subject: He Was Crazy...and He Studied Korean Karate With Me! [print this page] I doubt whether most martial arts training halls, be they Gung Fu or Shotokan or Hapkido or whatever, have ever had a crazy guy in their school like Mud Car. We called him Mud Car because that's what his license plates on his car said. That vehicle, more than just about anything else, summed up Mud Car.
He had tied parachute webbing across the insides of his car because he felt that that material was best for holding his car together on the inside. He had fire extinguishers fastened to every surface on the inside of his car. He had a dial on his dashboard to give extra power to his tail lights, and he turned it whenever he faced away from the sun so that drivers behind him could see when he braked.
This was just the surface of Mud Car, though. The most impressive thing that Mud Car did was commit to memory the times of all the stop lights in the whole town of San Jose. He could travel across that large town without ever having to stop for a light.
Unfortunately, when it came to Karate, he was just as crazy. He couldn't stretch, couldn't control his body, and, because he had no control, it hurt to work with him. Just being around him you could feel the sparks in his mind shooting into the cosmos.
One day, in class, he interrupted the instructor to complain about a pain in his shin. "It doesn't hurt, but it keeps bothering me, do you know how to make the pain in my shin go away?" My instructor looked at me with rage in his eyes, I suppose he didn't want to look at Mud Car because he would murder him, and he said, "Hit your leg with a lead pipe...that'll make the pain go away."
I suppose the ability to drive other people insane is the deciding point in this matter of whether a person is goofy or not. Because of this Mud Car never made it to Black Belt. He just didn't have the mental maturity that is the mark of a black belt.
One day, however, a new instructor came to the school, and Mud Car was promoted to Black Belt within a month...and then he left the school. He had achieved his goal, and that was all he wanted, and the new instructor knew that was the best and most efficient way to get rid of Mud Car. Yet, I missed Mud Car.
He was nuts, but so is the guy who attacks you on the street, so if you could last a session with Mud Car without getting hurt, you knew your art was effective. Furthermore, there was a shift of standard here, for Mud Car had been given a black belt because he could drive people nuts, not because he was good. Finally, I think that is where the True Art started disappearing from the martial arts training halls...schools, even schools like traditional Karate or Tae Kwon Do or classical Wudan, did not administer soothing discipline to the insane, they just promoted them to get rid of them.
