Vovinam Martial Arts

Martial arts have been a part of my life for almost twenty years now and will be for the rest of my life. I have been a part of my Green Bamboo martial arts schools team won several tournaments and I am currently teaching. These experiences have meant a lot to me, but none can compare to the one that I had on September 30, 1998. I was doing a high level legs technique that required me to jump into the air and grab some ones neck with my legs then flip them when something went wrong when I performed number 20 and I fell dislocating my right elbow. There was no pain initially, but then I saw my arm and it made a ninety degree angle the opposite direction from it’s natural direction, and this was when the pain started to set in. I looked around the room and I could see fear on some of the students faces this showed me that they genuinely cared for me, but Master Tam was perfectly calm as he rubbed something onto my arm and gently slipped my arm back into place within a few seconds without any pain an the other students continued to train.

Sometimes things happen for a reason and as I advance in my training these are things that I am appreciative to learn. The treatment that I have been receiving on my arm has been very effective. Master Tam has been giving me acupuncture as well as massage therapy herbs, and electrical stimulation. The acupuncture is the most interesting to me. The needles are so small that you really do not feel them go in, and I felt that I had drifted off to sleep although my eyes never closed. The way that these tiny needles work is almost amazing they work with the life-force of the person performing the treatment as well as the one who receives the treatment. The strength of internal power of both parties is what makes this procedure work. I have had several treatments since my injury and I must admit that I am impressed with the level of knowledge that Master Tam has when he is working on me. It appears to me that he can look right through my skin and see the pressure points as he jokes that he can even though my skin is dark. He can relax you with just a few words even as he tells you where and why he places the needles precisely where he does. My arm responds to the electrical stimulation a little differently than the needles once he puts the pads in place he goes through a series of turning and pushing buttons and as soon as he is done the muscle stimulation starts. I lay there and watch as the electrical impulses command my arm to work and it responds by making my fingers move to and down this all happens with no mental thoughts from me.

But what has meant the most to me is the way that Master Tam calls me and checks on me daily as if I were one of his own children from him I really do get a feeling that I have been accepted into the Vovinam family. He offers encouragement and suggestions for my arm and makes up “special medicines” for my particular injury. I must admit that I initially had a little fear that my arm would be ruined and I started to see my dreams of being in a martial arts movie and being a successful artist going out the window. These are things that I am sure that most athletes who love there rarticular sport have gone through when they have had injuries while performing in that sport. His continued encouragement and support including his wife Master Ha and all of the Vovinam students has made it easier to cope. What the injury has done also is open my eyes to those afflicted with ailments that must cope with them daily and it has given me an appreciation for the way that my older sister Margie has dealt with her “dis”-ease, which is diabetes. She works in the school system and goes to work almost every as well as attending her church, helping with baby-sitting and offering words of encouragement with the problems that confront her own son as well as me. The way that the Master has treated me is not to suggest that he has gone soft on me, to prove this in class recently he sent me before the entire class to perform a form that helps to develop the internal power that I spoke of earlier. He told me and the rest of the class that if I were to make a mistake on this form that I would be required to do pushups even though the arm was not completely healed. Needless to say I performed if flawlessly because this is a form that I do almost daily.

I am convinced that the Master has the concept of the Vovinam art down to a science, he knows how to motivate the youth with a smile a stern look or encouragement. He also has a way to motivate his adult and advanced students as well and this he will do by one of several ways: performing in front of all the other students when he knows that you may not even remember how to execute your assignment, or he will have you to recite something from the ten principles of a Vovinam disciple. A good instructor knows that this will encourage a student to work harder to spare themselves the embarrassment the next time. My training is much more intense than the average student you see the Master knows that I have had many years training and that I have a love for the martial arts. So what he would make me do is spend the night at his house and train with him one on one and at first I thought how cool this was for him to take out time to train me personally. I was thinking that since I had many years of experience training in one form of the martial arts or another the this would be easy training. Little did I know that my training would be as intense as it was. We would train from six o’clock p.m. until eight o’clock p.m. in our regular class and then we would train privately from eight o’clock until ten o’clock. The corrections to any mistakes were not as simple as the ones in the general classes there is a large stick that kept in the corner of the room, that was used to help jar my memory. The point that I make here is that I would get hit with this stick every time that I made a mistake that there was no excuse for me making. This proved to be stimulation enough for me to do it correctly the next time, and he would also help me with simple mental mistakes by having me to get lost. This is a form of meditation that ingrains the form or technique that you are learning onto your brain causing an automatic response when you perform it the next time. When you learn this way and a faced with a situation you an able to call up these memories and the correct technique will come automatically.

After our training we would retire for the evening, and then get up the next the morning to begin training all over again. This training would begin at six o’clock a.m. prompt and we would briefly go over what we had learned the night before and pick up where we stopped. We would train until my body was soaking wet and that’s when the regular classes would come in and my training would get a little easier although we had been training for the last two hours I would be so happy to see a face familiar to me that was not Master Tam’s face, not to say that I do not like the Masters handsome face. The belt that I do now wear is a yellow belt (the equivalent of a black belt in many other styles) is symbolic of the color of the skin of the people that developed the style, the Vietnamese, but it has been stained with the blood sweat and tears of this black man of African descent that has given time and devotion to the honor of this art form that came from a people with over 4,000 years of history.

Rick White