There was once a man named Bruce Tegner who spent the ’70s writing the same martial arts book over and over and over then changing the name of the martial art on the cover. He was a shin-kicking, backfisting master of a thing he called Judo, Aikido, Jukaido, Tai Chi, Ju-Jitsu, and sometimes Savate. He was also deadly with most weird sticks. And some of his techniques were so lethal they could only be trusted in the feet of the pure-of-heart like the intended audience for this Punching Day’s topic: 1976’s SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD.
You’d think this would be a survival guide for children in an increasingly dangerous world, but the stakes in SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD could not be lower. This is not a book about kidnapping prevention or pedophile identification. It teaches you how to fuck up a different 10-year-old and nothing else. In fact, I can prove it’s a weak ass book for bitches because look:
This copy was previously owned by a Karate school with a leaky roof run by someone named “Slendl Srbltrrp” who warned readers “DO NOT REMOVE FROM DOJO.” Well, I’m holding the book right here, Slendl, far removed from your dojo, and I’m intact as fuck.
Still not convinced this book is for pussies? Let’s zoom in on some of those accolades. Looks like CHRISTIAN HOME & SCHOOL called this manual on beating up children a “very readable little book.”
That’s the cruelest taunt I’ve ever seen. I fucking dare someone in Christian home school to say that shit to me. Leave “this was a very readable little article” in the comments and see what happens. I will pull so much of you apart your organ donor card will become a dark punchline for the man collecting your remains in a shop-vac. And the judge at my liquefaction trial will say, “You were right to do it, handsome liquefaction defendant! I sentence you and a guest to four nights at the Wailea Beach Resort in Maui!”
The book goes over a lot of the attacks you’ll see from your fellow third graders, like, for instance, a bare-handed strangulation from behind. By the way, the defense to this is turning around and kicking them in the knee. You might think it’s asking a lot of a child to decide when they should escalate playful roughhousing to full-on maiming, but you can take some comfort in knowing anyone who is taught to escape a choke by just kind of leaving and throwing a close-range sidekick will never hurt anyone with their Karate for as long as they live.
That’s not to say all of the attacks in this book are unlikely and pathetic. Some of them are absolutely overpowered. Look at this one:
Those are moves 53 through 59 of the same ass kicking. For dozens of pages, this kid unleashes a single unbroken combo against his opponent’s face, neck, and shins. And here’s a fighting tip for youngsters: if you’re queuing up hit #35 of a 59-hit combo, your classmate has been dead for some time. Oh, this seems like a good time to mention all of Bruce Tegner’s fighting techniques work best on attackers who announce they are attacking you and then stand very still for 20 minutes.
I should also mention Bruce Tegner always includes a weird chapter in his books on how to deal with pests. Not violent bullies or muggers, but everyday annoying people. In this one it’s called “Section Four: Annoying & Humiliating Actions,” and it’s at least the 7th time I’ve seen Bruce explain to his readers this secret technique for escaping a friendly lean. Here’s what you do, and follow these instructions carefully: if someone is leaning on you, fucking karate chop them with one of your hands. To his credit, it’s not NOT a fun idea.
It’s a lot to ask of a child to know when to unleash the full force of their deadly arts, but Bruce is expecting much more from the children of the reader. He’s expecting your kid to identify incoming foot attacks and react with different defenses for each one. His idea to block a kick by kicking it is optimistic, but I think most fighters would agree putting a leg between you and a kick is a way better idea than using your arm. But Bruce’s idea of waiting to see if a kick is going to be a knee and then ducking down into it to brush it aside with both hands– that’s nuts. It’s what I would act out if my charades clue was “Man Who Has Never Even Seen a Fight.” I know these techniques are 44 years old and developed during a time when the government listed ninjas as “Very Fact,” but authors should at least try to knee one kid in the head before they declare themselves an expert on it.
This is from the section on GROUND KICKING. There’s always a few parts of a Bruce Tegner book where the reader can’t be sure if they’re supposed to be the good guy.
Like all self-defense authors, Bruce Tegner believes you, the victim, are in an intellectual arms race with your attacker. If they find out you know how to duck into knees to nudge them aside, they will throw brain chops. If they know you know the defense to brain chops is spin-screaming, this will almost certainly be a feint. For well-trained children, all of these calculations happen in the blink of an eye. If you truly study SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD, the chest cavity of any kid who leans on you will be shattered before your brain has even caught up to your Karate.
KEEP IT SECRET!
A lot of you are probably thinking, “This is a readable little book, but I’m often facing off against multiple fourth graders. Are there any techniques for me?” Oh, shit yes. You want to see how to beat up two children at the same time? Scroll down zero inches.
Shin kick! Shin kick! Twist your legs for a crossover double shin kick! Shin kick them until one of them is hurt and use them as the shin kick! This is going to be the most important secret you and I will ever share, but the only defense you need is shin kick! Steps 1 through 213— shin kicks! If your enemy has shins and trouble with cursive Qs, your kick is where their bitch ass journey ends! Now get out there and defend yourself against some children!
This article is brought to you by Hot Dog Supreme Patrons Neil Schafer, Nick Ralston, and Eric Spaulding who have never met and never knew until now they could merge to form a giant panda.
There are exactly two categories of human on this earth: Those who can recite most of the 1986 Sylvester Stallone film Cobra by heart, and those who only know it as, “That movie where Sly eats a piece of pizza with scissors.”* I believe what I have to say here will be of interest to both groups and will be a valuable addition to modern Cobra discourse.
*You’ll occasionally run into someone who claims they haven’t heard of this movie, but there’s no reason to engage with them; we don’t platform Cobra deniers here and will not be doing so in the future.
There is a point where cinema becomes so iconic that all context and nuance gets lost. That’s why most people under 30 only know The Godfather as that movie where a fat guy in a tux says, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” while stroking a cat. It’s tragic that they will never understand what significance that scene holds in what is universally considered a masterpiece (that “the offer” Marlon Brando is referring to is the peanut butter he intends to smear on his balls to get the cat to lick them). So my goal is to make the beloved pizza-scissors scene from Cobra fresh to your eyes, to explain how it defines who I am as a person and who we are as a society in 2020.
First, for those of you too young to have experienced the 1980s in person, you should know that Sylvester “Sly” Stallone was the most eighties of action heroes and Cobra is widely believed by experts to be both the Stalloneiest and eightiesest action movie ever made. To convey the subtle genius at play here, let’s take in the poster, which seems straightforward on the surface:
But what’s that, on the grip of his .45?
“A cobra, like the title of the movie!” you say. Sure, but have you ever seen anyone store a handgun this way, so that an act as simple as carrying a laundry basket will almost certainly result in a hollowpoint-exploded scrotum? No, look at the careful arrangement of the symbols at play here. Do you see it? I’ll just draw you a diagram:
Normally I would cite this as an example of beautiful synergy between prop designer, costumer, screenwriter and star, but considering that we already know Stallone wrote the screenplay and mostly directed this movie, I believe we can thank exactly one man for making sure Cobra appeared at all times to have a cobra-headed dong peeking out of his jeans. “Wait, is Cobra saying Cobra’s dong is a cobra? Or that his gun is a cobra? Or that his gun is a dong?” Yes.
So, just to set the stage for the pizza scissors, the plot is that Marion “Cobra” Cobretti has to protect a beautiful model, Ingrid (Brigitte Nielsen) from a massive underground army of serial killers. He’s part of a team of supercops called the “zombie squad” and I know what you’re thinking: “With an assignment that dangerous, I bet he’s a real stickler for playing by the rules, since they exist to keep everyone safe.” But here’s where Cobra is already toying with our expectations: This cop actually doesn’t play by the rules.
Ingrid is in danger because she briefly witnessed one of the serial killers doing a crime. To silence her, the army of psychopaths lays siege to the small town where she’s holed up, presumably creating thousands more witnesses in the process. Cobra kills all of them in a series of car chases until he finally confronts the serial killers’ king in a lava factory and impales him on a giant metal hook. This was all pretty standard stuff for the era, and also for the movies made in the era.
The iconic pizza scissors scene comes just a few minutes in. We first meet Cobretti in the act of outwitting an unstable hostage taker in the opening action sequence (his strategy involves loudly and repeatedly telling the perpetrator that he is going to kill him, and then killing him). Cobra then heads home for a brief scene intended to establish what this man is like when he’s off the job. He rolls up to his oceanfront apartment in his police vehicle (a nitrous-boosted, custom-modified 1950 Mercury Monterey) to find some minorities are in his favorite parking spot on the street.
Cobra would literally rather see the whole world reduced to ash than settle for his second-favorite parking spot, so he uses his bumper to push the Latinos’ car out of the way…
… at which point the enraged owner steps out, shouting, “That’s my car, man!”
This exchange ensues:
(Literal translation, “Your mother would not approve of this behavior, cobra-dong!”).
I should note that approximately 60% of the comic relief scenes in 80s action movies depict what would now be classified as a hate crime and the other 40% were some form of felony sexual assault. Also, the most popular YouTube upload of this scene is titled “Best Scene from Cobra [1986]” and the description is, “This is the most hilarious and enjoyable scene from the 1986 Sylvester Stallone movie COBRA. Enjoy,”.
Once inside, Cobra walks to his freezer and withdraws a pizza box and an egg carton, then carries it over to the area he’s converted to a home crime lab (including a computer setup with access to all case files) …
He opens the pizza box and inside finds a single slice of presumably-frozen pizza. “Does he put it in the microwave?” you ask, because you’ve never seen an 80s action movie before. You have to understand that Reagan-era tough guys weren’t just bachelors, they were a unique breed of ultramasculine hyperbachelor. Microwaving that pizza would be a type of cooking, an act as emasculating to the hyperbacherlor as literal castration, or performing oral sex on a woman. Instead, Cobra picks up a set of heavy shears from his desk and uses them to scissor off a small, frozen triangle of pizza …
…and pops it into his mouth. “Then what in the hell is he going to do with the eggs?” you ask, growing nervous. “He can’t even swallow them raw like Rocky, these have to be frozen solid! Is he going to bash them to powder with a hammer and snort them like cocaine?” No, remember, we’re seeing the habits of the fictional character Cobra here, not the actor, Sylvester Stallone. Instead, he opens the egg carton to reveal a gun cleaning kit…
… and, while still wearing his gloves and sunglasses indoors, begins cleaning his gun while chewing his little triangle of frozen pizza. It’s so surreal that it’s almost Lynchian.
Look, great art should be about questions, not answers. “Why does Cobra store his gun cleaning kit in an egg carton? Why does Cobra store that egg carton in the freezer? Why does he snip off that little hunk of pizza before eating it, instead of just taking a bite out of the slice itself? Why does Cobra keep those huge shears on his desk?” You might be tempted to think that Cobra offers no answers to these questions, but it totally did, in the previous scene. The answer to those questions, and all questions that begin with “why”, is to rip off your shirt and tell you to clean up your act.
“Actually,” some of you are saying, “I kind of can’t get my mind off the casual hate crime this off-duty cop committed on the way in, are there seriously no consequences for that?” Oh, sure. Later in the film, Cobra again approaches his apartment and, once again, the Latino man is parked in the spot Cobra has decided is his. This time, at the sight of the approaching souped-up Mercury, the man jumps behind the wheel of his car and pulls forward, making room. He nervously waves at Cobra as he walks past and Cobra says, “You’re a good citizen.”
See? Everything is fine. Cobretti simply had to show the man who’s boss, that’s all. To put him in his place, if you will. The threat of violence corrected the behavior, as it always does. I don’t even know what you were worried about.
“Okay, I’m one of the readers who hasn’t seen this movie and I’m confused. Is this a comedy? Is Stallone making fun of these action movie tropes and the glib, casual horrors of the era? Or fully embracing them? The way you’re describing them doesn’t make it clear.” I assure you, watching the film will leave you equally confused. No one involved with this production knew the answer. The most important thing to understand about the 80s is that cocaine chemically inhibits the human brain’s ability to process irony.
The closest I can come to a modern comparison is 4chan. You know how the kids there used to make “Hitler did nothing wrong” memes as a form of shock humor? Then, a few years later, some of them started attending actual Neo-Nazi rallies and buying assault rifles, with no idea as to whether or not they were still doing a wry in-joke? Well, we were all 4chan back then. The year before Cobra, Stallone made a Rocky sequel in which he punched a Russian boxer so hard that it ended the Cold War and to this day, no one is sure if he meant it.
This, kids, is why people my age are the way we are.
Before we go, here are some additional thought-provoking details that you can bring up with your children when it’s time to sit them down for the Cobra discussion:
1. As you can see in the screengrab above, Cobra already had his gun stuffed down the front of his pants when he stood up out of his vehicle — meaning he keeps it there while driving. If you have a penis and access to a Colt .45, try sitting in a car with it in that position while wearing some vacuum-sealed denim like Stallone’s. Congratulations: you now have a permanent gun-shaped dent in your scrotum that will give the emergency room staff a funny story to tell later.
2. When Cobra first enters his apartment, he casually walks past a telescope that is pointed at a neighboring building. This is never seen or referenced again.
3. That apartment, with zero renovations, would sell for approximately $10 million today.
4. In addition to the shears, Cobra has scattered around his home crime lab some other old-timey tools — I see an antique manual drill and what looks like a scythe leaning on his window.
“But why?” you might ask. “Is he secretly Amish? Are those murder weapons from cases that he stole from the evidence locker, ruining the chain of custody? Are they the tools Cobra uses to murder minorities who inconvenience him? Are they what he eats tacos with? What could he possibly … HEY! MY SHIRT!”
5. The first time we see the model Ingrid at work, she is doing a photoshoot around some robot sculptures. They gave this one on the left a tasteful little robot wiener:
6. Incredibly, Cobra is based on a novel, A Running Duck by Paula Gosling. No, the novel does not contain the pizza-scissors scene, I checked. In fact, Stallone rewrote the script from scratch, apparently using story elements he had originally developed when he was cast in Beverly Hills Cop before he walked away from that project and changed the entire trajectory of blockbuster cinema. Even more incredibly, A Running Duck would get a second adaptation a decade later, as the 1995 Cindy Crawford/William Baldwin bomb Fair Game.
I have also written a novel, called Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick and I have in fact sold the film and TV rights to those characters via the first book in that series (really). If Stallone were to get involved in the project and rewrite it entirely into Cobra 2, I would do everything in my power to get onto the set, to try to have lunch with the man at least once. I would insist on pizza, then I would just sit back and watch, holding my breath.
Steven Seagal has done a number of hasty, ill-advised commercials that were not a good match for his brand, which is something along the lines of “Internet Tough Guy Without the Internet.” But his appearance as a playable character in World of Warships, one of those exploitative freemium wargames, fit him worse than his poorly-tailored, mildly offensive jackets. The official commercial announcement opens on the mountain temple where Steven Seagal dwells:
Like he’s not living in a sprawling ranch-style McMansion in whatever Russia’s Florida is. Haha, who am I kidding? It’s Primorsky. We all know it. Let’s just finally say it! Primorsky, you are the leopard print jetski of Krais.
Imagine the disappointment you’d feel after trekking to the roof of the world and entering this sacred mountaintop temple… only to find the “monk” is a shitty proto-weeb who looks like somebody Magic Markered hair on a thumb.
You already know how the rest of this “funny” ad goes: The default white guy from every character creation screen enters into a training montage with Steven Seagal, the white guy you get after hammering random. Seagal spouts uninspired “Asian sounding” advice like “strength is not enough, use your mind,” and the director cut out the part where everyone giggles except Steven Seagal. Seagal has one extremely brief martial arts scene in the entire two minute commercial, and that bit has seen more doctoring than… probably Steven Seagal. Buddy, you do not look good. You look like somebody put Steven Seagal in the microwave and forgot to poke holes.
Wait, here comes the comic turn! You’ll never see it coming!
After all this time, Inadequate White Dude #32 explains that he’s not here for wisdom, he just wanted to use the wifi! To play World of Warships! You know — World of Tanks for people without the personal mobility to click that fast!
Side note: Every time Steven Seagal looks at a computer, you can see the most hardcore Asian-fetish pornography reflected in his little glasses. Doesn’t matter what he’s actually looking at — the reflection shows you what he sees.
The ad unwisely closes on Seagal’s bloated head floating over a white-flecked, vaguely oceanic background. It looks like he died masturbating in a sensory-deprivation tank and the spa forgot to check before the holiday weekend.
Of course the cowards didn’t put him in the game looking like that. Instead he got this extremely generous portrait, back from that golden era when he looked like a figurative asshole instead of a literal one, and you could still pay him not to dress like the waiters at an early ‘90s P.F. Chang’s.
But oh man, World Of Warships were so excited for this promo! Or at least they tried to be! It was so sweet of them to go all out here, like they hadn’t just settled for Seagal after realizing that Bob Denver was dead, the surviving Village People wouldn’t work for scale, and the boat from Miami Vice had too much dignity.
“Fire Down Below! The Glimmer Man is coming to World of Warships! We did not have Maximum Conviction in this choice, but were worn down by Attrition. We know he’s not A Good Man, and The Asian Connection is unfortunate, but it’s too late now. We’re in the Belly of the Beast. Uh… fucking The Onion Movie. That’s one.”
World of Warships gave him captaincy of the USS Missouri, the ship from Under Siege.
Which was a very appropriate choice… in that the ship is also a relic that used to be famous for fighting but now just sits around posturing because it hasn’t moved under its own power since the ‘90s.
Seagal’s character even came with special “Seagal Skills”:
Could you click to make his boat slowly list to one side while all surrounding boats pretended to take damage? What was his ult? Betraying his own ship and suddenly appearing on the enemy destroyer? Could he combo that into shilling for the korporatsiya that made their cut-price artillery?
God, World of Warships really wanted to make this into a something. They even had Seagal pay a visit to their headquarters, where he stood around looking like a big penis caught in a little fingertrap:
Why does nothing fit him? Do they not make frog-closure jackets for Weebles? He looks like somebody’s squeezing a tube of shithead toothpaste.
They cut to clips from an aggressively apathetic interview wherein he begrudgingly admits that it “sounds like a good game.” They vigorously assure him that he is “a very powerful ship.” To be fair, only after he first says “it sounds like I’m the best ship. I’m the best ship, right?”
There are way too many closeups (one) on his gross long thumbnail that he tells people is for “picking” and hopes they assume ‘guitar’ instead of ‘coagulated coke blockages.’
Because he’s Steven Seagal and he must belittle everything he cannot fairly beat, from opponents to video games to women, he can’t even pretend to play this game he is being paid to like without lapsing into critique of its realism. He very plainly memorized up to two naval gibberishes and wanted to use them as many times as he could in a sort of conversational Aikido. Here’s how that plays out.
Here’s Steven Seagal with a group of people who don’t understand or like him almost as hard as he doesn’t understand or like them.
I promise that if he’s not groping that woman, it’s only because his right brachial artery is jammed with Steak’umms and he has limited mobility.
PC Gamer covered this hilariously obvious disaster of a promotion by saying it was a “less divisive” move than prior events.
Hmm, let’s see what the very next major story involving Steven Seagal has to say about that:
And so he was quickly pulled from a game that even Sonic would be embarrassed to cameo in. Though the developers very obviously didn’t want to say why…
Everyone understood that it was really because nobody wants this slow-motion rapist blood-pudding to captain their imaginary fight-boat. Nobody, that is, except for the entire fanbase of this shitty freemium game:
Huh. So the kind of person that lives in the intersectionality between ‘free online multiplayer war game enthusiast’ and ‘avid forum user’ and ‘Steven Seagal fan’ also dabbles in ‘knee jerk rape defender.’ I am so shocked by this revelation that my tiny sunglasses have popped straight off of my bloated head and landed in my tea, embarrassing everyone that won’t make eye contact with me at this traditional Japanese ceremony that I was not invited to. It has absolutely ruined the Burmese silk slacks that I had personally tailored to the dimensions of ‘much extra belly, four times’ and ‘not so much crotch, not so much.’
There’s a popular book series called THE PENETRATOR, who is sort of like if the Scottsdale police tried to make their own James Bond out of plumber DNA. The books are so short and readable that two PENETRATOR novels are often collected in one paperback the publisher calls a DOUBLE PENETRATOR.
That’s the only important thing you need to know about THE PENETRATOR, and the rest of this article is just examples of how insane the PENETRATOR novels became once they got into the high 100s.
Men! Manly Men! Now that I have your attention, ladies and Macho Men interested in Meaty Manliness, I’d like to put forth my thesis statement: Men were at their Manliest before the widespread use of electricity zapped the testosterone atoms of an entire nation. In this column, I aim to do two things: Explore just what made old-timey Men so Manly, and spread my ill-informed anti-electricity propaganda. I’ve already started on step two – invisible lightning bolts from the walls are electrifying your genitals as we speak! — so here’s step one:
The manliest things about old-timey Manmen were their magazines. None of that ‘Targeted Interest’ or ‘Independent Journalism’ crap. Pre-1960 magazines were about two things: Punching and fucking and sometimes that was actually just one thing. But I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do: Read these terrible articles. They’re just shoddy fanfiction about actual murders from a freer time, back when Libel was a kind of off-brand hooch and a fact-checker was just a guy you had to beat in a fistfight if he called you a fibber.
Instead, I posit that we can best examine the whiskey-pissin’, beef-horkin’, revolver-suicide-retirement-plan manly manly men of the 1930s by having them take off their girdles and dance around a bit. But failing that, I guess we could just look at some of the ads in their old detective magazines.
Advertisements in True Crime publications put a lot of emphasis on wildly unqualified amateur law enforcement, which to be fair, is very in-wheelhouse for Complete Detective Magazine.
But apparently being a cop back in the day is like being president today: All you need is raw enthusiasm, absolutely no regard for the sanctity of human life, and to have read part of one book (in the cop’s case, THE BLUE BOOK OF CRIME; in the president’s case, THE MAKING OF BLOODSPORT: CHEAP DRUGS, CHEAPER SEX, AND THE VITAL ROLE OF DOING LATERAL SPLITS IN THE FOR-REAL KUMITE WHICH DEFINITELY EXISTS).
Don’t worry, once you read the table of contents for THE BLUE BOOK OF CRIME, you are done investing in your law enforcement education. You can then hunt criminals straight from the pages of the detective magazines you already own:
God damn, Conly “All Neck” Ayers got fucking roasted in his own wanted poster. It’s true that it looks like his chin is mad at his throat, it’s true that his nose is also his Adam’s Apple, and it’s completely, inarguably true that he’s a human Patrick Star, but that eyebrow dig was just uncalled for.
If you just plain don’t have enough rope to hang Conly “The Trunk” Ayers, maybe Johnny Bugg is more your speed:
John Harvey “Sock Foot” Bugg is the least threatening anything in the history of everything. That name is not pulled from my Doug fanfiction, but it’s definitely going in there now. And he’s a kidnapper! What does he kidnap, Smurfs? Imagine being abducted by Harvey “The Sock Foot Cowboy” Bugg – your search party would be snickering right up until they found your severed toes artfully arranged into a flesh bouquet, aka The Sock Foot Corsage.
But point taken: a little tin mail-in badge is all the qualification you need to hunt these Dick Tracy first drafts.
Weirdly enough, detective magazines seem to endorse petty crime as much as they do slipshod vigilantism:
True Crime mags are full of more minor scams than your mom’s Facebook page. You won’t find this many low-effort cons anywhere else but an Airport Hilton, and it’s very odd that one publication is trying to move product to both predator and prey. Were these publications like the Reddit of their day: the only game in town where you could both complain about social justice and find exciting new hate groups to join?
But hey, it wasn’t all mail-order cops and classified-ad criminals — old-timey detectives knew how to have fun!
Finally! A tie that you can jerk off to! No longer do you have to carry two ties, one for work, and one for self-pleasure. Yes, one tie that does it all, from business deals on Wall Street to frustrated masturbation in the back of an Edsel! Plus the back is absorbent, for clean-up!
Not content to merely hustle rubes with magic trick, there were also a ton of ads for actual magic.
I didn’t even know you could sell ‘new types of prayer,’ but that’s exactly the type of sloppy desperation I’d expect from “PAXCO,” the shitty progenitor Hydrox to PoxCo’s far superior Oreo.
Hey, do you dream of success, conquering your enemies, and mastering the power of prophecy? Have you tried… smellin’ stuff?
I guess dopes have been falling for aromatherapy scams since the first idiot with too many coconuts evolved a nose, but I just never pictured the Greatest Generation’s manliest detectives buying into it. Some whiskey-fueled private dick stumbling into his office, all gutshot and ulcerous, pausing his grim narration to light a Raspberry Nag Champa because it’s Tuesday and he needs the ‘GOOD LOVE AND MONEY WISHES’ karma.
But I suppose that image does jive with the many, many wanted ads for poetry…
I understand that music had just been invented in 1928 by Billy Music and His Sound-Time Mouthblowers, and people were all very excited about it. But there is a lot of desperation in these many, many ads clamoring for shitty poetry about MOTHER and SACRED. This has to be some kind of scam, but for it to be this widespread, wouldn’t there have to be some takers? That implies there’s a significant demographic of singing gumshoes who read Complete Detective as much for the hot scoop on new ways to make your own blackjack, as they do for inspiration in penning “The Ballad of Sock Foot.”
Hey, here’s an eleven-inch solid slab of crazy:
Let’s zoom in on that WANTED: A BABY! ad. I’m sure that’s a dark remnant of the time when child-trafficking laws only dictated how fast you could drive with somebody else’s kid in the trunk.
But no, it’s actually a somewhat touching ad about infertility? This… this is not what I expected from you, Kaiser-punching cocksmen of the past.
Let’s pick another from the wall of textual lunacy:
There’s something very sassy about building a body specifically for men to envy, but I love that FUN IN BODY BUILDING is just an add-on to SECRETS OF STRONG MAN FEATS. Implying that you don’t really need to have a beautiful body in order to rip a tractor in half with your teeth, but if you make your pecs dance while you do it then Karmov the Krusher will positively seethe with jealousy.
Huh. It’s like I’m sensing a theme here.
Perhaps one that could explain why there’s so many ads in these pages about failed marriages…
Aw, that’s almost sweet. Love is indeed “a cherished privilege,” you chain-smoking, huge-livered, dead-at-50 old-timey copywriter. I am totally on board with this book about…
Holy shit!
That’s the darkest turn I’ve seen since I wrote that joke about child-trafficking. H-how do you solve your marriage problems with fucking eugenics?! Do you breed perfect wives out of generations of your own – no, no I can’t even theorize about this book without typing sentences that will haunt my fingertips.
Let’s refocus:
There are a surprising amount of ads targeted at female readers, and most of them are about trying to entice or entrap the mannish fans of True Crime mags who, alack and alas, seem more interested in envying each other’s glutes than breeding out the perfect woman.
I say “a surprising amount” of female readers not because I’m assuming women aren’t interested in detective work and savage homoeroticism — a demographic breakdown of Sherlock fans tells me that’s not true — it’s just weird they’d be into this specific magazine. Because if there’s one thing Complete Detective fans hate, it’s themselves and their failing, inadequate bodies. But if there are two things they hate, it’s their own uncooperative penises and all women.
ZOOM. ENHANCE.
“You’re gonna LOVE how much you’ll HATE women! Finally, Tommy “The D” Horton does what we’ve all been waiting for him to do, which is just fucking take the worst gender to the mat. We’re not even gonna advertise a potential use for this information — just watch this dude fucking drag the unfairer sex for 123 double-spaced pages!”
“At last, a man who’s willing to straight-up fight a female! Any female! Any female under 5 feet with no formal fight training! And recently clipped fingernails! No farmworkers! NO ORIENTALS. A single unslapped woman is a challenge that 1932 has let hang for too long! Never again feel EMBARRASSED that the undonged might be happier than you, when you KNOW FOR A FACT that Tommy The Hort once heard a girl fart in an elevator! THAT BITCH. Learn about…”
If there’s one thing Thomas D. Horton is sure of, it’s that women don’t play by the rules. He’s not sure what those rules are, but apparently there are formal playguides for literally every abstract activity, and not a single woman obeys any of them. They bargain unfairly in love for… love points? I don’t know what they’re haggling for in a relationship, but I’m damn sure they cheat at “office.” They even display bad sportsmanship when you call them animals — they’re just the worst, and if you’d hang back to light some Lucky Revenge incense while The Hortsman uses the Master Misogynist’s Prayer to nail down this Eugenics For Spite chart, we won’t even need these dames no more! We’ll be free! Free to focus on each other’s bodies, only reluctantly impregnating our carefully-bred Brood Cow when we need to make some more Complete Detectives!
In the 1900hotdog library, there are countless books made up of total bullshit, sometimes because the author was a lying grifter and other times because they were a stupid failure. This book, My Life’s Fight: the life story of Mark Bailey, has one of each. It’s the fully fictional life of a fighter who can’t fight as told to a writer who can’t edit, fact check, or spell. By any metric, it’s the worst, most pointless book ever written.
Aside from growing up dumb, racist, and filled with drugs, Mark Bailey has never done anything. But Donna Kshir transcribed every story he told about drug deals gone wrong, prison fights, and so, so many underground world championship street combat battles. They all have the same details of Mark getting his jaw and hands broken, winning because he never gives up, then listening to doctors say he’ll never wake up from his coma. Oh, and sometimes he signs autographs for his fans before the coma. And another thing…
This book was written in 2008.
This obviously fake bullshit was published ten years after every home had access to all information in the world, and Donna Kshir sat here with the scarless, chubby survivor of three hundred street fights and twice that many comas and never thought to Google any of the 27 world titles he won. To call her a bad writer is inadequate. She’s a bad 3rd grader. She’s a chimpanzee declared too stupid to use for shampoo testing. This trusting, mitten-handed cow doesn’t know the difference between “their” and “there” and at least 40% of the book is made up of previous paragraphs clumsily rewritten with different spelling errors. If you asked her to write instructions for soup she would say, “My naybor sayd soup is invented by wizerds to de feet breakfast. Wizords com bined all their majic to kill eggs with Soup.“
I don’t want to cherry pick her worst mistakes, so to give you the fairest possible example, here’s the very first page of the book:
You probably assume Donna is simply lazy as fuck, poorly educated, and untalented in a way beyond criticism. You can’t review this as a work of writing– it’s like mocking a ransom letter for missing a comma. If a janitor wrote this, you’d fire them for being the dumbest goddamn janitor in Pennsylvania. The middle school this woman dropped out of should burn itself down in shame. But, get this, according to the Dedication, this piece of shit book fulfilled her lifelong dream. And then, as she does all fucking book, she mentions the same thing on the next page in the Acknowledgements. Do you know what this means!? I think she was trying. This 72 page pamphlet of clumsily transcribed lies as told by the dumbest goddamn liar in Pennsylvania, which neither she nor anyone proofread, was her dream.
Let’s talk a little about Mark Bailey’s entirely fabricated life story. It started like most stories do…
In his early 20s, Mark was already an International underground fight champion. He was so deadly, and everyone knew it, but people would always spit on him and then he had no choice but to choke them out with lethal choke holds no one had ever seen before. The fact that anyone, even poor Donna left behind by our education system, couldn’t see this guy was full of shit is depressing. Donna must have so, so much MLM merchandise in her reverse-mortgaged home while she raises money for her ghost investigation equipment.
Every character who passes through Mark’s life is a movie cliche. He was trained in sombo, which isn’t how you spell that, by an evil Russian named Vlad, a name which means, “I should have looked up a second Russian name before I made this character up.” When Mark finally defeated Vlad, Vlad said he was ready to go back to street fighting, the thing it was already impossible for Mark to lose at. I think Mark was still around 22 at this point, and so he sort of retired from made up fighting to get into made up drug dealing. This landed him in made up legal trouble.
His lawyer, “Mr. Smith,” told him he was going to have to go to prison for 25 years unless he snitched, but Mark Bailey doesn’t snitch. It wasn’t exactly clear on why his testimony would help them, and honestly Mark’s entire legal saga was a narrative mess. He seems to have seen maybe one TV episode about the process, but definitely not a second. Here’s how he dealt with the threat of prison:
You don’t have to be a genius to know how Mark described his first day in prison. Take a minute and try to guess what he said, and what Donna Kshir recounted breathlessly and with a bag of hammers’ understanding of punctuation.
You’re right. Within three paragraphs Mark earned the respect of the big black man who runs the place by beating him up and turning down his job offer to be him.
To be legally allowed back into grade school, her teachers had to list Donna as “class hamster” on her paperwork. I have a feeling “Kshir” isn’t her real last name; it’s just the closest she could come to spelling “Kangaroo Brain Transplant Subject H-14”
Back to Mark’s story: due to a paperwork mixup he got thrown into a prison for cancer and AIDS patients. This weird digression seemed more interesting to him than normal prison which he instantly conquered, so another paperwork mixup sent him to a prison for the criminally insane where several things he saw in movies happened. In particular, Mark talks a lot about all the rape. Every few pages it comes up and Donna is not equipped for it. She seems to not know whether the word is a verb or some kind of adnoun, and whenever Mark invents another unspeakable sex crime her sentence structure falls apart worse than usual. It’s… I don’t know, “weird” isn’t the word. I mean, sure it’s weird, but it’s more like the worst aspects of their stupidity and dishonesty are painting a masterpiece of failure. There’s nothing quite as troubling or shitty as what these two piles of garbage came together to make for zero money and the benefit of no one.
By the time Mark got out of prison he was no longer a racist and gave his life to God. So he went back to street fighting where he maimed many fictional men in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Once he fought his way back to being a world champion of the streets, again, he became a teacher. He opened a school where he taught his lethal, unorthodox martial arts techniques to children. His students entered tournaments and “sat back and laughed, walking away with the medals and swords.” And since children were winning swords in no-holds-barred grappling tournaments, I guess we can add “martial arts tournaments” to the list of things Mark Bailey doesn’t know anything about and Donna Kshir can’t Google.
Every page of this tiny, never-before-read book is a fucking disaster. Mark’s fake life is a rough draft of a screenplay called Untitled Wayans Brothers ’70s Action Movie Spoof, and Donna Kshir is lucky if she can spoon chocolate pudding into her dog’s mouth without either of them losing an eye. Once the saga of Mark Bailey gets to this child Karate section, he and Donna slop together a swamp of words I fucking dare you to make sense of:
Longtime, tastemaking Me fans might recognize Sensei Mark Bailey from a Cracked article I wrote 10 years ago called “7 Fighters Who Lied Their Way to Legendary.” In it, I condensed thousands of pages of Internet drama and police reports about Mark and six men like him into 4000 words. It was no small feat, but they took the whole thing down after one of the subjects’ lawyers threatened to sue. I wasn’t told which one, but the liar who took the number one spot, Frank Dux on whom Bloodsport was based, was also known for filing ludicrous lawsuits. I couldn’t believe the nerdy comedy website caved in so easily. To what? A superspy ninja’s famously unreasonable lawyer!? Psh.
I have good news, though! Here at 1900hotdog.com, the closest thing we have to a legal team is a People’s Court board game that smells like 40-year-old beer, so now that I’m thinking about it, I’ll just reprint the whole thing here.
So now all I need to do is find an old draft, copy edit it, reformat it, find a ten-year-old backup drive of notes and graphics, Photoshop those, then reflect on the outrageous words I remember being funny in the 2000s but look like hate crimes today. After that, it’s just several hours of followup research to find out what all these shitty men have gotten up to in the last decade, and that, aspiring comedy writers, is how you make two days of work out of a half day off!
Please re-enjoy this…
My cousin knows a guy who killed someone by touching him by using an illegal Karate move known only to fifth graders. Knowing I would one day face him I learned how to kill on the streets from Tibetan jungle sherpas. During my martial journeys I studied with these men– these legends.
John Decyk is a professional fighter who was stabbed in the knee ligament at the age of 16. Doctors said he would never walk again, but fighting legend Royce Gracie helped prove them wrong. He went on to train John to become one of the top MMA stars in the world, winning 57 fights, multiple titles and finding time to also be a Marine, firefighter, and bail recovery agent. Soon after he posted his amazing life story on Wikipedia, John “The Jam Man” Decyk also became gay, studied with the X-Men, and won at least three cheese-eating championships.
As you had to have guessed, John Decyk’s fighting career took place entirely on the World Wide Web. He didn’t know that we knew, though. He wrote long blogs about his rivalry with boxer Floyd Mayweather, who seemed to know everything about this “The Jam Man” guy and all his make-believe championships. My gut says he’s not telling the truth, but there is an outside chance John Decyk was some kind of magic fighter that only Floyd Mayweather could see.
As if they needed to, everyone did their part to bust the myth of John Decyk. Decyk fought back as hard as he could refuting every joke and fact check with another lie. It was all less than meaningless. He was like a starving man crawling away from food to get to his fake moustache. He must have removed the occupation “professional dick sucker” from Wikipedia 200 times a day alone. He could have easily become the world’s most respected professional dick sucker in less time.
Among the highlights, he posted a hilariously fake discharge certificate to explain why he wasn’t in the Marines and tried to prove he was a bail bondsman with a shirtless picture of himself carrying what looks like 2 pepper sprays, 3 cell phones, and 30 pounds of baby fat. This joke is going to be more cute than funny, but in The Jam Man’s case the proof really was mostly pudding.
To give you an idea of how difficult John Decyk was to outwit, one person offered him a $3500 purse if he showed up to fight. John Decyk asked “what kind of fag would want an expensive purse.” That’s how deep his knowledge of the sport was after “64 pro fights.”
How It Ended: Arrested
John’s fiance’s mother was involved in a court case against the world champion, and she Googled his name as research. This led her right into a forum devoted to fucking with him. She was only too excited to join in, and she soon teamed up with the Internet to turn him from laughing stock into crater. He was humiliated then arrested for a number of charges, one of which was fucking shooting a gun at his brother’s head.
2020 Update: In 2016 John did an interview where he was asked about this article and he claimed it was a lie that he was telling all these lies. I swear I’m not saying this just to protect our precious fun, but it’s possible the liar with a history of lying might be lying about the lies and he, in fact, fucking sucked and still sucks.
6. Craig Rehage
Long after it should have been possible to try something this stupid, a fight promoter in the midwest got a call from a welterweight fighter named Craig Rehage who claimed to be undefeated in 18 amateur bouts. Sensing bullshit, but still being quite lazy, the promoter booked him for a match at 170 pounds anyway. Craig called before the match and said he was at 178 pounds and simply couldn’t lose any more weight. When he showed up, he weighed 190 pounds. Also, he didn’t know how to fight. It’s like he showed up to an online date and she said, “You fat dumbshit. You lying, bee-sting-faced cautionary tale of drug abuse. What was your plan here? Claim to be Georges St-Pierre and hope things magically work out?” and he only heard the very last sentence.
A second promoter came forward with a near-exact story about Craig, and an Internet star was born. The MMA Underground Forum scrambled to find more information about him, and what they found was a gold mine of douchebaggery. Craig had invented stories about being the training partner or cousin of dozens of UFC fighters to try to get free t-shirts, had fake pro hockey and football careers, and had submitted himself as a sports celebrity to any page that would allow it. You know that satisfying feeling you get from seeing someone you hate fail? Imagine an entire community sharing in that together.
As their blissful mockery grew to critical mass, Craig himself joined the forum posing as a lawyer who didn’t personally know Craig but decided to take some time to verify all his outrageous claims. It was as convincing as a swarm of bees in a trenchcoat. Craig can barely spell his name and here he was attempting the same transparent deception from everyone’s first day on the Internet.
How It Ended: Arrested
Craig learned nothing from the time he spent fooling no one as the absent-minded lawyer that was NOT named Craig Rehage. So he tried the same trick in real life– he found himself in some trouble for stealing hockey equipment and decided to get back at one of the police officers by writing harassing letters to his own girlfriend as the police officer. It turns out it’s still a felony to falsify charges against a police officer even if it’s that police officer’s most easily solved case ever.
2020 Update: As far as I can tell, this guy just kept getting arrested for scams that never fooled anyone, but weren’t fun enough to be cataloged by an entire community of fight nerds.
5. Manny “The Hialeah Kid” Reyes, Jr.
Manny Reyes, Jr. competed in point Karate before he made the switch to MMA and became the UFC Lightweight Champion. This was shocking to the UFC and its fans since he had never had a single match in it or any organization. He was, however, one of the first to adapt Karate for Internet message boards like in this desperate plea to UFC referee “Big” John McCarthy:
“DO SOMETHING UFC….DO SOMETHING GAYFUCK MCCARTHY…….. I DARE YOU…….I DARE YOU……. PIECE OF SHIT…I HAVE NO RESPECT FOR YOU………YOUR MOTHER OR FATHER EITHER…..OUR MOTHER WAS A WHOAR AND YOUR FATHER WAS A FAG… LOL………..I’m laughing at you………Send me an Email Address…….Fag!”
By the time this master of persuasion was done karate chopping his keyboard, his Myspace page had so many belts he didn’t even know how to spell them all. Unfortunately, it takes exactly the same amount of time to claim you have a belt as it does for a search engine to prove you don’t. In this rocket age of technology, you can only be the world’s greatest fighter for 7 or 8 seconds at best. Which meant Manny wanted to look cool, but only to the stupidest people alive. Maybe it was a short-term plan to sleep with very dumb girls because he had a theory stupid people herpes could cure regular people herpes? It’s honestly hard to get into the mind of someone dumber than anyone any of us will ever meet.
Manny actually did go on to build a “real” MMA record including several fights in Lords FC. This is a strange promotion that only has two fights on each card: one with Manny winning against a made-up opponent, and another fight between two made-up opponents. Where we live, reality, he has two wins in King of the Cage, but no one has been able to stay awake through them to verify it. Manny seems clinically insane, and has claimed many times that these two wins over bad opponents with no experience and losing records made him… well, I’ll let him explain:
I am the #1 LW in MMA and I did Fight for KOTC….so I am the KOTC #1 CHAMPION……..
If Bob Hope were alive, he’d say that this fella knows less about belts than a pair of suspenders. Seriously, though: he’s clinically insane. When Manny Reyes, Jr. puts on pantyhose, he truly thinks he’s Miss Teen USA and gets pissed off he now has to change all his business cards.
Here’s a fun Manny story: He once had a heated disagreement with the actual UFC champ Jens Pulver. I’m not sure what started it, but Jens Pulver refused to back down from his position of not knowing who the fuck Manny Reyes, Jr. was.
How It Ended: Beaten to Undeath
Reyes continued to challenge many pro fighters and then call them cowards when they wouldn’t fly him out and pay him $10,000. He whined and bitched so much that you couldn’t tell if he was trying to land a fighting career or a Vagisil commercial. Eventually, lightweight contender Hermes Franca offered to fight him at AFC 10 for $1 with the rest of the purse going to Reyes, Jr.. If you were Manny, this would be right when your friends convinced you to apologize and save some dignity. Well, Manny’s only friend was a dwindling tube of dick cream and all it was saying was, “Think of all the me you could buy.”
When the two met in the ring, Hermes Franca didn’t set the world record for fastest knockout that night, but he only missed it by 30 seconds. Hermes pounded Manny Reyes out so quickly and easily that it looked like he was changing a disagreeable pillow case.
When they woke him up and explained what had happened to him, the now more mentally-challenged Reyes had the balls to say that it was a moral victory for him because Hermes used karate. This wasn’t accurate, but victims of head trauma often get their language centers scrambled. Manny was probably trying to ask his dick cream where it left the remote. Either way, you have to concede that the guy’s more determined to be a dipshit than the rest of the world is to fix him.
After the Hermes loss, he returned to inventing wins for himself over the Internet. No one was interested, so he got the idea to start a rumor that he had died! Here’s the problem: his ego couldn’t resist bragging about his popularity and imaginary world titles when he submitted the fake reports, so they read mostly like sarcasm. He scrambled to get anyone’s attention while he debunked the very rumor he started, but all he’d proven is that when the time comes, this goddamn idiot won’t even be able to die correctly.
2020 Update: Let me just Google hi– oh my god, this lunatic isn’t in jail? And he’s teaching Karate to gyms full of badly masked children during an airborne disease pandemic? Fuck.
4. Scott “Lionheart” Blevins
Tiny and insane Scott Blevins is an expert in something he thinks is called “Maui Thai” and claims to have been trained by “Renzin” and “Rocky” Gracie in Virginia. This is notable because there are so many r-named Gracies that teach jiu-jitsu it’s actually sort of an achievement to make up two and not accidentally pick a real one. Scott also claimed the UFC signed him to compete in their 135 pound division, which at the time, of course, did not exist.
With the size of a 4th grader and the fighting abilities of that 4th grader’s little sister, Blevins lost all his amateur fights before losing his first 13 professional fights, all of them in the first round, most of them in less than a minute. It’s possible that he’s worse at fighting than anyone will ever be at anything. Think about it scientifically: if there is a worse fighter on Earth, they would cease to be that moments into the testing process. It’s like trying to directly observe a quark– all you get for your troubles is a series of confusing paradoxes and an angry void that suddenly knows you’re gazing into it. What I’m saying is that Scott Blevins sucks so hard he defies our understandings of science.
How It Ended: Inside Out and Arrested
Before he could achieve his UFC dreams, Scott Blevins was arrested for several counts of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old. He has all kinds of stories to explain how he didn’t do it including a corrupt cop and a frame job by a different sex offender, but the one thing the great teachers Renzin and Rocky Gracie never taught him was how to properly tell a lie. His defense was so childlike and filled with holes that Scott Blevins forgot where he was and tried to lure his own words into a van with ice cream.
2020 Update: A few years ago he was thrown back in jail after he stabbed his roommate for trying to stop him from stabbing his girlfriend’s tires. So Scott’s still kind of pursuing his dream of being a fighter, but we should add two more losses to his record. At this point, the police in Indiana must use him to train cadets. They’ll never find a person more certain to be committing a crime but also just so fucking bad at fighting.
3. Sensei Mark Bailey
Five time shootfighter-of-the-year and former Navy SEAL Mark Bailey has led a hard life. He was a 27-time title-holder in The World Fighting Championship, but had to deal drugs to supplement his income since that’s not a real thing. This criminal activity landed him in prison, stripped of all his titles. Luckily for his cellmate, his prison stay was also imaginary. Why is Mark Bailey so dangerous? Because Navy SEALs are trained to control their violence, and Mark Bailey should have told you this earlier: he’s not a Navy SEAL at all. One might think there’s some truth to the drug part of his story, though.
Mark created a website to document his domination of the world of martial arts. He was undefeated, with almost all his fights ending via death. There were no eulogies for his fallen opponents, but the webmaster did produce this grim explanation: “Mark Bailey never intends to kill… but in some cases his striking strength is too powerful for a human body to withstand.” Mark Bailey isn’t even considered a heterosexual since everything he fucks is technically a puddle within seconds.
How It Ended: Starting From $0.33 New or Used at Amazon.com
The problem with Mark Bailey is that all the imaginary fights he’s been in have given him very real brain damage. Noah’s Ark has fewer plot holes than this guy’s history. His made-up fight record reads like an idiot trying to spell UFC fighter names and he physically looks like someone made a pussy out of cookie dough and balanced it on chopsticks. His entire existence was debunked by the Internet in less time than it took him to accidentally kill “Hinso Grasie” and “Kent Sharmrock” in underground kickboxing matches.
Nevertheless, he published an autobiography called My Life’s Fight. I ordered a copy and the shipping-and-handling charge was $3.66 more than the cost of the book itself. Probably because touching it gives your hand Down’s Syndrome. Oddly enough, after thousands of fights, he finally had one in front of people in 2008 at the main event of Skip Hall’s Dixie Throwdown IV in Alabama. He fought a man named Dave LaFlamme, and I have some things to say about this “fight.”
Let me first describe the deadliest striker on the planet, Mark Bailey. Mark Bailey holds his head and hands perfectly still and tries to block jabs with a double slap like a child in a high chair who wants more chocolate. I have some combat sports experience, and if Mark didn’t have 87 wins by spinal paralysis on his fight record, I’d swear this guy had never even sparred before. As he circled, Mark’s face was holding a festival of vulnerability, and his rapidly slowing love handles seemed to be saying, “God, nobody told us there would be all this circling.” LaFlamme answered back with a few not-quite-punches before lowering his head into a choke. I’m not saying the fight was fake, but if it wasn’t, someone should tell these gay gentlemen that there’s a crowd of Alabamans that can see them slow dancing.
Not everyone sees Mark as an obvious, ridiculous fraud. Why here’s a letter from “K. Uchideh” a real person from Korea who wrote to Mark after he visited his or her school, home, or dojo:
“Thank you so much for the autographs that you took the time to sign, even though your hand was broken. Your style is unbelievable! I can see why you have won every cage championship match that you have entered. I am anxiously awaiting your next training video and want to see you fight again soon. Congratulations on winning the World Shootfighter of the Year title for the 5th straight year.”
K. Uchideh – Korea
2020 Update: Aside from making fun of his bullshit book for our hot dog comedy website and a single video of him endorsing some kind of holographic wristband you stick to yourself for energy, there’s no trace of Sensei Mark Bailey on the Internet. But kudos to 8eight Holographic Magic Bracelets for landing that endorsement from a sloppy hillbilly who is literally only known for lying about murder.
2. Rafiel Torre
Let me start with a totally true story. A man named Ralph Bartel was invited to a secret underground martial arts tournament in the woods… a competition so secret and exclusive that one might almost call it pointless if one were stupid enough to think it happened.
Despite its secret underground nature, one reporter got wind of the story. It happened when Ralph Bartel called the reporter and asked for a ride there. It’s possible that the tournament was only secret because no one had ever thought to tell a reporter about it until that moment.
For the trip, Ralph brought two bags: one full of camping equipment and one secret bag of mysterious contents. Ralph asked to be dropped off– he had to make the rest of the journey on foot, alone. The reporter knew enough about secret underground martial arts tournaments to fill in the blanks, and like your mother, every blank was filled with Ninja.
Ralph said to come back in three days. Well, three of our days. Time works differently when you pass through the Karate Portal.
The reporter arrived back at the rendezvous point three days later. Ralph, mighty Ralph, was waiting without a mark on him from his three days of secret battle. He was holding one bag of camping equipment and one bag-sized World Champion karate trophy. Ralph had done it! The reporter was surprised to find out that a forest full of dead martial artists has no odor. Did the coyotes already eat them? And if so, wouldn’t they now be ninjas? Knowing he was unravelling the edge of something big, he drove the secret champion home.
Maybe even more absurd than all of that is the fact that the reporter bought it. Ralph, now a world champion, went on to invent other stories about his Brazilian father who trained him in jiu-jitsu. In fact, he was so good at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that he decided his name should be Rafiel Torre, a name 710% more Jitsuey than Ralph. These and other lies got him an invitation to the first Abu Dhabi world submission grappling tournament. To say he got his ass handed to him is almost physiologically accurate. He was submitted and eliminated in under a minute.
When people questioned him about how he lost so badly and wait, also didn’t actually have a Brazilian dad, he adjusted his story so that he was now a master of ju-jitsu, the Japanese style that isn’t very good. Oh, and he didn’t know where you guys got all that Brazilian dad stuff from. The nice thing about Rafiel’s lies were that they were fluid enough to flow around most scrutiny. Because of that, and an exhaustive series of apologies, he remained a part of the MMA community for a long time. He even won his first pro fight at King of the Cage 7: Wet and Wild. Note that when I say “won,” I mean that he most likely paid a guy named Ioka Tianuu to gently place his leg into a kneebar. There were infants locked in cars outside the Soboba Indian Casino that night that noticed there was something fishy about the fight.
How It Ended: Tragedy
During sessions of group sex, Rafiel and another man’s wife fell for each other. All it took was her thumb up his ass while he poked Hepatitis B into a fat stranger to tell them it was love. Working backwards from a Knot’s Landing script, Rafiel and the woman hatched a plan to kill her husband Bryan and take his life insurance. But since treachery is hard, they changed the plan to just asking UFC fighter and former marine Gerald Strebendt if he’d kill Bryan for $10,000.
Gerald said no.
Well, shit. Plan B: Rafiel waited until Gerald had probably forgotten about that and went ahead and killed Bryan himself. Ironically, with jiu jitsu. He covered up the crime by hiding the body in the back of Bryan’s truck in an Albertson’s parking lot and claiming self defense when what must be the world’s greatest detective found the body.
The community was very nearly shocked! They knew Rafiel killed a lot of world champion martial artists during his jungle tournament days, but cold-blooded murder? I guess we can all take a lesson from it– if someone has lied about everything in their life and they’re leaving an orgy with your wife and your life insurance policy, don’t be too quick to trust them.
2020 Update: Not a ton of updates on the murderer serving a life sentence. Maybe in 2030 there will be some fun “Rafiel” news!
1. Frank Dux
Frank Dux was a spy and a master of ninjutsu, which is just a Japanese word for somersaulting megaspy. He was the best. He trained under a shidoshi whose name was only coincidentally the name of a James Bond villain. He was in a covert branch of the military so secret that even our military didn’t know about him. He doesn’t exist so hard that birds shit right through him. But someone did know about him: a shadowy society of martial artists who run a tournament called The Kumite. They invited Frank to enter which was the stupidest thing they ever did, because the CIA or whoever never trained him how to not kill everyone’s dicks.
From 1975 to 1980, he was the undefeated Full Contact Kumite World Heavy Weight Champion. He had 56 consecutive knockouts in one tournament, a number too stupid to be fake. He set four world records in the same tournament including “Fastest Recorded Kick with Knockout: 72 mph.” I guess the Kumite Athletic Commission figured it was okay to keep radar guns pointed at the fighters at all times since Frank removed most of their gonads before the long term effects of radar exposure could manifest. In fact, he punched so many dicks through their sacred walls that city temple inspectors shut them down for code violations.
The best thing about Frank’s lies is that they’re too impossible to even give the benefit of the doubt. Fifty six wins in a single elimination tournament implies magnitudes of participants more than the population of the Earth. And the idea that each body part on each fighter is being clocked for speed by ancient Chinese radar guns is something a four-year-old would explain to be unlikely to a 3-year-old.
Also, suspiciously, the organization that held the Kumite seemed to share a home address with Frank Dux, and the trophy they gave him was the same trophy he suspiciously paid for himself. Think about that: The Kumite is so secret the only paper trail leads to Frank Dux, professional secret agent. That means the other fighters, while obviously not very good at fighting, are unbelievably good at being secret. Why, if Frank Dux hadn’t written a book about them and bought himself that trophy, I doubt I’d have even believed they existed.
How It Ended: Awesomely
In 1988, Frank’s extremely true story was made into the film Bloodsport which is still Jean-Claude Van Damme’s and possibly the world’s best movie. Dux worked on the film as the fighting coordinator where he taught Van Damme how to properly get punched in the face for several minutes and then win by spin kick. Jean-Claude would go on to use these fighting techniques exclusively for two decades.
Years later, Dux and Van Damme worked together on the story of The Quest. It was a film like Bloodsport only with Bloodsport elements. Dux took Van Damme to court because Dux apparently had a big gross revenue deal for his “Story By” credit. In the film industry, this type of arrangement is almost as common as an actual ninja spy holding a trophy for Best Ninja Spy. To see both of these things in the same place is like finding a human vagina on your unicorn: literally fucking incredible.
Frank Dux never managed to produce evidence of this amazing agreement since the documents were in a box that was destroyed by a fire. Fitting in perfectly with his life of the fantastic, this fire was a magical fire that destroyed document boxes and nothing else. It sounds ridiculous now, but imagine you were a judge presiding over a case between the cocaine-filled star of Double Impact and an actual, real-life superninja who controls fire. That judge said exactly what you would say: “Pay the man, Timecop.”
2020 Update: One thing you can never trust is information about Frank Dux, but I personally have some. Aside from him hassling Cracked to take this article down, I’ve dated one woman who told me how Frank Dux creepily hit on her at her ninjutsu dojo. I’ve also purchased one autographed headshot of Frank Dux from a San Francisco spy shop where the clerk had no less than five stories of Frank Dux being a total asshole. As far as I can tell, he had been waiting his entire life to complain about Frank Dux to the first person who asked about him.
And while I have never had the chance to tell Frank Dux how his weirdly compelling shittiness has touched my life, I have personally thanked two of the people who made Bloodsport for making Bloodsport. Paulo Tocha, the Muay Thai guy who had a gentleman’s rib-smashing contest in the middle of he and Jean-Claude’s fight, gave me some unorthodox round kick tips in a Hollywood jiu jitsu school, and Stan Bush pretended he didn’t hear me when I requested “Kumite, Kumite” at a San Diego Comic-Con show. So this asshole, liar ninja helped create some wonderful memories. Thanks, Frank!
Special thanks to Sherdog.com, Eddie Doty, Bullshido.org, the Underground Forum, Paulo Tocha, Stan Bush, and Frank Dux.
