|
BILL WAKEFIELD A Prime Mover of Australian Martial Arts
Copyright – Marc Wickert 2002 At just 41 years of age, Bill Wakefield has been one of the most successful promoters of Australian martial arts. Born in New South Wales, a young Bill Wakefield took up boxing lessons at the local Police Boys club in Dubbo, a country town noted for being the birthplace of such other renowned martial artists as Grant Barker and Colin Johns. Being an impressionable six years of age he was inspired by well-known boxing champions Bob "Bomber" McCarney, Wayne Tinker and Olympic silver-medalist Brian Tinker who regularly trained there. "My father died in a car accident when I was quite young, so my uncle helped to bring me up and he taught me some boxing techniques. I soon learned that in order to gain respect in those days you had to be able to stand up for yourself. In a small country town, if you couldn’t take care of yourself, you were in for a hell of a time. I also looked up to people like Bomber McCarney, who fought for Australia and was a really good bloke. He would take the time to show us young kids how to throw a punch and move around the ring," says Wakefield. At 12, Bill moved to Queensland’s Cold Coast and commenced his football career. Not only was rugby league a showcase for the young lad’s natural athleticism, but it also revealed a man-sized temper. "They say that everyone has a big monster inside them, well I have a big, big monster inside me. And I grew up with this temper. If anything went wrong I’d just throw a tantrum: it worked at home and it worked at school, so I thought this was the way life was going to be." A few years later, Bill met Australian rugby-league hooker Mick Turner who told Wakefield that if he controlled his temper he would go to Sydney to play league, but if he didn’t control it he’d be going to goal. Turner then advised Bill to enrol in karate classes and learn some self-discipline. "I started training in Zen Do Kai Karate during the off season from football. The first night I walked in there I said, ‘This is bullshit! Nobody’s getting thrown on their arse.’ I had such a big ego it was unbelievable. At 17, I was strong as a bull from the football and had something to prove. When the football season restarted, I was doing footy training two nights a week and Karate two nights." By coincidence, Ray Maxwell, a third Dan in Goju Kai also worked as a foreman with Bill. He’d just cut a finger off on a grinding machine and was looking for accommodation, so Bill gave him a place to stay and commenced training under Ray in Goju Kai.
"Ray was incredibly strict and would only take ten dedicated students at a time, and they had to train every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. He’d say, ‘If you want to train you have to put yourself out. I’m putting myself out as a serious teacher so you have to do likewise as a serious student.’ If you missed a single Sunday session you were out of the club." After being tutored by Sensei Maxwell for three years, Wakefield’s mentor married and retired from instructing. A friend in Bill’s football team then recommended he take up Tae Kwon Do under Robert Muir, which led to Bill’s studying the Korean art for the next eight years. A career opportunity saw Bill and his wife Liz transfer to the NSW town of Forbes where they managed a motel. But Bill realised his life was meant to evolve around martial arts, and whilst travelling up to the Gold Coast for TKD gradings, he also drove to Dubbo for Karate training and commenced classes in Goshin Ryu at Forbes. "I was instructing in Tae Kwon Do and had a loyal following of students that I taught. We were winning all the sparring and breaking competitions we entered, but for some reason we weren’t winning the kata events. Then Shihan Terupe called me aside and said that it was obvious the judges were favoring the Japanese katas. He then advised me to make the transition to Shotokan Karate instead of the Korean art of TKD. Immediately our club started taking out the medals for competition katas."
For Bill, the deep passion to satisfying the warrior within remained and his hunger to reach higher heights kept growing. After leading an Australian contingent to Japan in 1995, Wakefield and his team first encountered the modern art of Ashihara. He loved the fact that Ashihara retained the ancient brutality of the Samuari but was also applicable for today’s street defence. Wakefield continues to teach Shotokan, which is one of the most practised styles of martial arts in the world today, but he delivers it to his students in a manner more fitting to the modern practitioner’s needs. "For my senior and more dedicated students I teach Ashihara. But the average person coming in off the street wants to train hard and do a good workout after a demanding day at the office. They don’t want to pound each other until they see whom the last man or woman standing is, because they can’t go to work the next day with a broken leg, corked thigh or smashed teeth in their pocket. They want to train hard, improve their fitness, throw a nice high-kick and be able to defend themselves without sustaining too many injuries. They want to walk out of the dojo sweating and saying, ‘Wow, that was a good workout.’ They can still throw a good punch and defend themselves, but they can also back up for work the next day. The full contact aspect of Ashihara isn’t for everyone, but my more devoted students who live for martial arts love it."
Wakefield is dedicated to spreading the word about the benefits of training in the arts. He now instructs Shotokan to students in almost every school on the Gold Coast, has five dojos in southeastern Queensland, five dojos and a Hombu in New South Wales, and after recently opening his Hombu at Nerang, already has a membership there of over two hundred practitioners. Bill is determined to raise the profile of martial artists in the community. He is president of MASTA an organization dedicated to the implementation of a safe code of training practice by instructors. He also operates referees and judges courses in Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands, and organizes first aid courses for all MASTA members to attend. But the results of Bill Wakefield’s tireless efforts to promote martial arts in Australia are now beginning to speak for themselves. EfC magazine, the largest educational funding company in the world, has listed Bill’s Combined Martial Arts (CMA) academy the number one rating academy of all the dojos in Australia. EFC has also rated CMA as the number one academy in Australia for resigning existing students.
For a dedicated martial artist who has done so much for the arts in Australia it is nice to see Bill Wakefield is reaping some of the rewards.
BILL WAKEFIELD
Part 2
Beating the Bully
© Marc Wickert,
www.knucklepit.com Internationally acclaimed fighting events such as UFC, Cage Rage, and IFL provide avenues for some of the world’s elite mixed martial artists to compete and hone their skills. However, not all martial artists originally take up a fighting system to compete in sporting events. Many partake in a self-defense system as a means of protecting themselves from bullying and assault. When The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man, Charles Atlas, asked: "Are you tired of getting sand kicked in your face?" millions of people started sending away for his bodybuilding, exercise and health secrets. Over the years, other victims of bullying have chosen to visit their local dojo to defend themselves by learning judo throws and karate chops. It appears being pushed around dates back to the Stone Age. From time to time, even Barney was a victim of Fred’s standover tactics. In their book, Be Aware, authors Bill Wakefield and Ros McCarthy call bullying the ‘silent nightmare’. Bill says this is because kids who are victims of bullying often keep it to themselves. "The thing is, one in six kids is subject to bullying on a daily basis. If they’re from an ethnic background, the chances are increased by 25%. Over 3,000 Australian children commit suicide every year. And 80% of those suicide cases are boys," says Wakefield. "The reason for this is because we put out this persona that boys can’t show their feelings. So when a boy is being picked on, if he goes to his dad, Dad says, ‘Just give ‘em a smack in the mouth.’ There’s this perception the kids have of how their parents are going to react. Mum’s going to come up to the school and embarrass them. Dad’s going to say, ‘Don’t be a wuss, just go around there and punch him.’ So the bullied kid keeps it to himself."
Bill admits this could be exactly how many parents would respond to such a situation. And the home life of a child has a very strong bearing on the person he develops into. "Well everything comes back to association and environment. We’re working with the kids in the schools, and the teachers are working with them. But that’s just for eight hours a day. For the other 16 hours, the children are with their families and friends. If they’re hanging around with idiots, they’re going to be idiots. If they’re associating with intelligent people, eventually they’re also going to act intelligently." Because the damage caused by bullying is not always physical, the symptoms are not always easy to detect. A child free of bruises and black eyes is not necessarily untouched by this cruel behaviour. "Bullying – both physical and emotional - is the number one behavioural issue in schools. Because a child doesn’t have any marks on him, or he’s not being touched, that doesn’t mean he’s not going through the emotional anguish and suffering. "It’s the same with a woman in a domestic-violence situation: The guy could turn around and say, ‘I’ve never touched her.’ And maybe he hasn’t physically, but emotionally, he’s just taken away her self-esteem. ‘You’re useless. You can’t do anything right.’ It’s the same with kids, ‘You’ve got no friends. You’ve got germs.’ It’s just as damaging as physical bullying." Some kids have a high tolerance of physical pain, but are not as strong emotionally. The exclusion from a social circle, or pressure from a peer group, can be a form of emotional bullying - particularly where the isolated victim is made to feel worthless. "There was a case of a young girl who went on a school camp. She was a little overweight and she’d fallen out with the other girls. All weekend, they were sending her text messages and calling her ‘Fatty’. Silly little things that to most adults would be water off a duck’s back, but to a teenage girl… "Her mother picked her up after the weekend. The girl was really upset. Her mother went to wake her the next morning, only to discover she’d hanged herself. These tragic incidents happen all the time. Emotional abuse is every bit as damaging as physical abuse – if not more. The scars and bruises heal. But the mental anguish doesn’t. It goes on for years. People tell the children to just get over it, but they can’t."
Bill, what factors cause some kids to become bullies? "Environment and association. If you live in a violent domestic situation, and you’re upset by what your father does to your mother, or vice-versa, you can then take that frustration out on someone who’s less physical than you are. Or you can be from a wealthy background, but you want control. So it’s a power thing. "Every bully is affected by different circumstance, but what it comes back down to is power control. There’s no difference between domestic violence later in life and bullying at school now." How important a defence mechanism is posture? "I was over in the States doing a workshop, and this guy was telling us about the early days of profiling. He said 100 of some of the worst lifers over there were shown a photo of people standing around an accident scene. Ninety-five percent of the lifers selected the same people in the crowd who they would pick to be their victims. It came down to body language - how they held themselves, their posture, how they held their heads… The results were amazing." Are children who participate in sport less likely to be victims of bullying? "The ones who don’t do sport seem to be more exposed to bullying, because the people who are bullies are often the best sporting people, or your class captains." You conduct classes at a large number of primary and secondary schools on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Have you witnessed this to be the case? "I walk into classrooms and I say, ‘Who’s really good at sport?’ Kids will put their hands up. I’ll ask, ‘Who’s the class captain?’ Someone will put their hand up. I’ll then ask, ‘Now, who are the bullies?’ The rest of the kids will point straight at them. And they can bully for all different reasons - for attention, a power struggle, to blend in and be accepted…There’s a multiple list of reasons for why they’re bullies." Where do you do your classes? "I run self-defense and anti-bullying classes here at the Hombu in Nerang, and at most schools – both public and private schools - on the Gold Coast. Within one month of our going into the classrooms, there’s a dramatic decrease in the incidence of bullying in those classes."
The term ‘bullying’ is something we generally associate with kids. But it doesn’t stop there, does it? With adults, the name just changes to ‘intimidation’, whether it be in the workplace or the home… It still continues. Are children who can defend themselves whilst they’re young more likely to be self-assertive as adults? "Two things: If children are being picked on while they are young, this abuse will either manifest itself into an emotional problem later on if they don’t learn to become assertive. And if people are bullies as children, and if they don’t come to terms with the consequences of their actions, they will then take that behaviour on and use it as a power control for the rest of their lives. "This can be in the workplace, at home… because it’s a cycle of violence – emotional or physical. You might hate the way your parents treat each other, but when you go to school, you’re going to act in the same way if the cycle of violence is not broken. "That’s why we go into schools and confront the problem with students, starting at the earliest possible age. We teach them to say: ‘No, don’t push me,’ and ‘No, I don’t want you to touch me.’" Do you believe verbal assertiveness can also be a very useful weapon in self-defense? "Definitely. ‘No’ is a very powerful word, because all your life you’re conditioned to respond to that word. And seventy-five percent of the world’s population will respond to your saying it (or the equivalent of it in their language). "Then you have another fifteen percent who have to be told ‘No’ a couple of times because they are thicker. A further ten percent won’t respond to your command. But that’s not bad - considering one in ten will respond if you tell them what to do. "You must look the bully in the eye; stand with your chest pumped out; hold your hands nice and strong; and use every bit of assertiveness you have to order them: ‘Stay away from me.’ It’s not easy, but you can teach kids to do this. And it’s the best form of self-defense, because they don’t get expelled from school or reported to the police for fighting. They just learn to be self-assertive." Addressing bullying and preventing child abuse are just two of the chapters in Bill Wakefield’s and Ros McCarthy’s book Be Aware. Other subjects covered in their book include rape, domestic violence, self-defense. For more on Bill Wakefield and to order his book Be Aware: www.c-m-a.com.au.
|
