Posted on January 22, 2010 at 4:24 pm in Thoughts by Bob Breen
Recently Carl Greenidge and I did a small demonstration and talk along with my Jazz friend Stephen Keogh to some gang members on a north london ‘ sink ‘ estate. The estate looked great but obviously didn’t do what it intended as there was lots of drugs and gang violence there. Doing knife defence in front of people who probably stabbed someone in the last few months was interesting, maybe you’d get to test it.
It started with teaching the youths who attended about drumming in particular Samba drumming which is huge fun. Then Carl and I did our demo integrating from sticks to kickboxing and grappling and ending with knife. The more serious older gang members didn’t come in but stood near the door looking in. We had a great time and maybe showed the guys there a different way, other possibilities for their life. Most interesting was at the end when two young guys got up and duplicated almost everything we did. They didn’t get it all right but it was hugely impressive. Something that takes weeks in a class to teach and months or years to perfect these two young men gave a very close copy of after just looking at it once. They added a little Bruce lee type screeching and threw in a bit of hip hop and beatboxing too. It was fantastic, disrespectful in the right way and fun. Afterwards we were told that the guys were the leaders of the local gang. What a waste! All that talent. They’d be in the British team in no time whatever avenue they wanted to go; MMA, Stickfighting, Kickboxing. Whether we made an impact or not has yet to be seen. We came away with a deep respect for these young smart guys. An interesting night.
