Lawler on career beginnings...
I was pretty lucky because I had a bit of street savvy about me anyway, with my upbringing with my dad [a bouncer] and everything else. I jumped in the ring, kickboxing, at about 18. Boxing got me into the ring prior to that. Competition-wise, I competed in anything from taekwondo to karate, to jujitsu, to kung fu - any type of tournament I could get my hands on. As soon as I started, I wanted to compete. I wouldn't say I was a great fighter (I probably won just as many as I lost), but I never wanted to be a champion of any kind - my ‘kick' was knowledge. I just wanted to become better and better and better.
I started bouncing at about 18. My dad got me a part-time job; I was working at night time on a Friday, Saturday night at local football clubs and so on. I probably looked more like a school-kid than a bouncer. Those part-time jobs scared the hell out of me. The main thing I really did my training for was pretty much for self-defence, rather than competition, even though I must admit that, in the end, I ended up training quite a few guys that won Australian titles and Queensland titles - even a few of them fought for world titles.
On the bouncer's craft...
It's a job that really does depend on you having the verbal skills and also the ability to be very, very observant. Observation's the key to it; recognising particular traits on people who walk in the door, knowing how to stand, where to stand, what to look for and learning how to enter people's personal space. I've had guys who walk in the front door with one hell of an attitude and I used to walk straight into their personal space and say, ‘How you going mate?' and make a point of having a chat to him. Then all of a sudden he's saying, ‘Oh, good mate, how are you?' and the next thing you know he's your mate. So he no longer has to put the big bravado on and you don't have to either. Sometimes you can break the ice that way; 99 per cent of it is observation, only one per cent of it is punch.
On control and restraint training...
[In most security industry training], they teach archaic control-and-restraint moves that aren't functional. They work great for a guy who just stands there and gives you his arm, but when you're dealing with a drunk, it's a totally different situation altogether. Gone are the days when we used the old ‘bum's rush', as they used to call it... You used to grab a guy if he started trouble and just rush him straight out the front door, no questions asked. Get him up on his toes so he can't get any base, so he can't get himself planted to do anything, and give him the ‘bum's rush'. They called it that because when the bums used to come into the pub and have no money, the doorman used to grab him and throw him straight out the door like the old cowboys in the saloon. If you go and do a security course, they don't teach you how to do that, and yet it's the most important skill to learn straight off. If you can get the guy out of the club, then the situation and the chance of you or anyone else being injured suddenly gets cut in half.
I think the big problem with everyone teaching control and restraint is that they tend to teach restraint and no control. People think ‘control' means that you grab his arm in a particular position and lock him up, but that's not the case. Control could mean the positioning of where you are to him; control can mean that verbally you've got him cornered or under control; or control can mean the placement of your hands, just in case you have to restrain him. Restraint is always the secondary factor, if need be. There are particular ways of holding onto someone where you can escort them out without having to restrain them as such. I don't think a lot of control and restraint training is fluid enough to suit the real world - I don't think it really ever has been.
Breaking up a Blue
On early innovations in martial arts...
"I never made any friends with instructors, the main reason being that I was always questioning everything that they did. I'm the first to admit I was not a great fighter, but my questioning was, ‘Why would I want to do an axe-kick to someone in street-fight?' My mentality was always centred around working the door and being in that situation, I suppose. Anything I was trying to do, I was saying: ‘Okay, what can I use in the street?' At the time, in the early ‘80s, reality-based training was kickboxing. Kickboxing was it. Everyone thought that if you could kickbox, then you could street-fight - that's pretty much how it was. And we were teaching knees and elbows and leg-kicks to people back in 1982-83, before anyone else was doing it. I remember a guy asking me, ‘What are you teaching this for?' because, at the time, ‘kickboxing' in Australia was that you had to throw eight kicks per round above the waist, and that was pretty much it. There were only two [organisations] in kickboxing at the time and that was the PKA - the Professional Karate Association - and the World Karate Association, the WKA. So at the time, everyone was throwing kicks above the waist and then later on they started throwing leg-kicks, then after that they got into knees and elbows, and, of course, the Thai boxing came into fashion.
We were already doing it and people were laughing at us. I was reading a lot and seeing which direction America was going, and I think we pretty much kept up to date with that. And also, you realise when you work on a front door, if you're wearing your normal slacks and shiny black shoes, the capabilities of you throwing your kick above your waist were pretty low.
On reality-based training today...
I class self-defence as having two sections: aggressive self-defence and passive. Bouncing and any type of confrontational job, such as policing or even working in a hospital, or even teaching - in those types of jobs, passive forms of defence are the most important things to learn... Knowing where to stand, what to say, what not to say, how to move, how to put yourself into a safety range just in case something does happen - all of these skills are important. With reality-based martial arts these days, everything's aggressive - but not everything you do on the street has to be aggressive and not every attack should be responded to with aggression. I'll give you an example: if you were my brother-in-law and you were at a barbeque and you started playing up, I walk over and gouge your eye out, bite your nose off, kick you in the groin and side-kick your knee and break your leg - if I did that to you, what happens? Do you honestly think they're going to invite me back to the next barbeque? But if I got you and I said, ‘Calm down mate,' locked you up and said, ‘Come out with me' and I gave you the ‘bum's rush', walked you outside and said, ‘C'mon, what the hell's going on, brother?' Everyone turns around and says, ‘Geez, that Deane handled that well, didn't he?' Every [reality-based self-defence school] that I've seen, and it doesn't matter who it is, they teach [students to say], ‘Please don't hurt me, I don't want any trouble', hands-up-in-the-air-like-Jesus-Christ, and then they attack. Maybe I'm a bit wrong here, but I know I haven't seen one that actually teaches that passive form of defence - I have yet to see one. All I see around the place at the moment is about going from zero straight to 100. I think there's a grey area there that's not taught to the majority of people. And the grey area is that there are certain situations, [such as] your wife or girlfriend has a ‘crazy attack' and suddenly she gets into you, what do you do? Are you going to spear her arm and then forearm her in the side of the neck and knee her in the groin and drop her to the ground? There are potential [situations] out there where you have to be very careful about what you do. There have been times when all I've had to do is push the guy's shoulder off to one side quickly, lock my arm underneath his arm and just walk him out as quickly as possible, [or] grabbed him by the belt of his pants, give him a wedgie and walk him straight out the door, and that's all I've had to do. If I had responded in any other way - by throwing in a knee or a forearm or anything else guaranteed that would have escalated to an all-in brawl. And liability-wise, on camera, that would have looked absolutely awful. Unfortunately, whenever you see RBSD [reality-based self-defence] in magazines or anything else these days, that's all you see - you see the guy block the big swinging punch and then you see the guy rip the attacker apart. But you don't always have the luxury of doing that. When you're working a front door, you don't have the luxury of wedging the arms and then suddenly getting the ability to knee the guy in the groin and then elbow him in the face - you can't do that. I wish you could!
On acclimatising to violence...
The whole idea of acclimation training [used by Lawler in his R-sult training program] is to acclimatise yourself to the situations that bother you the most. When I'm training a guy to get used to fighting in close, you have to step in close to get into each other's personal space, to get prepared for it. Otherwise, what's the use in doing it? Basically you have to get used to people pushing you. What's it like for someone to shove you into a wall? What's it like for someone to throw you to the ground?
What's it like for someone to slap you in the face or hit you in the back of the head?
The biggest thing is the shock... Sometimes it's not the punch that knocks people out, it's the shock of the punch that does the damage; they didn't expect it. The key to acclimation training is to acclimatise yourself to control the fear that you have the most. If your fear is having someone lying on top of your chest beating the hell out of you, well, that's what you should be doing as much as you can, or you'll never get used to it.
One of the drills we did at the seminars we did in Sydney and Melbourne last year was to get [participants] to stand there and spin around in a circle until they were totally dizzy, and I'd get the guy from a pair to start swinging punches at them and attack them. Before I did this, I said to them, ‘Have you guys ever been in a fight when you're drunk? Have you ever fought when you've had the flu or have you ever been ‘cheap-shotted' or king-hit?' All these guys put their hands up, saying ‘yeah, yeah'. I said, ‘How'd you go?' they said, ‘Oh yeah, I did my kung fu technique' and another bloke said (joking), ‘I was a ninja and I choked him'... I said, ‘That's great' - and got them to spin around until they were totally dizzy. Then I got their partners to attack them with focus-mitts, and you'd be quite surprised how many guys got the living hell punched out of them.
Breaking up a Blue: Alternative
On Lawler's R-sult training...
I kept seeing that there was a need for some type of form of control and restraint that could be effectively used by people within that [security] industry. You work the front door enough and it's sad when you see policemen on the street grabbing a guy that you've just thrown out of a nightclub, and there's three of them rolling on the ground with him all trying to get him in a wrist-lock. There's no teamwork - one guy grabs an arm, another one grabs the head or the feet. I think because people don't look upon it as a necessary course to learn, but it really is. It's probably more necessary than learning how to shoot a gun. The majority of incidents they're going to run into are going to be that: control and restraint. So I decided to look then at something that could be effective and taught quickly and could be used by a multitude of people.
First, we take them through ‘acclimation training'. The great thing about doing that is that it shows me exactly where they are, what they're used to, what they're not used to. But it gets them prepared for combat as well, and gets them into a situation where now that they're all energised and psyched up, they actually do want to swing punches at the other guy. And the second thing is, I show them where to stand. It's amazing, I'll give you an example: we did a seminar in Sydney and one of these guys was a Jiu-Jitsu, wrestler bloke - big, solid guy - and I got two guys up against a wall fighting each other, one grabbing the other bloke. And I said to him, ‘Okay, you're a policeman or a bouncer, and there's a situation' - and the guy actually was an ex-bouncer - ‘these two guys are fighting each other against the wall; they're pushing each other, trying to choke each other. How do you split them up?' And what he did was walk straight in the middle of them, put his hands up and said, ‘C'mon boys, break it up.' Prior to this, I'd said to these guys that [in this scenario] they were brothers or cousins and that as soon as this guy touched them, I wanted them to turn on him. They turned around, both took him to the ground and kicked the shit out of him. And he was shocked. I said to him, ‘And what was the strategy here?'
I said, ‘You know guys, you're doing it all wrong here. You're thinking that there are 20 other guys here in the room to back you up. What if you're there working by yourself, what would you do?' And I started pointing out the different angles that you can come at the person's body. You don't want to be working for the guy who's pushing the guy against the wall. You don't want to be trying to pull him off the guy. What you should be trying to do is push him onto the guy, or push him slightly away. So, it's the angling, it's understanding which direction to actually come to the confrontation. You're not going to stand there like a gun-slinger, because if you do that, I'll tell you, you'll get knocked on the head straight away.
On creative conflict solutions...
They put a thread on the Blitz forum talking about how you'd handle a crack-addict. One of the guys that was helping me organise a seminar goes, ‘Well, come to Deane's seminar and he'll show you.' And I went, ‘(sarcastically) Ah, good onya mate' - all these lunatics, I'm going to teach them how to handle a mad guy who's on crystal meth? But I showed them how to do it, using a bar towel, and I demonstrated with a normal bath towel that was in one of the guy's bags after training.
I'll give you an example: I was working at a gay venue. There was a big Islander transvestite fighting another gay guy, and the transvestite was HIV positive. Here they are fighting each other, and one glassed the other and split his face open - there's blood everywhere. So I'm thinking to myself, ‘Well, geez, how am I going to do this? How am I going to break these guys up, get them out of the bar (which is what the manager's asked me to do), without getting covered in blood, and without the chances of me getting cut and having the blood go into the wound?'
The first thing that comes to mind is getting a bar towel. I lined up behind the guy, pushed my bodyweight against him and put the bar towel up over his face and covered his face up completely, wrapped it up tightly and yanked him straight to the ground.
When he hit the ground, the first thing he did was panic, but the panic was directed towards trying to get this thing off his head, not fighting me. Straight away, I had the whole situation under control. Rolled him over, locked him up, walked him straight out the door, that was it - fight's over.
Now, when I went to the seminar I said, ‘This is how I would handle a crack addict,' and since that time I've done it for a few guys who have either been on ice or crystal meth or whatever, and it's worked perfectly every time - where we've just covered their face up completely, yanked them to the ground, and they're more concerned about trying to get the thing off their face than they are of fighting you.
On facing reality...
I've had situations where we've had women in class and we put the cage-faced head-gear on and we do a knife attack. I've had women who've been Black-belts [in other systems] training with us, and the guy's mounted her with the knife and all you hear is the wooden knife going ‘chink, chink, chink' against the face mask, and all of a sudden she just breaks out into tears - and here's a woman who's trained seven years in martial arts, thinking she can defend against a knife. And it wasn't the knife that threatened her, she wrestled the bloke to the ground, did everything she had to do, but as soon as the knife started going ‘chink, chink, chink', she suddenly realised that knife [would really have been] going into her face, and the reality hit her.
It's the reality aspect that kills you the most, that's what it takes away from you. When you're fighting a guy and suddenly you see he pulls a knife or you suddenly realise he's just stabbed you in the face or the arm with a glass - they're the things that shock you. It's very difficult to teach - you're never going to be able to teach it fully, but you can try to get as close as possible to the real thing, so they can experience it as such.
|
