He talks about a guy who sees a Rhino in Africa tells a story about it. As more people share the story the Rhino turns into a Unicorn with all the made up effed up notions that come with a Unicorn.
You may notice in the vid that he shows a guy throwing a Kote gaeshi wrist throw against a knife, then he shows how knife attacks really happen. One's a Unicorn but with a lot of classroom/dojo reality mixed in(that is, all the angles and moves are technically right). The other two attacks are straight up Rhino.
I mention this stuff because the other night at class we did some knife randori. It wasn't Miller realistic but it was very beneficial and I hope we can get a steady diet of it. It just makes the aikido more aikido if you know what I mean. The principles/rules of thumbs we learn just pop out a lot more. I'm not going to stop doing it because it isn't sociopath realistic. It helps you find stuff and raise questions. That's the point of practice. I think that if you are highly skeptical about the martial art that you study, then the self defense aspects of good, not so good, and stupid reveal them selves over time. Don't get Cocky or delusional.
If you read what you can about Tommy Key and Tommy Key's students , Tommy put the Tanto Knife randori in after Toshu hand Randori. According to what I understand, Tommy was having trouble with things becoming a judo match. He put the knife in as distance regulator, to keep two guys off of each other, and make sure that an extended arm was always in the equation. It didn't have anything to do with handling real knife attacks, even though by doing it you maybe come more aware of issues pertaining to knifes(unless you are living in cloud KooKooLand with the Unicorns).
Anyway, my take is that Tommy wasn't putting knife notions out there, he was putting separated judo notions out there. One of his early scoring systems he lifted from volleyball. He wasn't trying to model reality, but more importantly he wasn't deluded into thinking he was. But there were some things he was doing that seem alot more Rhino than Unicorn. lets look at the the kyogi vid some more.
Tommy does a lot of two handed stuff. He latches on alot with both hands. His movement doesn't look akikai smooth, but it looks right. A lot of folks say that he's old, but he doesnt have the typical bad judo knees(which means he knew how to move without wrecking his knees), and he wasn't a chicken mcnugget eating fat hakama wearer. He moves. He moves. He moves. Did I happen to mention that he moves? Also, look at his Kote gaeshi and compare it to the unicorn in the miller clip. What alot of people miss is that a lot of what Tommy was teaching was based off of avoidance. We call it stepping off line, but I think Tommy made more of it. Alot of his techniques are based on which way you avoid. I say this because in his walking kata, he's getting the hell out of the way. He gets Ohba to try to whack him with a stick. And jumps the hell out of the way.
Tommy models 4 kote gaeshi, 2 avoiding to the outside, 2 avoiding to the inside. He latches on with two hands and doesnt do anything real fancy. But for an old guy he sure makes the point of showing that you get the hell out of the way on kote gaeshi. Tommy had three principles he worked with. First was the natural posture, second, non-resistance. Third, breaking balance. Non-resistance was his way of saying, "get the hell out of the way." It's a tanto/ spear/sword based principle, not an airy fairy hakama hippy principle.
Anyway, I had so much fun doing knife randori the other evening I got thinking about the Tomiki way of doing things and I also started looking at my Tomiki books that I previously deemed a little bit too much on the sport aikido side of things. One is called "Aikido Randori" by Tetsuro Nariyama. I got looking at it and I thought there are a lot of good things in here that just sort of have been lost, excluded, or ignored. Some pretty simple rhino shit about how to grab a guys arm and toss him. A lot of two handed stuff, no Ki discussions, no Hakamas.
Going back to the Rhino/unicorn Ideas from Miller. Miller says something along the lines that when you teach/practice martial arts there is a cultural assumption that you are an expert on violence and violent people. ( I aint) What has typically happened is that every style has the equivalent of a patient zero in the medical realm, the source of a technical outbreak of ideas, specific or general that helped them out of deep shit (what type of deepshit depends on the time and place). They put ideas out there and they start to degrade over time. They start out very rhino and become more and more unicorn. In Tommy Key aikido we have a person who wasn't a Patient Zero, he was a judo guy who never stopped learning. He was very realistic ideas about 3 things: natural postures, non-resistance, and breaking balance in a controlled environment. If these things happen to help defend yourself then that's a positive side effect. But that was never the original intent of a majority Tommys ideas. . My advice is don't try to be an expert on violence and violent people, and more importantly don't try to be a hakama hippy and a violence expert at the same time. Don't invent more unicorns.
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