I find it amusing when people get overly serious about fantasy football — imagining player trades, envisioning games between specific teams, theorizing about how a coaching change might improve a team’s performance and so on. It’s amusing because those confrontations on and off the gridiron will never happen; it’s all an exercise in the fantastic.
Martial artists, combatives practitioners, and combat-sports fans have been known to engage in similar activities: wondering who would kick whose ass and assigning street cred to anyone they deem to be a badass without even knowing the approach to fighting advocated by said badass.
Consider: A martial artist who’s clearly a badass is four-time UFC middleweight champion Frank Shamrock. Years ago, however, when he was asked what he’d do if confronted by an assailant with a knife, Shamrock answered, “I’d run like hell.”
I remember thinking, He totally gets it. I bet his answer would have surprised most of those fantasy martial artists, though.
HERE’S THE THING: You know who the most dangerous man in the world is? He’s not a famous cage fighter. He’s a guy you’ve never heard of. He’s a guy who doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, whether he hurts you or you hurt him, whether he goes to jail or stays out. He’s a guy with ropey scars on his head from fighting a dude with a machete when he was growing up. He’s a homeless kid in the inner city who has no choices and no options.
The most dangerous man in the world doesn’t read martial arts magazines or engage in online debates. He lives by his wits, always managing to get enough money, one way or another, to survive.
Or he has deep desires to dominate others through intimidation, rape, robbery, home invasion, assault or murder. He’s a stone-cold predator who, like a creature in the wild, watches packs of prey animals to determine which one is weak, distracted, or unable or unwilling to fight back so he’ll have the highest probability of success. He coldly calculates the formula for winning so he can do what he wants without risk to himself. He likes the adrenalized moment of attack; he lives for it. Vulnerability is irresistible to him, and he thrives on being in the presence of weakness.
Or he wrestles unimaginable demons that whirl through his head. He sees conspiracies where none exists. He feels urged to take action against foes who aren’t there. He may be compelled to protect “his kind” from phantom adversaries. Whatever drives him is unfathomable to anyone except mental-health professionals, but of course, that doesn’t matter when you’re con- fronted by such a person.
MY POINT IS, you never know whom you’re standing in front of or who just stepped in front of you. Potential threats lurk everywhere. Being skilled in avoidance and being able to recognize pre-incident indicators are survival tools that are too important to overlook.
One of my corporate clients, a person who engages my team to deliver our popular StreetWise and Active Shooter seminars for company employees, recently sent me a critique form filled out by an attendee. It said, “The seminar was excellent, but as an employee for XXXXXXXXXXX, I don’t feel we frequent ‘bad places.’”
The director of security for the firm noted, “Well, this one didn’t get it.”
Nope, she sure didn’t.
THE TWO NOTIONS I’m bringing up here — that the most dangerous man in the world is recognizable or notable and is well-trained and that he hangs out only in “bad places” where law-abiding citizens would never go — conspire to get people in over their heads. In the minds of many, they already have avoided the most dangerous man because of where they live, how much money they make or what their daily routines consist of.
Reality, of course, is a different story. The most dangerous man is the one you didn’t see coming. He had bad intent and was circling in your orbit without you realizing it or, worse still, without you even acknowledging the possibility of his presence there.
The only way to ensure your survival is training. Delivering a “winning” opinion in some inane internet argument over the fighting prowess of people you don’t know won’t help you. What will help is having that argument with yourself over how to better develop your skills — how to be faster, how to be more intuitive and adaptive, how to be more powerful and effective.
THE MOST IMPORTANT thing to take away from reading this column is this: On the day you interact with the most dangerous man in the world, you must make sure he loses his title. You need to steal his energy and become the most dangerous man (or woman) in the world — if only for a moment.
That moment is likely to be one of the most consequential episodes in your life. Stop fantasizing about who holds the title. On that day, it had better be you.
Kelly McCann’s book Combatives for Street Survival: Hard-Core Counter-measures for High-Risk Situations is available at blackbeltmag.com/store.
This article originally appeared in a 2019 edition of Black Belt Magazine.