This month, we report on the fighting experiences of Mr. Brian Tong, a Wing Chun practitioner residing in Vancouver. When Mr. Tong had less than one year of Wing Chun training, he decided to enter into tournament competition in order to test out his Wing Chun skills.
The first problem was what belt division to fight in. It was suggested by us that he fight in the brown or black belt division. We theorized that if you get beat, then you might as well get beat by a blackbelt than a white belt. Accordingly, Mr. Tong entered into the brown belt division.
Mr. Tong had three matches. The first two brown belts succumbed to the chain punching technique. Mr. Tong took the initiative and just charged in. The third brown belt, being aware of what happened, waited for the chain punching to start and leaned back to catch Mr. Tong with a hard hook punch to the side of the head.
Recently, Mr. Tong competed in a USA tournament, but this time in the black belt division. Mr. Tong reported that the chain punch works very well against people who are off guard. The Bong leg was very useful against any kind of spinning kicks. The side thrust kick was the most useful kick for scoring points. Mr. Tong recommended that Wing Chun practitioners familiarize themselves with the Karate ridge hand technique and the narrow boxer hook punch. Mr. Tong reported that point hitting tournaments work against Wing Chun, because Wing Chun is designed to get in, stay there and fight. The people who win in the point tournaments seem to be the ones who hit and run.
Note: July 1995
I met Mr. Tong a few months ago after losing contact with him for a long time. He had been studying Thai boxing, western boxing, TaeKwonDo and Karate from various people. After much heavy physical training his appearance was very muscular and his punching and kicking power increased by a factor of at least three. Mr. Tong planned to open up a Wing Chun boxing gymnasium somewhere in the Orient.
Warning: it is not recommended for most early Wing Chun students to fight in tournaments especially against people of high rank in other arts. You may get seriously hurt. Mr. Tong was one of those talented individual so we thought he could handle it OK.
