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Out on the street your opponent doesn't care how "pretty" your spinning back kick looks. Nor is he going to be overly impressed with that brand new form you've been honing to perfection in the dojo. All he cares about is how he's going to beat you into an unconscience puddle of blood, preferrably with some kind of weapon, even more preferrably with the help of a fellow street puke, and then leave you for dead in some dark, smelly, rat infested alley.
There are literally hundreds of different systems out there,
each of them professing to be the "Holy Grail" of fighting. You know what I'm talking about. The picture of the "masked man" buried in the back pages of "BLACK BELT" magazine, who promises you that his system is SO deadly and destructive that he has to hide his identity so that his fellow trained killers won't be able to "get him." All you have to do is mail out a check for 99 bucks and you too can be an ultimate warrior, able to walk ANY street with no fear. The truth is...there really isn't any one art that is the ultimate end all-bail your butt out of ANY confrontation that some soon to be very sorry street scum initiates. All martial arts beg, borrow, and steal striking and grappling techniques from other arts. Hapkido (Which was "BILLY JACK'S" style) bears more than just a passing resemblance to Shotokan, which in turn bears a resemblance to Kenpo, and so on and so on, with a few little tweaks hear and there to seperate them. Tae Kwon Do, Tang Soo Do, Isshin Ryu also look the same to the uninitiated, with little subtle differences and variations in the punches and kicks, usually done more for maintaining the mystique and originality of each style, than for any practical reason. For instance some styles like vertical punches...where your fist zooms in at your opponent with the thumb in an upright position, as opposed to some other styles, where the punches are thrown with a "cork screw" motion, meaning that your fist rotates to a knuckles up position upon impact. The theory here is that this twisting motion somehow generates more power than the vertical, hence, doing more damage. That's debateable. EITHER ONE will hurt if they land right. You can take a roomfull of instructors and they'll argue the point till they're blue in the face, but unless you can find someone who's masochistic enough to be willing to stand there and volunteer his face as a target....it's really hard to prove one way or the other. Even Gracie Jiu Jitsu, which is often

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