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In Richmond, down a quiet side street and up two flights of stairs, about 30 people are waiting. Instead of enjoying the last few rays of sunshine Melbourne has to offer, they gather in a long, matted room and everyone is buzzing with excitement. Most are local but a few have travelled from as far as Adelaide and Canberra to be here.
Dressed in a black short-sleeved shirt and blue jeans, Tom Sotis, founder of AMOK! Edged Weapons Solutions, pads onto the mat in bare feet and announces that it's time to get started. After a demonstration, foam knives are quickly handed out and before long the participants are slashing, stabbing and thrusting at each other. Pairs take turns at being the attacker and the defender as they test out Sotis' techniques.
During periods of inactivity, the knives are held in the waistbands of the pants, much like a real knife. Several of the more experienced trainers also carry blunt metal knives as training aids so during sparring they will develop sensitivity to the feeling of a blade on their arms.
Sotis and his trainers walk around the mat, answering queries and correcting techniques. At regular intervals, Sotis stops the class to build on the previous technique or introduce a different scenario. This is how it goes for the next three hours as Sotis takes the assembled group through the concepts and applications of knife-defence contained within the AMOK! system.
Born in Rhode Island, USA in September 1959, Sotis began training in martial arts when he was about 10 years old and hasn't taken a break since.
Gut-stab
Knife vs Knife
Gut-stab
Empty-hand vs Knife
In his early twenties, he moved to Los Angeles where he was employed as a criminal investigator and bounty hunter. In the ultra-violent City of Angels, Sotis' work as a criminal investigator meant going into volatile situations without a firearm. On more than one occasion, Sotis was forced to use his knife to escape serious bodily harm and even death.
"To reduce my chances of being stabbed, I began seriously studying empty-hands knife defence with different martial arts masters and eventually came to the conclusion that if I didn't learn more about using knives, I would not have a solid chance of defending against one, and so began my journey into edged weapons," he says.
Sotis began to garner experience in several blade-based martial arts, mostly Filipino, including kali-silat, Kuntao, Pekiti-Trankadas-Echikete, Pekiti-Tirsia Daga, Dagaso-Tirsia Daga and Qol Demama Daga. Drawing from military tactics and kinesiology - the science of human movement - he began to develop his own system of knife defence. In order to find out what worked, Sotis and his team put what he had learned to the test. If a particular technique repeatedly failed with a number of combatants and scenarios, it was rejected. "At one stage we decided to suspend all of our notions and ideas about what to practise and how to practise, and we replaced it with fighting. Just fighting. The first development was that we really learned to attack well, and after a time we got better at countering those attacks, to which we learned to re-attack, eventually yielding a hierarchy of fight-based tactics," he says. Sotis points out that AMOK! was not a reflection of his own experience but rather the result of a combative think-tank.
In the early 1990s, knife videos began to hit the open market, giving everyone - including the dangerous and criminally inclined - the chance to learn how and where to stick a knife to cause maximum damage.
In 1992, Sotis would start AMOK! Edged Weapons Solutions to teach everyday people and law-enforcement officers how to protect themselves from the increased threat of knife attacks.
Today, AMOK! is a multinational company that continues to teach its clients how to manage threatening situations and protect themselves from attacks with their empty hands, improvised instruments and edged weapons.
AMOK! currently operates in 14 countries and focuses on instilling a fighting mindset in people to be able to deal with those kind of attacks that cause most people to freeze on the spot or flail away in panic - that is, criminal violence that puts life at stake.
According to Sotis' Australian representative Andy Elliot, AMOK! teaches you how to fight; the weapon is only incidental.
"You don't fight the weapon, you fight the man," Elliot says.
In fighting the man, AMOK! considers replication, prioritisation, emphasis, functionalism and well-roundedness.
"Accurately replicating true attacks is essential if the learned counters are to withstand the real event. [We] properly prioritise the counters with the highest probability of success against the attacks most likely to be encountered, and emphasise them until they are consistently functional against fully oppositional partners," Sotis says.
"Finally, we value well-roundedness because we think it is not prudent to be overly developed against one form or phase of attack while remaining grossly vulnerable against others."
AMOK! considers itself different from the current families in the knife-fighting community because of its content and format.
"Our content was spawned and cultured in combat. Because we and our clients fight nearly every day in South Africa and other dangerous countries, we have the benefit of a real-world laboratory in which we constantly improve our life-saving technology," Sotis says.
However, the same could be said for the many Filipino martial arts developed on the streets of Cebu and other cities rife with violence, where simply surviving is a daily concern.
The main difference is AMOK!'s presentation format. Traditional martial arts and Mixed Martial Arts are taught in a linear way - exercise and practice, followed by fighting. Sotis describes this format like climbing the rungs of a ladder. He is critical because if students don't make it to the top of the ladder, they become vulnerable.
Instead, AMOK!'s learning format is like a spiral. Each session begins with students fighting their way out of different survival scenarios. The trainer would then select a certain area to focus on and the class would set about practising. After solving their most pressing issues, they move onto the next scenario and fix its major problems.
"Our problem-based learning format forces us to discover problems and seek their solutions, where other methods teach solutions and discover their problems," Sotis says. Essentially, AMOK! students aren't proficient in all areas of a single scenario before they move to the next one. They cover the most pressing issues and then move on. Eventually they will come back to the first situation and fix the next most pressing issue. This cycle continues until everything is covered.
"With spiral formatting, for whatever interval of time you have to train, whether it is one day, one week, one month, one year or more, you will be well-rounded and you will have gained the most experience and skill for the time and effort you invest," Sotis says.
It is this spiral format that the second half of AMOK!'s Melbourne workshops followed in March of this year. Over the course of a weekend, Sotis ran his edged-weapons obstacle course and empty-hand knife defence.
"The obstacle courses are spiral formatting applied to either knife defence or knife fighting, where one works their way through each of the predicaments to complete the course and have a solid idea of the whole of the problem. Each predicament then has its own focus course where we scientifically break down and prove every component of that tactic," he explains.
"Our empty-hands knife defence course replicates the various potential predicaments one may encounter in a knife-defence engagement, and the edged-weapons obstacle course replicates knife-versus-knife predicaments so we can set about learning to better cope with them."
Even though knifing is presented as the central technology, AMOK! also has an empty-hand system, which it based on its blade work. The program delivers a single set of blade-based actions to fight against hand-held weapons and empty-handed scenarios.
"This means, if you learn knife work properly you can substitute any other hand-held instrument or weapon and you will already know how to use it - you won't have to learn to fight differently with different weapons, you'll fight the same way, simply adapting the weapon in hand," Sotis says.
He demonstrates this by asking Elliot to bring him a training gun and rattan stick. Using only one technique, Sotis disarms his opponent with his own knife, the stick, the gun and with empty hands. There are only slight modifications in each technique.
"We use the same blade-based actions when we are empty-handed by substituting our hands, wrists, forearms and elbows. This is important because under the stress of fighting for your life, you won't have the luxury of selecting your responses and reactions, you will fall back on what is ingrained. And since we can use knife-actions when empty-handed, but not the other way around, learning the knife is the ideal and logical starting point for all combative training," he says.
But the question that nags at Australians who consider learning knife fighting as a form of self-defence is its relevance. In most Australian states it's illegal to carry a knife without a reasonable excuse. This does not include self-defence. In Victoria, police can give on-the-spot fines of $1000 to anyone caught carrying a knife illegally.
Sotis says that because AMOK! is blade-based and not blade-only, it is ideally suited to Australians and other countries with similar restrictions.
Slashing Attack
Knife vs Knife
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Slashing Attack
Empty-hand vs Knife
"We employ the efficiency of knife work but we are not dependent on weapons. Even the world-renowned Guardian Angels who operate with a strict no-weapons doctrine utilise our tactics in South Africa and other ultra-violent places," he says.
Up until now, learning AMOK! has only been available through classes and seminars. Since its inception in 1992, the company has not produced any videos or permitted anyone to record its workshops in order to prevent potentially lethal material falling into the wrong hands. In a further attempt to discourage people joining his classes for the wrong reason, AMOK! instituted a high joining fee of $750.
"After a while we noticed that we never had punks even inquire, but we did have a lot of family men interested in learning to protect their families who couldn't afford the joiner fee, and that the measure we enacted was only keeping out the very guys we were seeking to help, so we dropped the membership fee to $50," Sotis says.
"A few months ago a man whom I respect told me he was shocked how easy it is for punks to access deadly how-to-attack information for free on the internet. He asked me, ‘If punks can get that info free, what can regular guys do against that?' When I told him about my hands-on workshops, he asked me, ‘What about all the guys who can't come to one of your workshops? Why can't they get a video from you and practise together?' I told him about my concerns about punks getting their hands on it. He said, ‘Get their hands on what? Punks already access all they need to hurt people for free! And now more than ever, there are a lot of good guys who need access to what you do'.
"He was right; the policy had become moot, and as we are in the business of saving lives through responsible education and training, that will soon also include video access at www.tomsotis.com and www.amokcombatives.com." Given the potentially lethal outcomes in the application of knife defence, Sotis says people need to consider the moral, legal and tactical responsibilities.
"People must live with, and will very likely be held accountable for, the consequences of their actions, which is why we think it vitally important for people to seriously think the matter through in advance," Sotis says. "Each person should pre-examine their will by categorising different types of threatening situations and think them through, so if you are presented with a similar situation you will already know what you should do.
"My personal experience is that when life and limb are at stake, violent action and weapons rule. In situations where I took violent actions against others, it was necessary, and while I am not proud of some things I've had to do, I'm not ashamed of them either."
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