Friendship, Fatherhood and Male Bonding

The crucible of physical stress has been turning children into adults since time immemorial. I remember my first karate school, where the ex-Marine teacher, an exemplar named Steve Sanders, drove us to exhaustion and beyond, until the front windows were so steamed you couldn't see through them. Then we'd beat the hell out of each other. Unbelievably tough, and a kind of good evil fun it is hard to explain to someone who hasn't been there. And real love too: this was a tough inner-city school, not some strip-mall McDojo. Any student, walking home, might have needed to actually protect himself...or herself. I remember Steve telling the girls in the class to "fight like a man...and walk away like a lady." The girls he trained were SAFE. Now, thirty-five years later, I believe that those days and nights were among the best of my life, the friendships made in the martial arts among the most meaningful, and my respect for Steve and the legions of boys and girls he turned into men and women to be an honorable army of brothers and sisters.



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