"My development in Ving Tsun."
My martial arts career started when I was around 18. A few years of Tae Kwon Do in Madrid, then Karate, followed by a few years of boxing at Kristallijn’s in The Hague. I enjoyed the physical work-out aspects of boxing but found the martial arts’ aspects somewhat limited. I never felt like pursuing a boxing career because I didn’t want to enter ring fights: there’s always someone willing and able to pulverize my face. My boxing brother ended up with a crushed nose!
One day, when I was working as a cook in Leiden, I bumped into James ter Beek’s brother in law. We chatted about martial arts and he mentioned Wing Chun. I’d never heard of it, but I found the movements that he showed me fascinating and immediately called James. James was his trainer, and he trained me for over 10 years, an immensely pleasurable period. We trained one-on-one for many years, in an attic stuffed with a dummy and martial arts paraphernalia. Fantastic years they were!
I moved to the U.S. in 1992 and lived there for four years. I gave Wing Chun classes at Cornell University to earn some extra cash and also to keep practicing Wing Chun. After my return to Amsterdam, James introduced me to Dennis Janssen who at the time was studying to become a teacher. Apparently he was looking for a training buddy. We got on like a house on fire and we trained for several years at the Universitair Sport Centrum, where we also taught for a few years. After this period, Dennis and I thought we were ready to start our own little dojo, so without much further ado and a lot of (Dutch) courage we opened our very own school.
However, the euphoric state we were in was quite short-lived. About three months after the grand opening of our dojo, Dennis met Gert-Jan Ketelaar who was a Ving Tsun teacher based in Hilversum. I thought to myself that three letters couldn’t make that much of a difference, could it? It turned out that Dennis was quite struck by his meeting with Gert-Jan; in fact, he was so disillusioned and disheartened that he decided to quit teaching. “But what about the dojo?” I asked him. “We just started and it can’t be all that different, can it? How about we import whatever he does differently and improve our style?” Dennis said that it went far deeper than a difference in style. He claimed that the fundamentals of VT differed radically from WC: structure, training method, centre-line, you name it, it differed. All concepts that we thought we had mastered to a certain degree disagreed. To make things worse, he said, they practice the way VT/WC ought to be practiced!
Well, having heard that, I had to experience this for myself. We traveled to Hilversum and he was right. A Dutch guy my age with a head full of grey hair (no mysterious Zen-type Asian at all) kicked my ass without even blinking an eye! I was flabbergasted… First, how come he’s so good and I’m so poor at VT/WC? Second, I desperately wanted to learn this, and ASAP! Yep, I’d bought VT, hook, line and sinker, in less than an hour. But what about our dojo? We had started a dojo less than 3 months earlier; we couldn’t let our boys down just like that. Also, Hilversum is too far to travel to twice or three times weekly.
Fortunately GJ had an excellent idea. He thought that one of his top-students was ready for the next step in his career: to become a teacher. His name was Kai. Well, to cut a long story short, Kai has been training us for over three years in Amsterdam, along with Tomek, another of GJ’s top-students. I have never had any regrets, neither from training WC, nor from switching to VT. In fact, I’ve never trained so often, learned so much and had so much fun with any other martial art. GJ’s dojo often reminds me of the good old Kristallijn boxing days, where we were all each other’s trainer. Some work the punch bag, others the dummy but all share a common goal: to teach each other VT in a fine dojo, making sure that we all grow, one step at a time.
Eddy de Bruin, September 2008
