I first began my martial arts training, not in a classroom of four walls with students standing in neat rows on a blue mat, but in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, under pine trees. The year was 1988.
I woke before dawn each morning, hours before I began my job at the San Francisco Business Times, and got in my truck to drive to Spreckles Lake where I had witnessed martial arts classes under hundred-year-old Monterey Pines on the stretch of cement by the water's edge.
I arrived each morning while the sky was a dim blue-grey. I stepped out of my truck, and leaned against the fender, sipped steaming coffee from my mug, and waited as the sun rose. I positioned myself on the far east side of the lake to get a view of the entire breadth of the still water. and the surrounding walkway. By 6:00 about 20 students gathered around the largest tree at the western end of the lake where the cement expanded into a small 40 square foot platform. Each man and woman was carrying a long fabric weapons bag slung over their shoulder.
Soon a teacher appeared. His name, I later learned was Sifu George Shu, an immigrant from China. He started his class with warm-up exercises practicing the slow movements of Tai Chi for an hour. When the rising sun was shining through the trees he pulled out a broad sword from his own bag. The students each open their bags and lifted a similar weapon. The Sifu did a series of slow downward diagonal cuts representing a figure 8. The students mimicked those moves with their broad swords.
I was not one of those students. I stood a hundred feet away on the opposite side of the lake. Watching, feeling as though some invisible intelligence had guided me there, I did my best to mimic those same moves with my crutches.
I had read in a martial arts book that warriors would use any tool, or dinner cutlery, or piece of furniture as a weapon. Handles to mills became tompha sticks. Chopsticks became short-stabbing picks. Hand-held fans became blocking and slicing weapons. Sitting benches became blocking and trapping devices. Tall walking canes became spinning staffs. Everything in the hands of a martial artist was a weapon that could protect a person from an attacker.
Why not crutches? I reasoned.
I gave myself a promise to design a practice regiment for the period of six months.
And for that half of that year, I went to that park every morning, not missing one class. Each day I added a new motion to my spinning cutches, slowly transforming them into weapons while watching as those students practiced swords, both the Jin (double-edge straight sword) and the Jao (broad sword), the Geun (staff), and the Qiang (spear.)
At the end of the six months, I had developed a 15 second series of crutch techniques that could block and attack. It wasn't great, but it was a step in the right direction.
I felt confident enough to walk into a martial arts school across the street from my home on Divisidero Ave. The Kwanjang, Grand Master Walter Eichner, liked my attitude and admitted that he had no idea how we could teach Taekwondo into my body, but he was happy to help me create something useful from this Korean system.
Through the decades of my martial arts training, Taekwondo progressed to Dan Zan Ryu Jujitsu under Sensei Jeff Penner at Honshinkan in Santa Rosa, and Professor Kevin Colton at Santa Clarita Jujitsu in Santa Clarita which then advanced to Tang Lang Kung Fu, Shaolin Praying Mantis Kung Fu at North Bay Kung Fu, in Sonoma under Sifu Tim McFarland.
It was under the instruction of Sifu Tim FcFarland that we developed a series of Crutches as Weapons techniques that I named Iron Crutch Kung Fu.
Through these pages, I will share with you how I developed martial arts techniques that were originally designed for Fully Abled Bodied students so that they could effectively stop an attacker for this Partially Abled Bodied student. It is only a primer course from which the teacher can pick and choose what techniques she or he thinks will work for their uniquely gifted PAB student.
Because everybody that has been injured is unique, the techniques you will see demonstrated here will only work for my body. But, they will inspire your student to find her or his own sense of balance while learning how to defend and attack.
This visual book is to be an inspiration.
Through the decades of training and demonstrating the use of crutches as weapons in martial arts competitions and at conventions, Senseis and Sifus have come up to me asking me how they could encourage someone they knew who lived in wheelchairs or on crutches to do the martial arts. This manual I believe will help fill this need.
I also wrote it because being able to defend one's self from an attacker is not a luxury. It is as important as knowing how to eat nourishing food and drink water. It is a fundamental requirement.
This means that if an aggressor grabs, pushes, hits, kicks, or attempts to hurt someone on crutches, in a wheelchair, or one who has missing limbs, then the martial arts lessons written here will provide that person with an inspiration to develop their own effective methods to stop and even apprehend the attacker.
Or as one fellow martial artist said during an evening of training, “Steve, if I get mugged, I am not leaving till I get the mugger’s wallet.”
Being someone who has walked onto martial arts mats while on crutches for many years, I can tell you that the techniques I describe here will bring to an abrupt halt to many types of attacks.
However, and I will repeat myself because it is so important, this manual is designed as an inspiration to help others create their own unique martial art system.
Have fun.
Steve Brumme
Iron-Crutch Kung Fu