It has been a while since I have written a blog, but after attending a great martial art sharing event at the FTMA Annual Gathering in Salinas over the past weekend, I thought it fitting to reflect on how far we have come as an FMA community. During my early years of Eskrima training, early 90s, much of what we did within or small knit of Tenios DeCuerdas practitioners under the late GM Art Gonzalez was kept very secret and within our own house. I can recall many evenings when we would be deep into training and we would get a visitor walk in who was a higher ranking FMA practitioner and we would immediately switch up what we were doing, and at times default to some basic bastardized serrada drills, like outside number one or something similar. I use the term bastardized because we referred to our practice of Serrada as “spaghetti serrada” meaning it is not as crisp and clean as those who have dedicated their lives and honed their skills toward llearning this style. When the visitor would leave, we would go back to our DeCuerdas training. Back then, and as a newcomer to the Filipino martial arts, I found it a bit odd that we couldn’t simply keep doing what we were doing, this practice was never done or observed in my early kung fu classes. I suspect such practices were warranted for a reason and practiced by teachers prior to me delving into this martial art that I now hold near and dear to my heart. I once asked GM Art about this and he said you never know who is simply coming here to visit, some don’t just come to visit they come to take what you have and not give credit where they got it, I guess he experienced something like this in the past, but I didn’t want to push it based on his demeanor from his response so I instead asked about Serrada. From what I was told GM Art said our Serrada influence came from John Eliab and our DeCuerdas came from Tenios DeCuerdas that he learned via his family from the island of Bohol in the Philippines, why it was called Tenios Decuerdas. Both Eliab and Tenio are recognized as being the founders of the system GM Art learned from and his primary teachers. Over the years the mentality of holding things close to your chest has changed as our elders began to be more open to cross sharing and a new generation of FMA practitioners helped drive this movement by wanting to learn other styles as well as their own dedicated system. I often heard that even when Tenio would teach at seminars it was just basic FMA movements and not necessarily from the material he shared internally with his core group. During my over two decades of tutelage of training with GM Art he would sometimes say you can show this and that but keep this stuff internal to your students. But even he began to slowly start sharing much of what he once considered private or told me not to share at our MACE events and other seminars he went to, I believe he finally realized that sooner or later he would have to share if he wanted to be more recognized in the martial arts community. Personally, I have grown accustomed to just sharing everything with a few exceptions, which are things/techniques he told me to keep for myself, and to honor his wishes I have done that, but for the most part, I am an open book willing to share much of what I was taught. Cross training this past weekend at the FTMA Gathering and with the upcoming VEA Martial Arts Cross Share event I am pleased to see that we are heading down a path of continued sharing, if we don’t do this then each of our respected arts will die off. In my opinion I think another major influence of individuals willingness to share what they have come from social media in the form of youtube, blogs, and podcasts, where people are interviewed, and they not only talk about their systems but show some movements and techniques from it. All this sharing just benefits us all as we can become better martial artists by picking up new techniques or nuances that others may have in their system. Anyhow, my point is that I am glad where things are going and I hope to continue providing opportunities for cross sharing not only for my own development but also for our future generation of FMA practitioners.
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