Yesterday, I went to a training seminar hosted by the martial arts legend Bill ‘Superfoot’ Wallace. If you are unaware of who he is, then you don’t know martial arts – but here’s his Wikipedia page. I’ve seen his stretching and fighting videos on YouTube, and remember watching him in a couple of late 70s / early 80s martial arts films, the latter being The Protector with Jackie Chan. He’s exceptionally flexible, with a hook kick that has been clocked at 60mph, which is pretty darn fast.
Without giving too much away – pay for your own seminar 
– he took us through an EVIL stretch warm-up but gave a few pointers that I wasn’t aware of, and then told us to make our lead leg the “third hand”, and then we went into lots of kicking drills, but drills that involved our partner, making contact, not just techniques on the spot.
Bill’s teaching style is, er, unique 
Certainly not what I was expecting at all, very humorous and got his point across very well. He’d stop us every now and again to correct our technique, or to give further pointers. He also discussed tactics in sparring, and the point I’ll remember most about the day is that “it’s always my turn”, i.e. if you’re attacking and your opponent is blocking, he can’t attack you. Bill’s plan when he fights is to make the opponent move to block and create an opening elsewhere that he can exploit. Several “volunteers” were used to make this point, and all fell for what Bill wanted to happen, e.g. block a few low (on the belt) kicks, finally exposing their head, then Bill just kicks straight to the head, and it’s goodnight. It should be noted that Bill ‘knocked out’ 13 opponents with kicks to the body, really nowhere is safe
For someone in his mid-60s (sorry, Bill) his flexibility is amazing, and his speed is incredible – but with it he has control. I can throw out a fairly decent height hook kick, but there’s not much control. When Bill was talking to me about I question I raised (going from a counter-fighter to a offensive fighter), he demonstrated how he’d make the change with working on the feints and speed, and before I knew it, bonk, he’d kicked me in the head. But it was just a tap, ridiculously light, but damn quick. Awesome.
At the end, there was a Q & A session (in which I asked my question just mentioned), but Bill also spoke about sparring with Joe Lewis, Tommy “The Hitman” Hearn and a boxer called Virgil Hill, all very interesting and entertaining. If you’ve seen Bill’s videos on YouTube, you’ll see that he favours his left leg – the reason for this is that when he started training in Karate (in Okinawa, obviously), he had his right knee in a cast from a high school wrestling injury, so the sensei said “start training, just use your left leg” and so he did and the rest is history.
What was really good was at the end of the seminar, he told us that we just learnt worked really well if you were Bill Wallace – we had to take what he had shown us and make it work for us, i.e. pick our favourite technique / feint, see what works for us, etc. Very good piece of advice as we are all different, physiologically and psychologically (e.g. I’m an arthritic cripple )
It was a great seminar, highly enjoyable, learnt a lot and yes, I even got a signed photo of him – well, you would, wouldn’t you? A huge thank you to Dean Williams of the PKA for organising it 
