Wild Colonial Boy: Tales of a Kung Fu Cop
Docherty, Dan. Wild Colonial Boy: Tales of a Kung Fu Cop.
First Published (2020) Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.
Introduction
From the book front matter…
In 1975, Dan Docherty, a young Scots law graduate and karate black belt, left Glasgow to spend nine years as a Hong Kong police inspector. As well as serving as a detective and vice squad commander, he also took up Tai Chi and won the 5th Southeast Asian Chinese Full Contact Championships in Malaysia in 1980. In 1985, he was awarded a postgraduate diploma in Chinese from Ealing College.
This book is a strong ‘recommend’ from me if you are interested in Taiji and its practical application.
Having said that, I want to give fair warning to the light seasoning of predictable homophobia that was likely to have been present in all police services the world over in the 1970s. I suspect it may still be there today.
I liked the style of writing. In the hardback version, almost every chapter is just a single page.
I’ll disagree with the title off the bat though, it should have been ‘Tales of a Tai Chi Cop’.
The book covers Docherty’s time in the Royal Hong Kong Police (RHKP) and briefly on his return to the UK with his new wife. He later went on to set up a Taiji school and wrote several books. From one of these, when asked what style of Taiji he practices…
The Tai Chi that I teach is Chen style, Yang style, Wang style, Wu style, Ching Yi style, Qi style, Cheng style and Docherty style because people with these different names and others before them have all played a part in its transmission. I teach Tai Chi Chuan so that people in many countries can use it for self defence as well as for improving their health, for that reason I call my art Practical Tai Chi Chuan International. When asked what style of Tai Chi Chuan I teach, my reply is ‘Wudang’.
— Docherty, Dan. Complete Tai Chi Chuan (p. 60). First published in 1997 by The Crowood Press Ltd.
In later life Docherty developed Parkinson’s disease and he died in 2021. His Practical Tai Chi Chuan website can be found at https://www.taichichuan.co.uk.
Full Contact Fighting
Video shows Docherty fighting full contact in Malaysia against the 300lb (136kg) Roy Pink.
After training with his Sifu for what can only have been about a year, Cheng ‘volunteered’ him to take part in a full contact competition scheduled to take part in Hong Kong in 1976.
Full contact, was described as…
Scattering Hands Platform is the literal translation of San Shou Leitai and this is how Chinese martial artists traditionally fought full contact. Normally in Hong Kong, the full contact platform was around two feet in height and around 24 feet x 24 feet in dimension. Unlike a boxing ring, there were no ropes. Fighters could use hand, elbow, foot, knee and shoulder strikes, locks, trips, sweeps and throws. Normally only the groin was not a target. The fact that the platform was raised and that there were no ropes made it very dangerous to be thrown from the platform. Often, I witnessed broken legs and arms as a result. It was what I had to do to achieve my goal.
He did not have long to prepare. Of his training routine he wrote…
For the next three months, I practiced Nei Kung and hand form every day. Then Sifu added, “No girls no alcohol.”
Five days a week, I practiced Handstands.
20 minutes punching with a lead weight of over four pounds in each hand doing 150 Running Thunder Hand strikes per minute. Totally 3000 punches in 20 minutes.
3 x 2 minutes rounds of forward rolls – at least 80 rolls per round.
3 x 2 minutes rounds of striking a heavy bag.
3 x 2 minutes of taking conditioning blows to the head, body and legs at about half strength.
3 x 3 minutes rounds of Running Thunder Hand on focus pads.
Preceding the fight…
The competition was held at a Sports Hall in Wanchai. I had been coerced by John Wilson into drinking half a bottle of ginseng brandy, the night before my first big test at a dinner in Aberdeen.
Of his opponent…
….top local heavyweight Choy Li Fut guy who was also Hong Kong Judo Champ. No problem.
All fighters were dressed in either red or blue chest protectors, T-shirts and shorts, groin protectors, head protectors and 4 oz gloves.
Of the fight…
It ended in the 3rd round. His corner threw in the towel. I don’t remember too much about it except he started with a headshot which didn’t hurt. I do remember hitting him with uppercuts (which we’d never done in training) and I caught his legs every time he tried to kick me, but he had long arms and sometimes he managed to follow up with a head shot.
In the same year he entered the Fourth South East Asian Chinese Full Contact Championships in December in Singapore.
My first opponent was Malaysian from Chikechuan style, a blend of Thai Boxing, Western Boxing and Choy Li Fut (itself a blend of three styles). He was considerably heavier and considerably shorter than me. He was good in sweeping and, attacking the legs and feet with low kicks and stamps, following up with heavy headshots.
How the fight went…
I threw him with Tai Chi wrestling technique Double Hands Seize Legs when he tried a Choy Li Fut swing punch to the head. This was one of Sifu’s Inside the Door’ techniques. The name can’t be found in any Tai Chi book. You duck under a punch to the head and seize the opponent behind both knees, simultaneously barging him in the abdomen. I also threw him off the high fighting platform half a dozen times. He had nothing left so his corner threw in the towel. I’d won the fight, but I was badly injured with another fight coming up in three days’ time. I had two black eyes, a bleeding nose, cut lips and heavy bruising on my left leg and foot, so bad that I couldn’t put a shoe on my left foot.
Three days later, his second fight in the competition…
…was against a Shaolin fighter from Singapore who again was both heavier and shorter than I was. I noticed that I had a much longer reach than my Shaolin opponent, so I decided to try to cut him open above and below both eyes by twisting my punches on impact. He had a tendency to telegraph his techniques. He did manage to trip me once, but otherwise failed to score on me. His cuts were so bad that the fight was stopped at the end of the second round. His face was a mask of blood. He seemed a good man. For a second or two, I was sorry I was so brutal…
In the third and final fight in the competition for the championship, his opponent was…
Lohandran, the Malaysian Heavyweight Boxing Champ, who had been given a bye in the semi-final when he was drawn against his very own brother. He was going in against me almost totally fresh. Even Sifu said, ‘Dan, you do not need to fight again and you have no chance as you are badly injured and he is fresh.’ I knew I was going to get a beating, but I told him I had to fight or people would say I was afraid and that would bring dishonour to the school and to Tai Chi. It was the last night of the Championships. It was the last fight of the night. In the end, I didn’t do that badly. The fight went the distance. There were no knockdowns. Lohandran adopted hit and run tactics. All his points were scored by roundhouse kicks to my front leg, which hurt me a bit, but didn’t bother me. I hit him a few times.
Docherty had won, but at what cost?…
The movie of our fights was played endlessly. Our Tai Chi elder brothers, who had never fought full contact, kept coming over to where Chow and I were sitting, congratulating us and then telling us how we should have fought. I found it all deeply humiliating. It got even worse when I went back to work and had to face my colleagues. The facial bruising took several weeks to heal, while I had a limp for almost three months. It was the first major setback to my master plan of becoming a Tai Chi Sifu.
More than three years later (1980), Docherty fought full contact again, this time in Malaysia…
Despite Sifu’s protestations, I jumped up two weight divisions to Open Weight (over 220 lb) I only weighed 190lb. I had the fastest and hardest Running Thunder Hands in the Hong Kong Tai Chi school and I’d do more than half a million reps in under 100 days. It was a no brainer, go up against the big guys, only faster and much harder than them.
For his first fight…
The guy I was drawn against was from Five Ancestors Kung Fu….His name was Roy Pink and he’d been a British full contact champion. Years later, I became friendly with his Sifu, Kim Han. Roy was massive, he weighed more than 300lbs. A friendly Malaysian referee told me that Roy’s favourite technique was the spinning back hook kick. I thought no way, a guy Roy’s size could do that kick, I knew it well from my karate days.….We wore red or green T-shirts, long black trousers and a groin guard. We could choose our Thai boxing gloves from a pile, we found out later that the Malaysians had employed top professional Thai Boxing coaches. I chose the lightest pair I could find. I wanted Roy to feel each Running Thunder punch. Roy and I were top of the bill, last fight of a disastrous night for the Hong Kong team, who had lost every fight except for Kin. I was in red again. I felt invincible.
I jumped up onto the platform. We bowed left palm over right fist to the referee and to one another. The fight started with Roy punching me three times to the head. He didn’t hurt me, as I was making a strategic retreat at the time, but he followed up with a spinning back hook kick. I went flying off the Leitai for the first time in my life, but curled up and landed well, going into a backward roll. I could hear the Jade Emperor laughing, less than five seconds into the fight and despite having been warned about it, Roy’s hook kick had humiliatingly got me taking the count. I could see Big Roy was waiting to give me more of the same. I decided to get up on the count of eight. I knew that now I wasn’t strong enough to tackle Roy’s huge weight advantage; head on car crash Tai Chi was not an option against a juggernaut like Big Roy.
Maybe the Jade Emperor was testing me, but I always practiced footwork from the time of first meeting Nanbu, back in ’72. I rarely listened to advice – my speciality was strategy at short notice. I decided to try moving in and out and side to side. Big Roy tried to chase me, but as I had suspected, a guy the size of Roy found it difficult to turn and change direction. We clinched once and I hit him with a Tiger Embrace Head hook punch to the head, just to let him know I was there. I kept up the Scottish Highland Dance routine. A few seconds later, Old Twinkle Toes Docherty suddenly went in when Roy was expecting me to go out. Roy walked into a right hand Running Thunder Punch. I saw him go cross-eyed, teeter for a moment then fall flat on his back, unconscious before he hit the ground. The whole platform shook. The punch was so hard that he only woke up in the ambulance. He was a brave man and deserved respect because three nights later he was back fighting for 3rd place.
Docherty was to fight a familiar opponent in the final…
Next stop Kuala Lumpur against my old nemesis, Lohandran in front of his own people.
….The stadium was packed full of Chinese people. Lohandran and I were in the last fight of the night…. I had a theory about Lohandran. Most fighters are really only effective on one side and just don’t know how to deal with southpaws. My Sifu was left-handed. Ever since, I was a beginner in martial arts I had trained my left hand and side so I could fight southpaw. I quickly found that Lohandran was nonplussed when he had to fight against a southpaw. His left foot roundhouse kicks were completely ineffective. Maybe that was why he kicked me in the testicles early in round one. I wasn’t hurt, but I complained to the ref, who just signalled us to carry on. I waited till the start of round two to reciprocate with a groin kick of my own. Lohandran didn’t flinch.
The fight went three rounds, but I got big points by throwing him off the platform a few times. At the end, Lohandran graciously conceded defeat in his home town and presented me with his Malaysian team T-shirt. I still have it. The fight was a bit of a snooze fest. He had tried his old hit and run tactics and they didn’t work against the upstart Scots Tai Chi southpaw.
That was the last time Docherty fought full contact.
Docherty with Sifu Cheng Tin-hung and Chow Tim-tong with his Heavyweight Division 2nd place Merlin trophy at the 4th South East Asian Chinese Full Contact Championships in Singapore in 1976. Illustration from the book.
Key Points
A few things in the book really stuck out for me.
When he was not training for full contact competitions there were a lot of girls and alcohol!
His Sifu’s elder son by his second wife said to Docherty…
My father is not a good teacher, he is someone who knows a lot about Tai Chi.
When considering setting up his own club, Docherty wrote…
I was clear that Sifu’s haphazard way of teaching TCC was confusing. The Japanese martial arts course and grading concept was the way to go. Classes had to be directed and structured. It wasn’t acceptable for people to be left to their own devices.
The approach fits in with my own biases, having first trained in Karate and Taekwondo. But I truly believe it to be the case. Structure, repeatability, predictability.
I think in the last clause there, he is referring to his Sifu’s habit of retiring to his apartment whilst students trained on the roof. It also left a bad taste in my mouth as it reminded me of a Taiji class that I tried to join many years ago, when the instructor showed me a couple of moves and then wondered off to teach other students for the rest of the lesson. I hold grudges!
There is a saying in Chinese martial arts, “Spear 100 days. Sabre 1000 days. Sword 10000 days.” This accurately reflects the degree of difficulty of each weapon. I had to learn the sword three times from Sifu. The first time was just before vacation leave. The second time I forgot the sword form was because I had to prioritise full contact training. I finally got it with Ian Cameron, who was visiting Hong Kong over three days of sword tuition from Sifu.
This resonates strongly. I am very slow to pick up forms, whether it is open hand or with weapons. I have never tried spear (looks like it is the easiest, so maybe I should!), but have done some staff (gùn), have done a little sabre (I take it he means Miao Dao here rather than broadsword), and a tiny bit of the straight sword (Jian).
Credits
Lastly I wanted to pass credit on to Graham Barlow of the Taichi Notebook for his podcast interview with Alan Wycherley - Fantasy vs reality in tai chi, or tai chi as a self-defence art.
Wycherley trained with Docherty and caused me to go down the rabbit hole and find the book. He is doing Stirling work on his own channel - In Defence of the Traditional Martial Arts - to push back on fake Taiji and other ‘masters’. He’s not scared to get in the octagon either!
Interestingly, Wycherley has said that a good Taiji trained fighter (I’m paraphrasing a bit here) will look and move a lot like any other good fighter. Sadly, he has also said that in two generations there are not likely to be any remaining fighters, with Taiji backgrounds.
I am not surprised. Admittedly I don’t regularly follow MMA or other similar fighting arts, but I have just never heard of someone that considers themselves to be a Taiji practitioner, preparing for a fight. Chinese kickboxing (Sanda) maybe? Even then not really, as I don’t mix in those circles.
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Article cover picture of Docherty in Single Whip from https://wudangsanbao.com/index.php/taiji-quan-wudang/
