Appearances Can Be Deceiving

I don't know about these days but back in the 70s and 80s, movies where anyone learns some kind of physical combat skills always featured an old man coach/sensei character and almost always, this person did not look physically strong or capable. Not exactly what you would expect to teach you how to be a badass but the idea being that this person was such a badass, it didn't even matter how strong in stature they appeared to be. Yoda, Mr. Miyagi, Mickey from the Rocky series and pretty much every sensei in the Kung Fu movies are examples. The sensei could even blind but it didn't matter. They could "see" purely through their own awesomeness. But do these characters exist in real life? For the most part, they do! This man below is Angelo Dundee, who most famously trained Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson, Carman Basilio as well as Sugar Ray Leonard, older George Foreman and plenty of others:

Doesn't look very imposing, does he? And this is him as a young man. If someone was going to teach you boxing or corner you in a fight and he looked like this, you might think, "How is he going to teach me how to fight? What does this guy know?" But he is maybe the greatest of all time. This is true in all sports, not just combat. The best coaches and teachers may not necessarily appear like the big, strong athletic people they work with.

Something like this kind of happened to me when I started training in a martial art called Krav Maga. When I first met my trainer, I was the slightest bit put off that he was this older, very small dude. He did look kind of tough though, I will give him that, but somehow I expected a large, younger super soldier type. Of course my preconceived notions were completely blown out of the water when we started to working together and I realized that my trainer was as hardcore as it gets. There was even a time years later when we were working on some knife defense techniques and it was me, Barney (my trainer), a big dude who was then the head of security for the Golden State Warriors basketball team, and another big, strong guy who could pass for a Russian Spetsnaz. Anyway, part of the technique involved controlling the knife hand of an attacker and I remember taking turns with everybody and when these bigger, stronger, younger dudes put their hands on me, they had pretty good control of my knife hand and I couldn't move it much. But when Barney did it, I felt like there was no way I could ever move my knife hand ever, even if I was 10x stronger than I was. His technique and weight distribution were so good, it overrided any size and strength advantages. It didn't make scientific sense to me but here was, totally immobilized by the smallest guy in the room. I thought that stuff only happened in the movies!

This doesn't just go for people either, it goes for places too. The very first combat training I ever did was Muay Thai and speaking of movies yet again, the gym I went to could have certainly been in one. It was dingy and dark, all the equipment looked very well used and you had a bunch of people all training pretty much separately doing different stuff. One guy was throwing round kicks on a sand bag, another one was skipping rope, someone else was shadow boxing, two guys were sparring, etc. It was in a bad neighborhood in San Jose, CA and many people there were competitive fighters and they sure looked like it. So my impression was that this place was the real deal. Where only tough, serious Nak Muays trained. And that might have been true but no one really taught me Muay Thai. I would just train on my own and if I saw someone who worked there, hope that they would come over and help me. Sometimes they would but it was a pretty short interaction and I never knew exactly what I should be working on. I just did my best to copy some of the people who looked like they knew what they were doing. I went to this gym on and off for about 7-8 months or so and if you were to come to one of the kickboxing classes at our club, I would teach you more in 5 minutes before class than was ever taught to me in the 7-8 months I trained at this very traditional, hardcore kind of place.

So my point is that while the appearance of my old gym suggested it was somewhere I could really learn how to be a fighter, it really wasn't. At least not for someone like me who wanted guidance and didn't have a training partner. I've mentioned this before, but the best fighters, the cream of the crop, can still flourish under these conditions as they show a lot of natural ability and get some attention from the coaches (or, in the case of boxing in particular, over 90% of the good fighters are trained by their dads, who are already involved with the sport). But regular schmoes like myself? Forget about it.

I guess this holds true for just about everything in life, right? Appearances can be deceiving. You might think that someone or something really looks the part and maybe talks the part but in reality, they aren't. And you might think that a creepy, old, shriveled up gremlin can't be a great warrior but you could be as surprised as Luke Skywalker was when he saw Yoda bring that X-wing out of the swamp.