The Beauty of Style

Before we go on and talk about styles, what is the best or worst out there it is important to understand what is real.  What is pretty.  What is the best.  And why.  But above all it is important understand what is style, beauty, and reality.

The martial arts, fitness, and boxing can all be compiled into one.  But still the only way you can succeed in your goals is by carrying on through a formula which will become the center point of a system or style.

Bruce Lee, Larry Homes, Mohammed Ali, Mike Tyson, Holyfield and many others like the Sugar Ray Lenoard, Tommy Herns, Macho Camacho, Roberto Duran, Oscar Dela Hoya all become what they are by bringing something unique to what they did.

These fighters could not bring it all, but they brought a lot.  The Calasanz system is the most well balanced system in the world by incorporating it all.  It has the beauty of kung fu, the brutality of karate, the grace of boxing, the endurance of muay thai and the effectiveness of a reality based style.  You can answer the question yourself as this truth by following youtube and the vast video archives available documenting the well-roundedness of Calasanz and his system.

Again, all of these people are inspirations to me and to many others out there.  The Calasanz system is here to stay, it is not something that will vanish or disappear after the main person is gone.  It will stay, because we did and we have what it takes for this system or style to stay, all based on letting a formula and this formula must be simple.  And it is simple.

All the fame, skill, character and personality comes from one thing.  Knowing yourself.  By understanding why you are being seen by an audience and captivating them.

You are good, but still you can be better.  Sugar Ray said that when you shadow box look in the mirror.  Love the mirror.  The meaning is to know what you are doing, to know what you show the audience in your punch and being able to show the beauty of it.

Practice your moves not just to make them better or correct them, but to make them real.  Make them effective.  Make them prettier and prettier.  As you look at mirror to see how they look understand what it is you portray.  All of this comes by starting with that great foundation and then they become great.

Don’t let a gift that was given to you from birth, that natural skill you've been born with be taken from you.  Control your skill.  Be smart.  You can be yourself or you can let others manage you until you can comprehend who you are.

Myself I could not let anybody be in charge of me for very long.  When I did it was nearly disaster.  But I came out of it.  I remembered and took charge and responsibility for who I was.  I decided to work my hardest so as not to let the skill knowledge and reality be lost.

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Calasanz' Contemporary Recounts the Past

"I was on the circuit myself for years and was competing in tournaments and that's how I got to meet a lot of people throughout the country.  Some were real while some were just tackin' 'em in there."

An Ex-Instructor Describes His Experience with Calasanz

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Over the years we would host tournaments at the local YMCA for forms, fighting, weapons and breaking.  Calasanz would perform in the breaking events to demonstrate his breaking ability which was pretty fantastic.  He performed an incredible amount of breaks.  At the time he did Ed Brown's tournament he did the most amount of breaks I have ever seen at any point in time in my life, it must have been some sort of record.  I believe he broke a baseball bat with his shin and generally, anything I heard about Calasanz I usually took as true because I had seen what he would do and could do in real life.

Ed would run these tournaments twice a year which would draw in the top competitors locally, and more than that.  People would come from all over the North East.  It gave the top competitors quality competition in those disciplines of: forms, fighting, breaking and weapons without having to travel into New York City.  I first met Calasanz at one of these local tournaments.

Calasanz, as long as I've known has always been an innovator when it comes to martial arts.  He was always working on developing new programs and classes; always trying to do something to better the martial arts.  I remember he called me over to his school years ago to have a look at a new class he was running.  He wanted to know what I thought about it.  Today they call it "cardio - karate".  He was an innovator of this and he had it going before all those names came out which I thought was really interesting, and again Mr. Calasanz as far as I was concerned was a quality, was a real martial artist.  He was a guy that just kept doing, kept training, kept making his art and is someone I've always respected.  He teaches martial art as something to be real, not just a place to pay money and get a 5th / 7th / 10th degree belt.

One of the hang-ups I had years ago was that you could have a school and if you were a real "traditional" martial arts instructor you weren't going to make any money.  So a lot of those real teachers left the industry.  The reason was that everyone wanted their kids to look like a black belt.  They wanted their kids to be able to throw 55 different leg kicks.  People didn't want to take the time to do what they needed.  They needed forms, meditation, exercises... the real stuff.

Most places having anything to do with martial arts at that time was more for show and tell than anything else because it was such that in those times you could only survive by teaching a lot of kids, and that meant doing a lot of things that weren't so much the traditional way.  There are still a lot of those places around that want to get 1000 students and keep them coming in for prizes [belts].


There were, however, at that time other instructors that really were teaching traditionally.  I call them traditional martial artists, that really stuck to the old ways.  They knew how a martial art was performed, how it was received and how it was really taught.  I always think of "Karate Kid" you know, 'paint the fence'.  I've always respected that Calasanz taught Martial Art as something to be real.  But let's say you went to Japan to learn martial art.  You would sit outside for months to get in and you would just sit outside waiting to get in.

So there was a difference between Martial Artists even before I was there.  What I saw in Calasanz was a REAL martial artist.  He was always real.  He meant to perfect his craft, always trying to progress it.

He was a for real guy is what I am trying to say.  A good guy.  I really like him.  He was one of the guys that had real fighting going on back then.  He was having full contact fights at his school, [similar to MMA today],  "Friday Night Fights" I think they called it.  It wasn't so big because the laws of the times wouldn't allow you to openly do what they were doing; but I remember that at one time he was trying to get that going.  The boxing commissioner was giving him the hardest time because they didn't want it to take away from Boxing's lime-light.

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Account by Anonymous Contributor

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Calasanz Comes Clean : Why He Really Stayed Out of Hollywood

Discourse Taken from an Audio Recording of Calasanz

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 "For the first time in my life I will give you an idea why, why in this world or in the world I could still be here." 

[Norwalk, Connecticut]

Even before my career I was well received and well known.  I was known even as a child for singing and dancing.  It was one thing I did for a little money from one time to another.  I would end up performing lots of places.  When I came to America as a student at University of Bridgeport they immediately asked me to give a demonstration for the Freshman class of several thousand.  The University thereafter allowed me use of their gymnasium to use and to teach in.  They even bought several swords for me including nihontō [and others] to use to perform weapons forms at later demonstrations and events.

So, why...

...as a natural performer being so well known and being a guy like that, doing all this stuff and then being here... why in the world didn't I try to at least travel or at least go by car to California when Ron Howard called me twice to give me an address.  "Just go there."  He told me.  JCVD had someone flown all the way here to give me an audition...

...

All is based on one thing, that I am terrorized of water, and even more so I am terrorized of a car driving under a tunnel.  I don't even know how they'd get you out if it collapsed.  How do you avoid tunnels?  Airplanes.  I am fine in airplanes when it is over land, but when it gets over water it's just pure terror.  Not scared.  Terror.

High rises... when I get to about 4 or 5 floors up I think "Yes, if I have to jump I can survive." After 6 or 7 now I'm not so sure.

So there are a lot of things that have to be said so that people understand when they find me on google or wherever and see that I am doing what I do still.  They come here and say to me, "Calasanz do you know that you are supposed to be more famous than [____________]?  What the hell!"  And I know why, because I stayed in Connecticut.  Why didn't I get out?  And all the time I just tell them "Scared of airplane."

This is the first time that I go out and say it, that I am scared of the outside because I am scared of getting into trouble.  I have a temper.  Back on the island I was known by people, that you do not insult a lady in front of me because I am going to make you suffer.

So when I think about what I am going to encounter on the outside, am I going to confront a jerk?  Will I have to stay quiet to avoid problems because I do not like to be in trouble?  You see, because it takes me 5 or 6 days to recover.  When I see something like that and I have to stay quiet it eats at me and I have a lot of trouble letting it go and that drains me.  Its debilitating.

As I was filming "Crossing the Line" locally in Norwalk a guy was coming down the street and saw me.  He ran for his life because he knew me and he didn't know what I might do to him.  He went into the first hole he could find, a store or a restaurant or something.  Not because he was scared but out of respect.  He did that out of respect not because he was scared.

So when you go to the reality of it and ask "Why isn't Calasanz out of here?" it is much more than just airplanes.

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Evaluate Your Training and What to Look For to Find A Quality Instructor

When we talk about someone that is new to martial art and 'shopping around' for a quality instructor or simply looking to avoid an inexperienced one we are talking about someone who has little to no idea of what they are really looking for and often not even conscious of what to avoid.  We can make the analogy of a carpenter who is first trying his hand at musical composition with no concept of rhythm, harmony, tune or time.

What do you look for in an instructor?  Is it size?  Is it ability?  Is it personality?  Do you wonder if they really are knowledgeable?  Are their techniques sporadic or is there a certain degree of control?  Are you actually learning something useful from your instructor? ...CAN you learn from your instructor?

One should remember that even as an eager student attending a martial arts center one must remain a diligent consumer of self-thought and critical thinking.  One must verily be an active participant in his training FROM DAY ONE.  While submission to an instructor is a necessary step in order to create the "teacher <> student / student <> teacher" relationship it is not necessary to remain submissive or blindly faithful should the training bring about a grave disagreement, or culminate into either direct or indirect permanent bodily harm.

Should this occur we are now talking about either an inexperienced instructor or a new student not caring about what they do to another human being.  So be aware, and remember there are always more schools and more instructors out there.

For example, here at Calasanz Physical Arts we have always taught training without brutality.  There is, however, a long history of military and police personnel training here.  Some of them have been kind and dedicated enough to help at our school.  As officers, of course, they rise to the occasion.  They are trained to be like that.  To be a force.  They have to be like that.  They have to have courage.  Two officers, each about 250 / 260 pounds were working out together in the ring one day and tried to perform a suplex without any instruction, training, or practice one of these giant men tried to lift the other above his head and fall backwards.  Calasanz says, "When I captured that from the office I just could not believe it."





They tried it once.








Still to this day we are told by other officers that still they suffer.  Probably that day the officer completely lost his life of fitness.  This sort of technique experimentation and training that was brutally done without thinking took his entire life of fitness away from him.  Probably he was never physical again, but to this day the guy does not complain.

And we have more stories like that.  Another example was with a Kyokushinkai instructor.  Not that he did anything wrong, its just that he trained Kyokushinkai.  Kyokushinkai guys are different.  An instructor would have no qualms about tossing a student down 5 feet onto his head on hard concrete and the student would practically be expected to get up and say "Thank you.  Thanks for that."

But the people, especially new people, are not ready for that.  This instructor lined up several students.  If you don't know, the Kyokushinkai guys during class would yell, "HOLD THE BREATH!"  and then as the students are standing there would deliver hard punches to them just standing there.  So our instructor did that with a line of students.  Two of the students ended up on the floor.  Two wonderful private students, gone...  Never came back.

Let this be a reminder to those just getting in-to martial art or looking to get started.  Keep your head on your shoulders and be sure to really agree with the training that you are signing up for.  And for those already in the mix, be sure you agree with the training that you are currently doing.

 

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