Ngôi trường của những đòn đánh thép

Bài này được đăng trên tạp chí The Word. Tác giả của bài viết là Douglas Pyper phóng viên người Anh, anh đã sống ở Việt Nam khá lâu, qua bài viết này phần nào cho chúng ta thấy được sự trân trọng đối với võ Việt Nam nói chung và môn Vovinam nói riêng. Đây là bài viết bằng tiếng Anh :

http://wordhanoi.com/features/item/2926-the-school-of-hard-knocks .

Phần dịch tiếng Việt : http://vovinam.vn

The School of Hard Knocks

Vovinam is fast becoming Vietnam’s signature martial art. Douglas Pyper finds out where it came from and why it’s more than just self defence. Photos by Dominic Blewett

Long grew up in Russia and a hearty Broscht based diet shows in his stocky frame. Sitting in his living room he explains, “Our arms are not strong, so we use our legs to break our rival’s necks, ankles or chests”. He looks like he could do it with his eyes.

Long is talking about Vovinam — Vietnam’s biggest martial art.

“Vovinam’s philosophy takes bamboo as its symbol,” says Long. “The more it bends, the stronger force it can generate back.”

The symbol represents a key principle in Vovinam — the blending of what is termed “hard” and “soft” attacks. While most Chinese martial arts exclusively use “hard” techniques to strike an opponent, Vovinam is a fighting style that has been adapted *****pport the smaller Vietnamese frame.

A “soft” attack is one that uses the opponent’s momentum or weight against them.

“If you want to punch me with a lot of power, your weight has to be on your front leg,” says Long. “Vovinam fighters take advantage of their small bodies to avoid the punch while bending their knee and sweeping away the opponent’s standing leg, taking them down.”

The youth today “are more hot tempered and tend to use weapons more often [in typical street fights]” explains Vovinam instructor Viet. “From my experience when you use a weapon, to some extent you also depend on it. The variety of possible moves becomes very limited with a knife or a brick and is therefore easy to anticipate… You just block it, break his hand and then take him down. Very easy.”

The Two Faces

Vovinam was created by Nguyen Loc in 1938 and has a long history of uprisings. Grandmaster Loc combined tra***ional Vietnamese wrestling, which is of the Greco-Roman sort, with other martial arts prevalent at the time to create a fighting style that would be useful against the French. Upheaval and conflict have made it difficult for the sport to develop nationally and it is only in the last five or six years that the art has really become a widespread pastime.

As the popular Vietnamese saying goes, “Vovinam has two faces” — performance and combat. The performance element is in part responsible for the sport’s recent surge in popularity. A quick search on YouTube will bring up clips of Matrix-esque takedowns — the most spectacular involves 21 scissor kicks. Seeing a performer simultaneously kick two opponents in the chest before wrapping their thighs around the neck of a third, flipping them over and pretending to snap their neck like a chicken is not an uncommon sight at a competition. This is known as don chan kep co and isn’t the kind of thing most folk pull off in a typical street fight.

Born out of the sport’s revolutionary past is the combat element. While the performance aspect can make Vovinam seem like some kind of glorified circus act, the combat takes no quarter and generally features moves banned from competition.

In the courtyard of the University of Foreign Affairs, up to 70 students can be found three nights a week kicking and punching the air in unison. The courtyard is surrounded on all sides by halls of residence. While the students practice, the sound of a lone bamboo flute can be heard coming from one of the rooms. A few hours later, the atmospheric sound is replaced by distorted karaoke.

The group is run like a youth club. Classes are free for all students and are able to function through the generosity of ex-students Master Binh and Trainer Viet. Three quarters of the students are female. In contrast with Long’s burly Russian physique, Viet is sinewy like Bruce Lee, of average Vietnamese height and yet manages to weigh around 80kg — proof, if it was needed, that muscle is heavier than fat.

As an instructor, Viet emphasises practicality, which, in contrast with Vovinam’s theatrical image, he believes is central to the art. In Vovinam’s formative years as a revolutionary weapon against the French, students didn’t have much time to practice, so Grandmaster Loc concentrated on using the parts of the body that are better for defence. Rather than spending a few years kicking banana trees to carve their feet into lead weights, Vovinam fighters utilise their elbows and knees to inflict maximum damage.

“The elbow is very hard, while the top of your foot is very soft,” says Viet. “If you want to make your foot hard you have to practice a lot — it takes time”.

In the Balance

During the training session, the students begin to practice one of the 21 scissor kicks. The victim stands with the weight on his lead leg while the attacker wraps both legs around his thighs and knees. At other times during the session the students do rolls and learn how to fall. Two girls aren’t interested in this and opt to spar instead. In this club, everything is optional. One of the girls likes practicing forms — quyen in Vietnamese — which are a kind of procedural learning common in many martial arts. Actions and poses are repeated then strung together so that they become as natural as reflexes. When done right, the fluid motions are like a beautiful dance and their appeal becomes obvious.

“When you are against an opponent, you have your own rhythm,” says Master Binh. “You calculate your opponent’s rhythm and you attack like a chorus.

“Quyen has its own beauty, but beauty isn’t all,” he says. “A good master should teach their students how to balance quyen and self-defence techniques […] too much focus on either side would not make a good practitioner.”

What Binh describes as an “ideology of balance” has helped Vovinam to evolve into a global sport. More than 30 countries around the world have official associations with Iran, France and Russia being particularly strong. Master Long estimates the total number of students in Vietnam is around one million. Vietnam is still the most successful Vovinam nation but for Long, this is not important.

“The English invented football, but they aren’t the best at it… What matters is that Vovinam continues to develop all over the world.”

Douglas Pyper