Two years ago this week, my first martial arts teacher passed away. Outside of mentioning it to people at the time, I haven't really talked about it, and grieved privately as is my habit.
It's a common trope in the martial arts community that everyone tends to lionize their first martial arts teacher, and considers them the "best" martial artist they've ever met. The reason isn't complicated at all: the perception gap of skill between you as a complete beginner and them as a teacher is the widest it'll ever be, assuming you keep training. As you get better with practice and time, you'll start noticing a smaller distance between your ability and any future teachers and advanced students you train with, because your skill gap is closer when you come in. They seem less like magic and more like, to paraphrase Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, "someone who simply started before you did".
Sheridan, however, was someone who really seemed like he could do magic. I've been training martial arts consistently (barring a few years off during the pandemic) for just over 20 years, and I've trained at somewhere around a dozen schools, almost all different styles, for various periods of time ranging from months to years. In that time, I still have yet to meet someone I would consider a better fighter, or more knowledgeable about martial arts in general.
(Side note: the one exception was my Mantis instructor, Tom, who was a former Czech army ranger before moving to the states. He was one of the kindest people I ever met, and was one hell of a fighter. But that's all a story for another day. If they were both having their best day at the same time and you put a gun to my head, I'd still put my money on Sheridan, but I'd stall so long in the decision you'd probably pull the trigger first.)
Sheridan taught kung fu. Or, he taught me kung fu--he was certified to teach at least four different styles, because martial arts was the only thing in his life starting around 7 years old. I'll spare you the long background of a troubled childhood growing up in North Carolina and his military service as an Army Paratrooper and all the various styles he'd trained up unitl the time that I met him, but he was the kind of guy that literally did nothing else in his spare time. He did have kids and partial custody with his ex-spouse and he was involved in their lives, but outside of that? No real hobbies that I knew of except alcohol, but we'll get to that.
How It Began (As in So Many Things in My Life, with Embarrassment)
I first met Sheridan about a week after an incident where I almost got into a streetfight the night before my brother's wedding. As I was getting back to my car leaving a cafe one night, someone drove by as I had my hand on the door handle and threw a full cup of soda at me and yelled "what're you gonna do about it [racial slur]?" (NB: everyone involved here was white.) I, being a young and angry and very stupid young 23-year-old now drenched in sugary cola, immediately got in my car and chased him down. This only took less than two blocks, because he braked hard in front of me and got out of his car. In that moment, I realized several things immediately:
- He was already wearing MMA gloves when he got out of the car.
- He very obviously had been driving around town explicitly looking for someone to fight.
- I, as someone with no fighting experience outside the various tussles of youth, was not going to win that fight by a long shot.
- If I engaged, I was going to have to go to my brother's wedding the next day with a black eye, or much worse, assuming I was going to make it at all.
I ended up demurring from the fight he was screaming at me to bait me into, and drove away, extremely embarrassed even though it was the right, or at least correct, thing to do. (Clearly the right thing to do was not chase him down in my car in the first place, but, well. Young and stupid.)
I went home with a fire in my gut and a need to prove myself I guess, so I started looking up gyms in the phone book. I interviewed at a few schools teaching different styles and none of them felt right, until I pulled into the abandoned liquor store Sheridan had converted into a kung fu school. I didn't know much about kung fu that I hadn't seen in movies. Sheridan greeted me warmly as I walked in and I almost turned around immediately--he was short and quite heavyset, with a thick Southern drawl, buzzcut and a goatee. Unlike the other teachers I'd met that week, all obvious bruisers, he frankly didn't look like much. "What could this guy teach me?" I thought. He gestured at a wall of trophies, maybe reading my expression. "Are all those yours?" I asked. "No, none of them. Mine are all in a storage unit across town, they take up too much space. These are from my students." If it needs to be said, I later learned he absolutely wasn't exaggerating. I saw the storage unit.
I stayed for a class, was sufficiently impressed enough to sign up, but admittedly also because his was the last school I’d found in the phone book and after not feeling it anywhere else I figured I'd better sign up for something or give up the idea entirely. That kicked off four years of intense training at least 10 hours a week, and my love affair with martials arts.
Embarrassment, cont.
I'll be the first to say I was an indifferent student at the beginning, almost resentful at the idea of things like starting each class with 100 pushups and 200 sit-ups before training for 2-3 hours, and my former-gifted-kid frustration of not being immediately good at all of it--or let's be honest, any of it--on my first attempt. I didn't quit, to my slight credit, but it took nearly a year of semi-sullen slogging away before I started to really engage with it and look forward to class, instead of trying to think of excuses or secretly hoping I would get hit by a car or something so I could skip out. Around that time, Sheridan noticed that my attitude toward training had changed and asked why.
I just said "I decided I'm going to actually try." I didn't need to elaborate, we both knew what I meant. "Good," he said, "I've been content to take your money but I was on the verge of kicking you out of this school because you haven't put in much effort and you seem like you hate it." He stuck out his hand to shake and said, "you good to do this then?"
From that point, for me it was like a switch flipped. I threw myself into it and tried to keep up, tried to really understand what we were doing and why. I kept asking so many questions in class that Sheridan asked me to stop slowing the class down, so on top of the regular training I also started taking private lessons so I could go more in-depth on the things I was trying to get right. I got into the best shape of my life before or since, and I felt like I was getting the concepts down even though I didn't think my actual fighting ability was getting any better, as I continued to get completely rolled by the senior students.
Sheridan straight up told me one day during private lessons that I was his "worst fighter, but favorite student". "I bet you say that to all the girls," I joked. "I'm serious. You're my favorite student to teach because you ask good questions, you actually listen to the answers, and when I ask you to do something, you do it. If we were going by understanding and effort, I'd give you a black belt right now. But you can't really fight." He was correct about the latter part, as at the time I'd only earned a yellow belt (only one step above the beginner's white belt) after two years, and I never got higher at that school.
A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to the Kumite
It turned out, however, that things were relative. I never got higher than yellow belt, and I could never beat any of the senior students in sparring or even make much of a good showing of myself against them. But starting with the MMA school I trained at after leaving Sheridan's school and moving across the country, and every school since then, I learned that in fact I'd been playing on Hard Mode before. Whereas I didn't distinguish myself much against Sheridan's senior students, I had a much easier time against almost everybody else. Including enough times against semi-professional fighters, people who got paid in the ring, that this resulted in a few sponsorship offers over the years that I never took, and don't regret not taking. This is not to toot my own horn at all, it's to say that it was years after I left that I truly came to understand just how goddamned good the students at Sheridan's school really were, and how good Sheridan was as a teacher.
Before I gas myself up too much here, you should know that during this period of a few years proving myself in what I’d consider my prime, I went back to Sheridan’s school twice to drop in while back home visiting family. Twice, he asked me to spar with a student to see how I was coming along. Twice, I got my ass again thoroughly handed to me.
The Cost of Doing Business
All that said, something that I hesitate to write but can’t deny is that Sheridan wasn't a very good person, depending on your view. He knew this, and was open about it. He constantly said in class that "everything is love". To always fight with love for yourself first, but also with love for your opponent--whether in the ring, because it's a stranger you have no reason to hate, or on the street, because you don't really know what history brought them to the point of being willing to offer violence. But he was, in a way that became more obvious the longer you knew him, at war with himself as an extremely angry and miserable person who wanted--who I genuinely believe truly, deeply wanted--to become and be known as a good and kind person. Who wanted to see himself and everyone else as an intelligent person of good will, but who very clearly didn't always believe it.
It didn’t help at all that in the years I attended his school, which he had only just bought from his own teacher in the style a few months before I met him, he ended up chasing off all but the most diehard, of which I surprisingly turned out to be one. He was an open, funny guy, but when it came to training he did not fuck around and he had zero patience for those who saw a Bruce Lee movie once and wanted to put on silk pajamas and pretend they were, too. I wasn’t kidding before about starting the class with 100 pushups and 200 sit-ups, plus usually a half hour of various cardio and stance training before getting into the parts that the dilettantes wanted. The school went from around 30-ish students when I first walked in the door to maybe 8 at most by the time I left. He could not keep his bills paid with only 8 students, and he refused to teach kids’ classes which nobody wants to admit are the only way 90% of modern schools stay open for any length of time. He didn’t understand the Internet at all, and didn’t want to bother setting up a website or even just being findable on Google Search or Maps. We only had word of mouth, and those of us who brought in friends and acquaintances out of interest saw them all quit immediately when they found out it wasn’t going to be incense and zither and learning the secret and mystical ancient teachings of fantasizing your way to not getting punched in the face. Running a martial arts school was the only thing he wanted to do, and once he left the military he wasn’t qualified for much else. He had to take shit side jobs as we lost more and more students, and it weighed on him heavily.
He coped with it in pretty much only two ways: the release of controlled violence of training martial arts, and alcohol. He was half-decent at masking the latter. Not at all in the sense of drinking in secret. It was common for us to go out for beers at the sports bar next door after class. On only a few rare occasions, he showed up unmistakably drunk to teach class. Rather, in the sense that as much as he joked about his drinking he was still a great teacher and still the most individually skilled martial artist I ever knew. How bad could it be if he was still this good? Christ, how good could he otherwise be if it was this bad?
Beyond this, I can only be somewhat vague. This isn’t a hagiography. I’ve gone on too long already, and I haven’t even told any of the hundred cool stories about that school that would beggar the character limit of Whitewind. But there are also stories and histories that aren't mine to tell, and you bluntly wouldn't like a lot of them. I can only say that his private war directly led to his end two years ago this week.
I’m not entirely sure how to end this, if I’m honest. I could say that I miss him, and that would be mostly true, but the final decade of his life wasn’t at all a happy one, so I’d rather say that I hope he found some peace. I can say that I’m glad I met him, because I credit my years training with him to have had more impact on my becoming a sane and functional adult than any other single thing. Not always sane, not always functional, as my own history has proven out. All the more reason that if I dwell too much on it these days, I sometimes shudder to think of the kind of person I’d have turned out to be if I’d never walked in that door.
