"I don’t get a lot of backyard cutters, but I do get people who are into gekken, the sparring part. There were videos of me sparring with one very well-known HEMA instructor, Axel Pettersson. He’s a champion fencer. Man, his reputation is extremely high in tournaments in HEMA. He visited my dojo; he heard of me from Michael Edelson. We had a very friendly sparring session. There were no hostilities or anything at all. He’s a great fencer. I love fighting strong people. To me, that’s what makes it so enjoyable and fun.

 

The video of that got leaked out. I told him at first, “I took the YouTube video, here’s some links, but we shouldn’t share publicly.” Why? Then it’s going to go online, and people are going to be: “Eastern Martial Arts versus Western Martial Arts!” I really don’t like that type of stuff. He did share it though for a little bit of time, but he took it off.

 

But during that little time, there were people in China, hackers, that were able to get that, got the videos, and it just spread. It spread big time and I wasn’t even aware of this. I would get Chinese students who would come to the dojo: “Oh hi! This is our dojo. If you have any questions, please let me know.” Oh, can we take Instagram pictures with you?” “Sure. Why not?” They’d take a picture and thank me. Later on, though, I had some of those students actually join and they would say, “Sensei, you don’t know? That video of you with Axel Pettersson fighting, it was huge in China!” In China, that was a huge trend. There are not a lot of HEMA practitioners in China, so when they saw that, they wanted to meet me and someone to challenge me. [Laughs]

 

So, I would get people who would come and challenge me in gekken. It was more so that than backyard cutters. So that was fun and very interesting! [Laughs]"

 

Ui.:

Ezt sem tudtam.

 

Tag: Sang Kim