Besides that really was "sport" Karate. A sport tournament is a sport tournament. It depends on your school of thought but there is a general distinction between that and 'budo' karate organizations. You don't see most of those highly traditional guys intersted in tournaments but if you were to see a competition you it wouldn't be based on point systems but rather one finishing blow. Basically every strike or defense is potentially your last chance. Now that wouldn't make for much of a fight to watch but that's why it's not for sport so much. I suspect the host would have fared much worse in that.

I figure a lot of what you see in modern karate is an offshoot of it being changed to be made safer to put in schools as part of PE and such for children and the general public. Hell old school karate had eye pokes and groin strikes, throws, grappling, choke holds, you name it :biglaugh:

I finally watched the Karate one. I was actually a little dissapointed. Some of the training they were showing was kinda harcore and oldschool like the weakpoint stuff but most of the stuff was no different then stuff you could find right here in America. The real traditional stuff was treated as "a secret". It was mostly the same watered down stuff that I was talking about above. I thought they were going to delve into some lesser known "traditional stuff" but this is just the same old same old really. Just watching the "block" segment had me laughing. It's the same old block and counter stuff you get taught in black belt mills that would never actually work even in a tourney and certainly wouldn't be found in a 'traditional' martial art. It's fighting by numbers that was simply developed because that kind of step one, step two way of teaching is safer. I'm hoping the other shows are better cuz that bored my pants off. Just imo, no offense if you liked it.

yea, I posted without thinking of the perspective of the karate being a sport.

That's the problem to me. Peoples idea of what individual fighting systems are is based on the sport versions of them. But sport martial art is not Historical martial art. If you have a sport then you have rules to govern it...the RULES BECOME THE SPORT. Therefore the rules "become" the martial art. Karate along with very many others gets a real bad rap based on all this...the idea that it's not a complete fighting system. Well of course it's not based on the way it's practiced in large part today. But it's ridiculous to thing that people would have devised a weaponless street fighting system to defend themselve agaisn't ARMED ASSAILANTS without it being a complete fighting sytem. I.E. completely based on long distance striking. Of course not!

Even all the "historical" stuff they showed was based around the long distance striking part of it for the most part. Oh, well, lol, I don't like to complain I just had this naive vision that they were going to go to some Okinawan vision and find some people preserving the original more complete practices.