Is Steven Seagal, y’know… Good at martial arts?

Mat writes…

I have been asked, as the resident martial arts correspondent of the Imagination & Junk podcast empire, to write a short piece that answers this question. Happy to:

Not really.

Thanks, everyone – enjoy the podcast.

All right, Bill said that’s not enough words. Fine.

First things first – this won’t be a discussion of any other aspect of Steven Seagal’s life or career. To do that would require so many justified trigger warnings that Clippy would rise from the dead, pop up on my screen, and tell me he’s called the police. No, I’m just going to focus here on the man as a martial artist, as, after all, he does claim to be a great and important one.

Talking of claims – let’s go through a few…



One of the most well-known Seagal “facts” is that he was the first westerner to open a dojo in Japan. It’s not true, though – he just married someone whose parents already owned the dojo, in an effort to escape the Vietnam draft. He loves to tell stories of how he used his fighting skills to tangle with the fearsome Yakuza while protecting the dojo, but that same woman he married says the closest he came to that was yelling at some drunk kids.



His chosen martial discipline is aikido. He is, according to him, a 7th degree black belt. His ex-wife disputes this. She says that he is, at most, a 1st degree black belt, and only achieved this grading because the person judging him fell asleep. No shame there, mate. We’ve all fallen asleep while watching Steven Seagal at least once.



He has spent his life lying with the confidence of a man who never saw the internet coming – and now all his lies are easily disproved. Friends with Bruce Lee? Nope. An ex-CIA black ops frogman? I mean, come on. 



There is a truth at the heart of this, though - he did study aikido and teach in Japan. Although even there he couldn’t stop himself embellishing - he claims to have studied directly under the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, which would have been a challenge since Seagal first made it to Japan in 1971, a couple of years after Ueshiba had died.



But. He can, at least to some degree, do the martial art that he says he can do. And aikido can be a beautiful flowing art, with some techniques that can be effective, a nice philosophy underpinning it, and really cool trousers.



But it’s also the perfect martial art for a lumpy asshole to pretend to be good at. The joint locking techniques, when performed in serious combat, are designed to cause pain and/or snap bits of your opponent’s anatomy, so it's not really feasible to practice or demonstrate your skills for real, because people generally don’t like having parts of their body broken. So aikido has its own kind of sparring - randori. And here's where things get murky.



When demonstrating aikido there are two distinct roles - the nage (the person delivering the technique) and the uke (the person receiving the move). It's the uke's job to attack the nage in a predetermined way, so that the nage can apply the correct technique. Once a particular joint lock is delivered, instead of standing there, hearing a snap, and whimpering, the uke will fling themselves to the floor in a stylised breakfall, thus communicating the intention of the move.



It's an odd kind of choreographed sparring - the job of the uke is to make the nage look good. You see, of course, how this could lead to - shall we say - potential crookedness.



To anyone watching - friends, family, mid-level movie executives – the nage’s expertise in the martial art is entirely evident in the reactions of their opponents. Oh, I'm sorry, my mistake, akido doesn’t have opponents, it has partners.



Don't get me wrong. Aikido is a martial art with much to its credit, and I've studied a little of it myself. But when you see someone like Steven Seagal performing randori, and throwing his students around like ragdolls, well, it's pro wrestling, baby!

 When the proof of your mastery is in the way you stand there while bodies fly around at your slightest touch, fakery seems obvious.



Say what you like about the other martial arts studs who competed with Seagal for Blockbuster shelf space, but they could, for the most part, DO STUFF. Jean Claude Van Damme's training in karate, kickboxing and ballet meant that he could twirl his way into the air with absolutely gorgeous spinning kicks. Jackie Chan’s childhood spent in a Beijing opera school meant that his physical talents in Kung Fu, acrobatics and physical comedy would later enable him to literally do things that nobody else had the creativity to think up or the guts to do. Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, all of these absolute titans could - as they say in the kung fu world - throw some serious shapes.



Big Steve, though, chose a martial art where he can stand in the middle of cloud of people, and as they, one-by-one, run at him with their arm raised in a cartoonish attack, he will dispatch them to the floor with god-like power, with nothing much more than a wave of his wrist or a forearm slapping a chest. It's the martial arts equivalent of Bugs Bunny holding the matador's cape at a cliff edge and watching the bull run through it and pause for a self-reflective moment before plummeting. It's like that, and just as effective a fighting method.



Steve has a reputation for hurting stuntmen, in order to assert his dominance, because he’s an unpleasant toxic human-sized baby. It doesn't feel like it would be hard to real-hurt someone that has literally been paid to get pretend-hurt by you. Just a matter of… oh, what's the phrase? Deciding to be a dick.



This doesn't always pan out for him, though. There's a famous story that all Seagologists know, and it took place on the set of "Out For Justice," the movie that Bill and I are discussing on the latest episode of our podcast. So if you'll allow me?



Steve is on set, and he's telling anyone who'll listen about how it's impossible for anyone to ever choke him out. He apparently learnt a secret technique in Japan that makes him invulnerable to chokes.

 One of the stunt guys hears this and wanders over. Unfortunately for Steve, the stunt guy in question is the legendary fighter, wrestler, martial artist and all round tough cookie Gene LeBell.

Look at that face, right? He's the real deal. He didn't just know Bruce Lee - he taught him how to grapple.

 So Gene hears Steve say how he can never be choked. He chokes him. Steve passes out. And shits himself.



Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s embellishment. Either way it's more real than one of Steve's aikido demonstrations.