the end. It was these sessions that shaped the way Smith teaches Shotokan today. “Stan gave me an appreciation for beautiful, orthodox karate technique. He was a very strict disciplinarian, and uncompromising,” he says.
The Geyer brothers were also a great influence. “They were always thinking of ways to make your life, in a fight, as difficult as possible, because that’s the only way you can get better. That was their philosophy. They were very competitive brothers, which in turn made them very competitive with us. So, everything was a competition, which was great!”
These were just some of the reasons Schmidt’s dojos produced star fighters, including the Geyers, who made the karate world, and Japan, take notice. Smith’s own tournament career, which he describes somewhat modestly as “reasonably good”, lasted 22 years. His best result was third in kumite at the 1994 World JKA Championships in Philadelphia, when team-mate Pavlo Protopapa won. It was the first time two non-Japanese had finished in the top four, and they were from not only the same country, but the same dojo. Smith continued competing until he was 40, entering veteran’s events with the World Shotokan Karate Federation (WSKF), which he joined after moving to the United States 13 years ago.
His commitment to training belies the fact that Smith wasn’t always a full-time karate instructor. While training in karate twice a day, he was studying law, and later working as a lawyer. It was only when he tired of it and decided to reward years of hard slog with some worldwide travel, that he landed a job in a dojo. While touring the USA, Smith was offered an opportunity to take over the International Shotokan Karate Federation (ISKF – a branch of the JKA) Central Region dojos, based in Chicago. “I thought, ‘This is great, I can be an instructor full-time. I think I am better at being a karate instructor than I am anything else — I am definitely a better karate instructor than I was a lawyer!”
Ironically, it was Americans’ obsession with calling lawyers at the drop of a hat — or the thud of a mistimed punch — that eventually made Smith a lot of enemies in the American karate scene. It’s when the backdrop of his story moves to the US that he really gets vocal on the state of modern Shotokan.
“The problem there is, America is such a litigious society. You hit an American too hard and he’ll sue you. The Shotokan in America is weak — there is no other word for it. They might be good at tournament style, but if you take away the referee and the judge and the rules, they have a minimal understanding of realistic fighting,” he says adamantly. “The Americans are good: the technique is fine, katas are fine, they have world-class people there. But anyone can do kihon and do it well. But that’s not what karate is about. There is way too much emphasis, I think, placed on the philosophy of karate and what these masters did 90 years ago. You can’t teach it like that. Karate is about fighting. The one vital ingredient that is lacking is a fanatical devotion to fighting.”
Mae-Geri Feint to Hook-Kick
Smith is adamant that the much-lauded JKA masters Masatoshi Nakayama, Turuyuki Okazaki and Hidetaka Nishiyama, who were all involved in starting the JKA instructor’s class, put too little focus on free-fighting because Shotokan founder Gichin Funakoshi, who was then an old man, disapproved of it. The late Master Hiroshi Shoji, he says, was the one who reintroduced serious kumite in the early 1960s, after the other instructors had left Japan to disseminate karate around the globe.
It was for making criticisms like these that Smith was expelled from the ISKF/JKA by ISKF chief instructor, Okazaki Sensei, but he has no regrets. “They actually did me the favour of the century, because then I wasn’t held back by that and I could hopefully practise the South African way. So, I had my dojo there and when new students joined me, I said ‘well, this is my approach and I want to keep it this way, and you either embrace it now or don’t start’. There were no injuries, no-one went home in an ambulance, but it was hard training. I tried to replicate as close as possible the kind of fighting to which I was exposed in South Africa and Japan. And they loved it, because they couldn’t get it anywhere else.”
Despite having seen a lot of action on the tournament tatami mats himself, Smith believes the emphasis on tournament-style point-fighting in most dojos is stripping karate of its practicality and its spirit of perseverance. He says sport karate has an important place in Shotokan, but that there’s too little recognition of the differences between this style of kumite and real knock-down, drag-out fighting.
“[Tournament fighting] certainly developed certain skills that dojo fighting isn’t going to develop, just because of the different nature of the fight: you need much greater reflexes and speed, and timing, and ring-craft. You might be down two-points and you’ve got 30-seconds, so you have to have strategies and tactics. You’ve got to be thinking fast,” he reasons. “But when you’ve got a 20-minute fight on your hands and there is no referee and no clock, and just that guy in front of you, you don’t necessarily need the kinds of reflexes and speed that you would need in a tournament setting, because it is now — for want of a better word — a brawl. There you need real conditioning, but of a different kind. You need to build resilience and ultimately when you’re getting stuffed up it teaches you the spirit — that undefinable quality that makes a man go on and on. I think that’s the ingredient that has been lacking in karate.”
But perhaps his biggest gripe with Shotokan today, in the United States particularly, is what he sees as a prevalence of high-ranking instructors who prefer their students to do as they say, not as they do, and demand respect rather than inspiring it. “Karate is a martial discipline and I think the hierarchy aspect is a good thing. However, I am not in favour of this blind subservience from a junior to a senior, especially if the senior doesn’t keep his side of the bargain. By their side of the bargain, I mean to lead by example, both physically and philosophically. I don’t want anything to do with senior men who haven’t kept their side of the bargain because they’re lazy, they’re unfit, they’re overweight. Anyone who is under 60 and is in good health, must be training. Stan Schmidt is 72 and I trained with him last night!
“The Dan rank is meaningless if you aren’t able to lead by example. Get on the floor and fight! Show us what you can do. Train, don’t stand off to the corner and just be an administrator. That’s what the American instructors do, and they don’t fight. They are like, ‘I’m a 5th Dan now, I don’t need to do it any more’… That’s exactly the wrong attitude. You have no credibility if you stop training.”
In 1995, as a guest instructor at the Chicago dojo that would later offer him a teaching position, Smith encountered a rotund 3rd Dan instructor who shocked him by neglecting to train with his students and instead ‘correcting’ them by whacking them with a stick. Smith decided the instructor needed a lesson of his own and the next night, when in charge of the class, selected him for some kumite. “He was a useless fighter and ran out of gas in less than two minutes, but I continued to punish him until he crawled on the floor, begging me to stop. I was simply trying to convey the point that no instructor — especially a fat, lazy one — may strike students with canes…”
To him, the example set by Schmidt, the Geyer brothers and other seniors in South Africa — that of constant training and passionate participation — is the foundation on which a good karateka is built. To the early-birds, commitment was sacred. At one point, the Geyer brothers introduced a rule: If you miss a class for any reason, the next time you come to the class you have to have six fights before the 6am class starts. “It was like running a gauntlet. It was hard and it made you train, it instilled this culture of training,” Smith recalls.
The common dojo culture that places rank and time-served over time spent sweating on the tatami is, in Smith’s opinion, a major cause of an inherent lack of innovation in Shotokan circles. It was for this reason that he finds himself now travelling the globe with Kasuya Sensei. Smith sought out Kasuya while in the US, after his break with the JKA. He was still keen to find an accessible mentor, and was introduced to Kasuya via a video of the Japanese master fighting. Impressed, Smith flew to Japan to meet him in 1997. “I found him to be the best Japanese example of Shotokan karate now, in every respect. So, I have been with the WSKF ever since.”
Aside from his fighting spirit, it was Kasuya’s development of multidirectional spinning techniques within the Shotokan format that most interested the South African. “This rotation stuff Kasuya does is three-dimensional. You have to utilise muscles that you never used before, because you’re spinning all the time,” Smith explains. “What I like about it is, you might have doubts and say ‘it looks very fancy, how does it work in practice?’ And then he shows you, and he applies it.”
Smith believes that many martial arts instructors won’t step outside the boundaries of their style, because they’re afraid it will be seen as denigrating the memory of their teacher or the history of the art. They can’t reconcile the ideas of carrying on a tradition and simultaneously developing the system, which means change.
“Black-belt is a completely new study, that’s why we spend so long on each Dan. It’s not just about maturity. Now you’ve got to branch out, to develop new thinking, and that’s what I think Black-belt level is all about. With 1st Dan you have just mastered the basics. By the time, you’re 5th or 6th Dan you must have your own thinking. You can’t be a robot,” Smith muses.
I must ask: isn’t this desire for innovation at odds with the strict and methodical manner in which Shotokan was administered at Schmidt’s dojos?
Not at all, says the former lawyer: “Last night I trained at Keith’s and there was kumite training drills I have never seen there before… He takes a simple thing that we have all done in our training and he puts it into a completely innovative context.”
Smith made the trip to Melbourne especially to train with Geyer, who moved there from South Africa in 2001, and Geyer’s father-in-law Stan Schmidt (Geyer married his sensei’s daughter Debbie, in 1985), who immigrated a few years ago. Given that Smith had not seen Geyer in over 10 years, it is a testament to the strong bonds forged in the fiery sessions at the Orange Grove dojo. But it also speaks of Smith’s desire to return to the roots of his karate, which keep him connected and provide the nourishment he needs to keep branching out.
From Melbourne, Smith was heading back to the Queensland capital, to train his host, Sensei Michael Looke, in preparation for Looke’s upcoming tilt at the WSKF World Cup in August.
Looke is campaigning to get Smith living in Australia as a permanent resident, since he’s severed ties to American Shotokan and is looking for a new dojo to call home. Looke, a 3rd Dan who has been running the WSKF Station dojo for five years, only met Smith a few months ago but is enamoured with his way of teaching karate.
“Kasuya Sensei speaks highly of him, and I can see why,” says Looke, who was introduced to the South African by the WSKF chief. “He’s very thorough and methodical, but really approachable. He has an MMA approach to karate, in that he admires that kind of toughness. He’s revolutionised my dojo and the way I teach karate.”
One thing Smith has brought to Brisbane is surely a product of his early-bird days. His fighting class, according to Looke, might start with a ‘warm-up’ of five minutes’ non-stop sparring, then seven minutes, then 10, each round punctuated by only a short break. Just the sort of thing to ready his Aussie protégé for the rigours of world competition.
Before long, though, Smith’s Aussie visa will expire and he’ll fly back to South Africa, having given up US residence after 13 years. But if fortune favours WSKF Australia, he will have a return ticket in his pocket.
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