The Hand That Feeds
by
Anthony Revill
Someone brought to my attention
that Chris of the “Everlasting Wing Chun” (Carroll Street, Dunedin) Facebook page
said in a post that he and Steve started my kung fu school with me.
To quote Chris:
>> “In 2005ish,
I joined forces with another kung fu brother, Anthony... Together, we started a
new school in Dunedin, with the help of my student, Steve. However, due to
creative differences and disagreements, I eventually parted ways with Anthony...”
All of this is a lie. Moreover, the
lie is of such rank stupidity that I can refute it in a few minutes by simply
accessing my school’s records, which include Chris’s own emails.
My position is usually live and
let live. Chris can promote himself, spin his yarns, talk himself up, and I
won’t care or even notice. However, his inclusion of my name and mention of my
school in this latest deceit needs to be dealt with.
I’ll break it down.
>> “In
2005ish, I joined forces with another kung fu brother, Anthony... Together, we
started a new school in Dunedin...”
Chris is lying. I was not living
in Dunedin in 2005. In fact, I was nowhere near Dunedin. I started my school in
2010, after a phone conversation with Kevin.
Furthermore, I have never “joined
forces” with Chris to do anything.
Shortly after I moved to Dunedin –
which was about sixteen months before I opened my kung fu school – I received
an email from Chris, completely out of the blue. He had found me accidentally on
the Old Friends website. I remembered him from when we had trained in the same
club many years before. Unfortunately I could not see then what I can see now,
that his first email was a harbinger of what was to come.
In the first part of his email,
without preamble, he launched into a diatribe against the leaders of his
original kung fu club, MSG. According to him, they had returned to Dunedin to
hold a training seminar, which he attended. He explained rather dramatically
that at the seminar they kicked him out of MSG. Apparently oblivious as to why,
he tried to get answers, but “the more I tryed to find out the worse it got”. His
conclusion was: “they just dont like me”.
He also informed me that he had a
kung fu club at the university which he had been running for the past six
years.
In the second part of his email,
Chris described his recent catastrophic failure in basic self-defence,
involving a “friendly” man who approached him in the street asking for a
hamburger. According to Chris, the man kayoed him with a punch he did not see
coming.
I sent him a polite and friendly
reply, and this opened the floodgates. Within hours he sent me another message,
longer than the first. It was the same bitter complaining about the leaders of
MSG, but in much more detail.
In a ridiculous comment that has
relevance to the matter I am addressing here, Chris declared that MSG was
actually his club – and, to quote him: “I was kicked out of my own
school.”
I won’t go into the rambling,
convoluted logic of how he came to that conclusion, suffice it to say that this
type of conceit turned out to be fairly typical of Chris. And as I came to
realise, his dramatic complaints and gossip about others (of which I have a
multitude of examples) were habitual.
Another remark from this email
that will be relevant later on was: “it was a total shock to get kicked out”.
Evidently, he did not have any insight as to the reason. It was all so
embarrassing and unfair.
He was convincing. I bought into
his view of himself as an aggrieved victim. I felt sympathy for him. At the
time, I believed him, that he had been rejected and ostracised for no good
reason. I could not see it at the time, but this was a mistake. I didn’t know
it then, but he would eventually start complaining to others about me, behind
my back, in a similar way.
These initial messages also
encapsulated the other feature of his relentless emailing, that of promoting
internet videos of himself. He wanted me to critique a public YouTube video he
had made of himself teaching the Chum Kiu form – “see if I got it right,” he
wrote. Naturally enough, I was curious about this. Who taught him this form?
Why was that person not critiquing it? And why was he attempting to teach it
publicly?
As I found out, he had filmed
himself copying movements from other people’s YouTube videos, then posted his
video online as if he were an authority. I soon discovered that this was
Chris’s modus operandi.
Apparently there was a whole
library of his material: “got lots of stuff on my youtube chanel,” he told me.
What’s more, this practice of
sending unsolicited videos he had made of himself to instructors at random
would eventually land him in hot water.
Actually, at this time I did not
even consider myself an instructor. Kevin had graciously accepted me into his
kung fu school, and I spent the next seven years training rather obsessively.
After a time, I was teaching those who had something to learn from me, but it
was always within the scope of Kevin’s school, and under his auspices. It would
have been inconceivable for me to presume to teach others outside of the
school.
My point here is that becoming an
independent instructor was never my motivation. In fact, when I was in Kevin’s
class, I never even considered it. I trained the way I trained so as to master
the method. Mastery was my only goal. Teaching others was secondary, and only
then because there was a periodic need for me to do so.
Chris’s way of learning and
teaching, i.e., copying movements from internet videos, then promoting his own
videos, was alien to me.
In the final part of his email, he
wrote: “why is all the wing chun on the net crap?” Based on what I was soon to
experience with him, the unintentional irony of his question is crushing.
I was a family man, busy with
establishing a life in a new city, so it was several months before I finally
popped around to Chris’s place to train with him.
I was not used to training with
someone who talked so much. He was running away with himself, telling me all
about what he knew, and demonstrating what he could do. This never really let
up. Despite this, I found him to be likeable. I noted his ability to make crude
training equipment from the types of things that you would find lying around
the average house and garage. But training with him presented a problem to me.
He said he had been training
diligently all these years, while also running his own kung fu class. However,
in practice, it didn’t seem to add up to much. For a young man, I found him to
be rather flabby physically, with poor stamina. And although he could talk up a
storm, his technique lacked depth. His punches, in particular, were downright
anaemic. I don’t believe I have ever encountered a martial art exponent with
weaker hitting ability.
Chris, apparently, was the highest
ranked Ving Chun Kuen representative based in Dunedin. This was a problem,
because it meant that there was no suitable instructor for me to train under,
and no suitable school for me to join. Thus, from my first encounter with him,
the seed of an idea was sown.
It took a few months for the idea
of opening my own school to germinate and begin to grow. My reasoning was this:
the only way I was going to have properly skilled training partners in Dunedin
was if I trained them myself.
Close to the end of that year
(2009), I sent Chris an email in response to many of his: “Less time on the
Internet and much more time doing hands-on training, Grasshopper.” I don’t
suppose it made much of an impression. In any case, my mind was on other
things. Life in Dunedin was more established for me now, and the notion of
opening my own school was really solidifying in my mind.
In late January 2010, I wrote an
article for Kevin’s website about my early days of training in his school.
Shortly after that, on the 29th, I rang him to ask for his permission to open
my own kung fu school. He responded with a ringing endorsement, so now it was time
to go ahead with my plans.
Opening a school was a significant
step for me, and a deeply personal one. Chris’s latest spasm of bullshitting,
i.e., that he and Steve were my partners in this, reaches new levels of
absurdity, even for him. He was not involved in any way, shape or form. I had
told him of my plans to open a kung fu school, naturally enough, and two days
before my first class in February, I sent him the link to my new blog:
http://southern-wing-chun.blogspot.com/
My venue was a beautiful old school
hall in Oxford Street. I developed a good working relationship with Janice the
principal. She and the school board gave their permission for me to bolt Wooden
Man onto one of the interior walls. No doubt Wooden Man was a talking point for
the schoolchildren, and I bet they played on it!
It is relevant to point out that
Chris was still running his own club at the university Clubs & Socs
building, and he continued to do so, even as my school got up and running and
started growing rather rapidly in membership.
The first person to walk through
the door was a personable young American man who had been training with Chris
in his Clubs & Socs class. Chris had told him about my school opening, and
he came to check it out. He signed on, and trained religiously with me for the
remainder of his time in New Zealand.
In late July, Chris emailed me
another rant about being banned from MSG. Also in July, Chris visited my school
twice. This was a concession on my part, to have an instructor with his own
club come for a visit and join in. About a month later he followed up the two visits
with an email, asking, “hows the club going? still 20 people?”
In September, he received an
enquiry from a prospective student who wrote: “I am looking to do Wing Chun
classes. Can you please advise. I am based in Dunedin.”
Chris copied me into his reply. He
told the enquirer that “i teach at clubs 'n' socs” and “Anthony has a club in
south Dunedin”.
Also in that year he came to my
school twice more as a visitor: once in October and once in November. This is
all in the training logbook. (From the very first day I opened my school, every
person who was present at a class signed in, that is, wrote their name under
the date for that day in the logbook. I still have all of the logbooks. They
constitute the record of which people attended on which days, in their own
handwriting.)
Then, the following year (2011),
Chris learned through Kevin’s website that Beau was coming to town for a
workshop at my school. He wanted to go to the workshop and asked if he could
attend. He also commented, “notice ya posted a picture of ya club” and, in a
later email, “hay is your school open this monday?”
I include these little gems from Chris
himself – and there are plenty more of them to choose from – to show that my
school was never a joint school, and that he had nothing to do with it, either
in its formation or its ongoing development. He continued to run his own club.
He hit a snag when the university reportedly
told him he was no longer allowed to use the Clubs & Socs building. So, in
July 2011, he re-started his class in a back room of the Cia Café. Chris told
me that the guy who ran the café let him have his class there in exchange for
lessons. By this time my own school had been operating for about a year and a
half.
>> “we
started a new school in Dunedin, with the help of my student, Steve.”
Roping Steve into his bullshitting
makes Chris’s lying even more idiotic, if that’s possible. Unfortunately for
Chris, although he can lie, the training logbook cannot. Steve walked in for
the first time at the end of my second week of operating. I had never seen him
nor heard of him before. He asked if he could just sit and watch the class. I
said yes, and he did. In my third week he returned and joined in with the
others. (One of the people he trained with that evening was Kevin’s sister.)
Someone is going to have to draw
me a wonderfully imaginative flow chart to demonstrate how Steve helped me to
start my school.
>> “However,
due to creative differences and disagreements, I eventually parted ways with
Anthony...”
This highlights one of the
problems of parroting phrases you do not understand. “Creative differences”? I
am neither a songwriter nor a movie producer. Furthermore, the only thing Chris ever
created in my kung fu school was a nuisance of himself.
And he didn’t “part ways” with me,
whatever that is supposed to mean. I kicked him out and banned him from my
school. This is recorded in my training diary and is well-documented in emails
at the time. It took a long time to get to that point, and, in looking back, I
can see now that it was inevitable.
Still running his class at Cia
Café, he sent me this request: “can you please fwd my email address to some of
ya trainers... then i can add them to facebook and if there online in the week
end i can ask them round for training.”
In hindsight, I should have questioned
this. Up until this point, Chris had had no involvement or input whatsoever
into my school apart from being admitted occasionally as a visitor. If my
“trainers” (the senior students of my school) were going to start visiting
Chris at his home for training, there would be a blurring of the usual
boundaries. But even though Chris had his own club, I had come to see him as a
rather needy person, albeit likeable, and I wanted to remain supportive of him.
I readily agreed to his request. I didn’t have a problem with it – yet.
Two or three of my senior students
took up his offer to train with him at his home occasionally. Comments started
coming back to me, indicating that Chris was attempting to undermine my
teaching by introducing as many disparate ideas from his internet obsession
that he could cram in. This did not bother me at first. At this stage, I didn’t
really believe that Chris could corrupt their practice.
Chris continued to visit my school
sporadically, catching a ride with anyone he could. He also continued to talk
too much when in class and allowed his attention to wander. From what I could
see of his ability, I thought it best for him to mind his own business, concentrate,
and persevere with some proper training.
Yet, he could not mind his
own business: I was routinely reminding him to stop his jabbering and meddling
in what others were doing. He sent me emails complaining about this or that
person in my classes, based on personality clashes as far as I could tell. And
a couple of my senior students reported he was attempting to argue with them
when they were instructing others in my absence.
In response to one of his rambling
emails, I wrote to him: ”Anyone else would have been asked to leave for
interfering in my class. You I put up with.”
This persistent behaviour of his
was ironic considering that he would send me emails lamenting the fact that my
senior students were more skilled than him. By spring of 2013 some of them had
been training for three years. If I contrast this with Chris’s roughly 15 years
of training up till that point, much of it as an instructor in his own club,
his experiences in my school should have been signalling something to him. I
still have the emails, e.g., “last week I was training 2 hours every day and on
sat every one was better than me”. Comments from him such as this almost read
like lightbulb moments, but no, he carried right on interfering in the learning
of others by babbling on about what he had seen in videos, half-formed ideas
that were all over the map.
I gave him a metaphor to think
about, which I derived from my younger years working on orchards: It is better
to prune and thin, and have less fruit of much higher quality, than to have
many overgrown branches and overcrowded fruit of much poorer quality.
He went away to think about this,
and emailed me later: “I like your prune the bush saying...” (I had spoken of a
“tree,” not a bush, but it was close enough.) He seemed to get it, but would it
translate into the practical?
Despite his problematic behaviour,
he was learning a lot from me, my students, and occasionally Kevin, because
Chris was invited to come to class whenever my sifu visited. During one visit,
Kevin gave everyone a small notebook and a pen. At that particular workshop,
Chris took a lot of notes, writing down many things that Kevin said. Afterwards,
he emailed the notes to people outside of my school and outside the lineage
altogether. I know this because he copied me into one of the emails. What would
motivate him to do this, I have no idea, but it was another annoyance that
pointed to a lack of integrity on his part.
To top it off, he later sent me a
negatively slanted email about my sifu and sigung. It was one of those
familiar, dramatic rants from him that I had to read more than once to make
sense of. The gist of it was this: Chris was doubtfully questioning how long my
sigung (a student of Ip Man) had been training in Ving Chun Kuen before
starting his own school, and he applied the same doubtful measure to my sifu.
One of Chris’s conclusions, remarkably, was that he himself had been more
qualified than either of them when starting his own club, saying: “the amount
of time spent training would make me more qualified”.
It must have been a slow week for
him. I was starting to get the picture, namely, that in my experience of him,
he simply could not get by without stirring up some new type of disagreement,
disgruntlement, or point of contention. Any subject matter would do, as long as
it could be skewed to the dramatic.
Why he had chosen me to send this
latest blather to was puzzling, because my loyalty to Kevin was well known.
And yet, despite his ongoing
nonsense, I continued to support and include him. I still liked him. His café
club came to an end, and by 2014 he started attending my evening classes
through the week when he could.
One day Chris informed me that he
had started teaching one of my junior students the wooden man form on weekends.
The student was a nice enough fellow, but his attendance at my school was
unreliable, and his reluctance to do foundational work – especially the Form (Siu
Nim Tau) – meant his progress was slow. I considered this poor judgement on
Chris’s part. It demonstrated the folly of catering to students who only want
to do fun stuff, new stuff, novelty stuff. It reflected the dissipation I saw
in Chris’s own training.
On occasion I have seen the wooden
man form performed by people who have clearly copied movements but have no
effective depth in the three forms that comprise the exercise. That is not to
say that new students cannot be given exercises to play around with on the
wooden man. But an instructor who is teaching a junior student a wooden man
form he has copied from internet videos and picture books, before the student
is ready for such a form, is the blind leading the blind.
This behaviour is only cheating
the student. And some students who take every short-cut they can like this,
think they are making quicker progress than everyone else. Hence the instructor
involved and the cheating student fall into a ditch together.
By this time I well knew the
futility of trying to explain anything like this to Chris. I shrugged and told
Chris that he could now have this man as his own private student, and I handed
him on. Less drama for me, more fun for the student.
Throughout this period, Chris
continued to send me videos of himself, which included his taiaha practice, and
I remained encouraging.
Also around this time I gave a
three-hour in-depth workshop on the Form which Chris attended on a Sunday. He
got a lot out of this, as the class was very small and I would not allow him to
waffle on and on in his usual fashion.
But in the regular weekday
classes, he was more of a problem than ever. Rarely could he pay attention
without interjecting and talking about several things at once that he thought
were vitally important, but which were actually irrelevant. I would set an
exercise for him and another student, then a short time later I would look
across the hall to see the student standing idly while Chris was talking. Once,
he seemed to be demonstrating something quite elaborate, while his partner
stood waiting. I went over and discovered that he was acting out a scene from a
martial art movie.
Often he would draw his partner
into a debate whereby he would cast doubt on what they were learning, and would
start one of his rambling speeches, based on things he had seen on the
internet, cutting into his partner’s training time. On these occasions I would
set him straight, often just saying, “Get moving,” or “Start training.” But he was
persistent in this type of behaviour.
It was evident to me that Chris
loved the sound of his own voice, whether it be in the kwoon or on one of his
numerous videos.
My annoyance with his nonsense in
class was growing, particularly as it distracted and confused the people who
needed to be knuckling down to their training. There was a big difference
between the camaraderie, occasional joking around, and sheer enjoyment that was
always a part of the training, and the time-wasting bullshit which irritated
and immobilised others, forcing them to neglect their work.
Chris had also begun making
negative remarks about me behind my back. Reports of this trickled in to me. I
was philosophical about it. On one occasion I said to one of my senior
students, “Let him vent.” I figured that because I now represented some type of
authority figure in Chris’s life, and knowing him as I did, I was bound to
become a source of resentment.
The only thing I ever said to him
in response to this conduct was, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds, Grasshopper.”
Whether or not he understood made no difference, because he carried on
complaining as before. It is worth pointing out that this was a man in his
mid-30s trying to stir up ill will towards the teacher as if he and the other
students were adolescents in junior high school.
I had a little bit of insight into
this when Chris complained to me about Work and Income (WINZ). He had been
unemployed on a benefit for some time. He called it his “holiday” and was happy
to sleep in and do whatever he felt like doing all day. But now, as he told it
to me in an email, WINZ had said he must attend a seminar about how to get a
job, and he was afraid they might make him do “annoying stuff”.
I suppose I was just another
person making him do “annoying stuff”.
Be that as it may, Chris had
transitioned into a de facto member of my school. For one thing, he now wore
the school T-shirt with my logo. Usually the T-shirt was earned, i.e., someone
new had to be a member for a certain amount of time before getting one. I am
not sure that Chris had earned it, but it showed that he retained a special
place in my consideration. However, like a T-shirt that is wearing thin, this
consideration was finally beginning to fray around the edges.
The fabric finally tore one day
when I had set a student some work with Chris during a busy class. After a
short while I looked over to see Chris gazing down at his own feet, doing
something totally unrelated, while the other person stood watching. I went over
and did not have to say a word. Looking somewhat sheepish and confused, Chris
said to me, “I was just teaching him some Biu Jee – but the footwork doesn’t
seem right.”
I was almost incredulous. I
replied, “That’s because it is not right. Go back to the lesson I set.”
I now became resigned to the fact
that Chris was going to persist in his undermining, disruptive behaviour. He
showed no sign of changing. In training with my instructors and me, his skill
had improved markedly from when I first met up with him, so his presence in the
class wasn’t totally pointless. But, for the most part, he was a nuisance. He
contributed very little of use, and his compulsive gasbagging and bullshitting
were taking up too much time and distracting students. I had to make a decision
about him, and it was not an easy one to make.
Saturday classes had become more
or less invitation only, set aside for my instructors and senior students to
work on their own stuff. Saturdays were unstructured and of a different flavour
to the weekday classes. I figured that Chris’s negative impact could be
mitigated by restricting his attendance. I told Chris that I was confining his
training at my school to the Saturday classes, and that he was not allowed to
attend the weekday classes anymore. Additionally, there would be a couple of
new rules for him.
He was quite cut up about it. He
complained to me in a subsequent email, “My whole life I feel left out or
singled out,” which was begging for some self-reflection rather than self-pity.
Somehow it escaped his notice that I had gone out of my way to make sure he was
always included.
My patience with him was frazzled,
but he retained my goodwill. Naturally, his petulant grumbling behind my back
continued. With Chris, this was to be expected. I still thought it harmless.
And it couldn’t change anything, because he did not have a choice when it came
to the new arrangement.
However, his cloud had a silver
lining. The situation was a catalyst for Chris deciding to re-establish a venue
of his own. The next month, December, he had rented the container in Carroll
Street. He enjoyed telling me all about it, and I was happy for him. He slowly
started setting up his own training space. He showed me through it, and, on
Christmas Eve, I made three photographs of him at the container and featured
them on my school’s blog.
In the New Year, Kevin and two of
my kung fu brothers from Christchurch paid a visit to my school, and Chris came
along. When Kevin was back home, he messaged me. We had a brief conversation
about how great the training visit was and the high calibre of the students
generally. Still, I felt obliged to account for Chris’s verbal diarrhoea. I
wrote: “Chris is still an issue for me, but I am determined to include him.”
I bought Chris a Kung Fu Panda toy
as a mascot for him in his new training space and to celebrate him getting his
own club up and running. Always the expert at self-promotion, he had put a lot
of posters up around town, calling himself “Sifu Chris”. And, of course, he was
still pumping out the videos of himself. I thought it was good for him to have
this diversion: in the container club he could alleviate some of his
frustration and fully indulge his desire to be the master.
While this was going on, he
continued attending my Saturday classes, training with my instructors and me. I
figured that having a club of his own again would give Chris an outlet for his
drivel and drama, i.e., release some pressure out of his valve, and settle him
down in my senior class. I was mistaken. He persisted in his nonsense,
particularly when I was absent due to study and work commitments. Reports of
his self-obsessed and undermining behaviour filtered through to me over the
next few months. My own observations in class confirmed that his behaviour
wasn’t improving, and for the first time I felt my goodwill towards him waning.
Then his craving for attention and
penchant for stirring up drama broke new boundaries. When I heard about his
latest stunt, my regard for him finally shifted, and not in a good way. In
keeping with his usual habit, he filmed himself doing a sword form that he had
copied from an internet video. He then sent the video of himself, unsolicited,
to a venerable and highly ranked kung fu teacher in Wellington, asking him to
comment.
The response from the teacher was
essentially that Chris should ask for guidance from his own sifu. To this,
Chris replied that he had no sifu.
Now, even someone with only a
superficial understanding of Chinese martial art culture, with its intrinsic
concepts of lineage, loyalty, and integrity, would appreciate that Chris had
put the teacher in a difficult and uncomfortable position. Add to this the
instant confusion caused by someone who portrays himself as knowledgeable in
kung fu yet has no sifu. The very idea is ridiculous.
This caused a flurry of
communications, involving Chris as the subject of discussion. His craving for
attention had been rewarded beyond a simple critique of a video of him
imitating a video. His efforts had finally hit pay dirt. Here was his
proverbial fifteen minutes of fame.
In the grand scheme of things, it
was a minor matter, so the kerfuffle did not last long. Things were smoothed
over, a strip being torn off Chris in the process. However, it had some lasting
consequences. The narrative that Chris had been peddling far and wide for
years, that he was a hard-done-by lone battler, completely unravelled. It was
in tatters. This came about because the communications included a swift and
decisive refutation; in other words, a reality check.
Although I was privy to this
reality check, I did not have to contribute a single word.
It was readily established that
Chris was indeed part of a thriving martial art community. Firstly, he had
spent considerable time under a teacher at his original club, MSG, before being
thrown out. Secondly, he had been popping into my school for years, and
latterly had developed some regularity in attending. This meant that he had
enjoyed the benefits of training with me and my instructors, all of whom were
noticeably superior to him in skill at this time. The mere fact of him wearing
the school T-shirt showed that he belonged somewhere. He had a de facto
lineage to replace the one he had been ejected from. Thirdly, he had attended
workshops presented by Kevin (and Beau), and had ongoing access to my sifu’s
technical advice.
Thus – despite his poor attitude
and behaviour – his grasp of the art and his sense of how a martial art class
is run had improved merely by spending a lot of time with us. This was possible in large part because I had decided to maintain a friendship with him and include
him. He knowingly took advantage of this, which made his disloyalty and lack of
acknowledgement all the more jarring.
In addition to all of this, I had
fielded two student complaints about Chris’s loose talk, not related to the training.
Apparently he thought he was funny, but his subject matter was seen as
offensive. Due to my loyalty to him, I managed this in a way that allowed his
attendance to continue.
When I look back on this now, it
speaks to the familial nature of kung fu. Special considerations are made that
are not possible in the more regimented arts or more formal settings. However,
there are limits. At some point an undisciplined troublemaker who persists in
his behaviour will be kicked out, something Chris had already experienced
elsewhere.
And now, regrettably, critical
mass had been reached.
It had taken years for Chris to
erode my goodwill. Of all the stressors in a busy life, I now saw him as the
totally unnecessary one; there was no upside. Finally, he had crossed a line
with me.
I told him plainly that I was fed
up with his nonsense.
He later emailed me this: “I apologize for
my behavior I will not attend your school until we have worked things out in
person. .I sense I have pulled the final straw with you and feel ashamed..and
wish no further disruption...”
This was the only self-reflective
sentiment I ever received from him. But it was too little, too late.
Consulting my training diary, I am
reminded of just how fatigued I was with Chris’s perpetual drama, gossip, and
drivel. Indeed, I wrote to Kevin the same month:
“So many hassles have been created
by Chris’s nonsense in Dunedin .... an observation of the attention-vampire
style of Chris .... how easy it is to get sucked into his never-ending issues
.... I have been very patient, but [my patience] ran out .... Chris will
complain about me to other people, as he has done in the past, but I can’t
control that, even if I wanted to .... the never-ending disruptive nonsense.”
I decided to kick Chris out. That
is to say, I was going to ban him from training in my school. I asked him to
come in on the next Saturday.
It was rare for me to call a
meeting in the kwoon. I called my senior men into a circle with me and Chris. I
was open and explicit about Chris’s longstanding behaviour, its persistence and
negative effects on the class. Although I doubt they heard anything they didn’t
already know, this had never been formally discussed before. It was a calm and
firm dressing-down that had been a long time coming. The upshot was that my
tolerance was at an end and that I was kicking Chris out.
I left the floor open for dissent,
but there was none. My seniors were all forthright men; there were no shrinking
violets. And although my decision to eject Chris might have been challenged (it
wasn’t), my descriptions of his conduct could not be.
Afterwards, I wrote to Kevin to
update him and to close the matter:
“Last Saturday I had a talk with
Chris and my regulars at my hall in which I spoke my mind and laid it all out.
... Chris has got away with some pretty underhanded and disruptive
behaviour for years, and it was exposed and discussed last Saturday, and he was
quite affected emotionally. I didn't enjoy it. I asked for responses from my
seniors, including possible disagreement, and they supported me. ... It was
tough for Chris.”
For me, though, it was a relief to
have him gone.
After this, there was only the
occasional blip from afar. For example, a long-term student of mine bumped into
Chris where he was stacking supermarket shelves, and Chris attempted to relate
some gossip about me that was so awful it backfired. My student was angered,
and told Chris off. The student was still angry about it the next time I saw
them in the kwoon.
Apart from remote ripples like
this, Chris was blessedly out of sight and out of mind.
A good five years went by before he
emailed me again. In those intervening years, had anything changed with regard
to his conduct? Unfortunately not. In the email, Chris said he had recently sent
a senior kung fu man, well-known to both of us, an unsolicited video. Chris
received a negative reaction: apparently the recipient of the video “spazzed
out”. Then Chris proceeded to inform me of some gossip he had heard about this
man. It was a little extreme, if not malicious.
The attempt to draw me into it
failed, because I immediately disregarded it and did not reply. Thankfully,
starving it of attention kept the floodgates closed. I have no idea why he
targeted me for garbage like this after so much time had passed.
It would seem redundant to say so,
but I don’t believe a single word he says about other people behind their
backs.
I am not bothered by Chris’s
gossiping, but his lying about my school in public (which I am addressing here)
is a different matter. I have not been on social media for many years, so I
might have remained oblivious. Now that I know about it, I’m obliged to say
something.
To reiterate: as the “founder and
head instructor” of a “thriving combat studio,” Chris can talk himself up as
much as he likes. The problem with this (for me) is when he includes my name or
mention of my school in his everlasting bullshitting.
>> “In 2005ish, I
joined forces with another kung fu brother, Anthony... Together, we started a
new school in Dunedin, with the help of my student, Steve. However, due to
creative differences and disagreements, I eventually parted ways with Anthony...”
In order to concoct an absurdity
such as this, would it not be better for Chris to wait until the logbooks have
been lost, the blog has been erased, the emails have been deleted, and the many
people who were involved are all dead?
As it is, his own emails and the
other records clearly show that he had nothing to do with starting my school,
nothing to do with its operation, and eventually wore out his welcome due to
his appalling behaviour.
© 2025 Anthony Revill
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