SPIKE TV’S DEADLIEST WARRIOR STAR, NICK HUGHES, SPEAKS HIS MIND ON THE MARTIAL ARTS
For some, martial arts is just a past time. For Nick Hughes, the martial arts has been an odyssey that has taken him around the world: from the netherworld of the Australian club scene in the ‘70s to a five-year stint with the French Foreign Legion as a commando with the legendary 2nd REP parachute regiment to working as a bodyguard for the Saudi royal family, rock stars, celebrities, and corporate executives. He has taught various military units and also speaks about self-defense concepts to various groups. He is the chief instructor of Krav Maga Lake Norman in Huntersville, North Carolina.
His first book, How to be Your Own Bodyguard, was just published and is a must-read if self-defense training matters to you.
Nick was generous enough to let Adult Martial Artist interview him shortly after his remarkable performance on Spike TV’s Deadliest Warrior series and share his thoughts with us about the martial arts, MMA, the French Foreign Legion, and much, more more.
How did you get started in the martial arts? Why?
I had a debilitating disease when I was a kid which ruled out team sports for years. When I was finally given the all clear (to begin playing rugby) I never jibed with the team concept probably due to not playing team sports during those formative years. My uncle had just been drafted into the Army to go fight in Vietnam and had started learning this stuff called karate. (It was actually Tae Kwan Do but we didn’t know that). My brother and I were aghast when we found out he was learning how to kick in fights. Our father had brought us up to believe kicking – or anything outside of the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules – was being a sissy. My brother followed up on it and found a copy of Black Belt magazine at the newsagents and we pored over stories about people like Peter Urban, etc. This was around 1969 or so before anyone in Australia had ever heard of Bruce Lee or films like the Five Fingers of Death.
We couldn’t find a karate dojo but I discovered there was a Judo club at my school. I watched one class and was hooked. I began training and reading and studying everything I could get my hands on. To say I was obsessed would have been an understatement. I didn’t drink, didn’t party, didn’t smoke, and, to my parent’s chagrin, didn’t do much schoolwork because it all took away from time to train. I’d walk eleven miles on Saturday to train. For some reason, maybe because I’d been bullied by my brother growing up, I was drawn to the practical stuff and would go through the Judo class so I could do the half hour of Jujutsu training at the end.
What martial arts have you studied?
Judo, Jujutsu, Tae kwan do, Zen Do Kai (a spin off of Goju-Kai), Shito-Ryu, Aikido, Filipino stick & knife, Wing Chun, Military Unarmed Combat, Krav Maga and Boxing.
Tell us about Zen Do Kai. What is it? Is it still taught? How did you chance upon it?
While I was doing Judo at the school club my brother was out in the work force. He found a karate school that had just opened in town run by a guy called Bob Jones. He was teaching something called Zen Do Kai (ZDK). It had a bad reputation and rumors abounded that they were all thugs and street fighters.
I’d later find out ZDK was a spin off of Goju-Kai which had been brought to Australia by Tino Ceberano who’d trained with Yamaguchi in Japan. To cut a very long story short (I could write a whole book on the story of Zen Do Kai), Bob and Tino had a falling out partly because Bob was running a security company using his karate to oust troublemakers from discos and concert halls. He manned the security teams by using his karate students which alienated the purists and classical martial artists. The purists seemed to lose sight of the fact karate was originally all about fighting and not character development. They thought he was prostituting the art.
There were some epic fights that made headlines across Australia – one big one about 60 or so skinheads being hospitalized after causing a ruckus at a big outdoor pop festival. That really put Bob on the map and gave him and the style his reputation as a street fighter and bouncer par excellence. It wasn’t very long before his organization had pretty much tied up the entire security industry in Australia. What began in discos ended up looking after the security needs of every major rock-and-roll band in the world at the time. In fact, some of the guys are still providing security for their clients to this day.
I stayed with the Judo – Jujutsu and eventually Tae Kwan Do (when a club opened at school), but I had to wait until I was 14 before I could sneak out of the house, ostensibly to go to my brother’s to help him landscape, so I could attend Zen Do Kai classes. I’ll never forget the training. There was this intensity that was lacking in everything else I’d done to that point no doubt due to the fact the instructors were using this stuff to fight on the door. They weren’t in there to play around. Their training would determine whether they’d survive the night at work or not.
The first night the black belt teaching the class broke my nose while sparring. At the end he came over with an apology saying “sorry mate, but your brother insisted we show no favoritism and that we harden you up.” I think my mother suspected I wasn’t much of a landscaper when I kept coming home with broken noses, split lips and pissing blood.
Just to digress here a little, you couldn’t get away with the training we did in those days nowadays. It worked then because the worldwide boom in the martial arts was on us. There were 100 people a day clamoring to join classes and you had to bash people to get them to quit so you could make room for the new guys. Bob—ever the entrepreneur— had a couple of hundred schools across the country in no time and I once saw a film of a Sat morning class with more than 300 people in it.
I loved the style because of its emphasis on the practical, the tie-in to security work, the reputation we had, the blood sweat and tears and camaraderie that developed as a result of that Spartan training. We were a little bit like the Hell’s Angels of the martial arts world if that analogy helps.
What did you learn working as a bouncer with respect to the martial arts?
In a nutshell, what worked and what didn’t. Zen Do Kai’s translation (at least as it was explained to us) meant “The Best of Everything in Progression” and we were given free reign to use whatever technique we wanted as long as they worked.
I remember going from the school Judo club to the local Tae Kwan Do club, catching a guy’s kick while sparring and foot sweeping him with a de-ashi barai from Judo. The instructor ran over and said I couldn’t do that (which I thought odd considering I just had). The first time I did a sweep in Zen Do Kai conversely everyone stopped and asked me to show them how I did it. Then everyone began dumping everyone with sweeps.
There were guys in the style from every conceivable background; boxers, Judo guys, Jujutsu guys, wrestlers, kung fu students and ordinary old street-fighting bouncers and everyone contributed to the technique toolbox. If it worked, we used it. Plain and simple.
That was a godsend on the doors because I always had an answer for wherever or whatever I ended up in. It didn’t matter if I was on the floor, up close, at a distance, fighting a multiple or dealing with weapons.
Other stuff I learned? Boxers are way tougher than many karate instructors told us they were. I remember Tae Kwan Do and Judo instructors telling me boxers were easy to beat because they only used their hands. ZDK black belts said “watch out for boxers, they can take a punch, throw one and they’re in great shape.”
What else? Fighting a bunch of untrained fighters isn’t really that hard. Fighting two guys who know what they’re doing and have grown up fighting side by side will give you the hardest fight of your life. If they know enough to know that one goes low and one goes high you’ve really got your work cut out for you.
Next Week: Part 2 of the Nick Hughes’ interview. Stay tuned.
In the meantime…train hard, stay safe, live well.
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