So, one day in class Sensei Murphy said he’d like to practice kumite with me. I believe I was a yellow belt at the time. I wasn’t worried because I trusted Sensei completely and I knew that he was a gentle person and that this truly was an opportunity for me to learn something that I probably wouldn’t learn in kumite with a peer. After “hajime”, Sensei softly said “When you blink, I’m going to hit you.” I thought that was some pretty good “smack talk” but I kind of ignored it because that would be virtually impossible. As we continued sizing each other up, I blinked. In that moment I felt a blast of wind in my face and despite the fact that Sensei always said “Hard fist to soft body parts and open hand to the hard head; you don’t want to have someone’s teeth imbedded into your knuckles.”, with that blast of wind I felt a knuckle gently touch my upper lip. By the time my blink ended, he was back to his normal stance. I never saw any of the movement! I had heard that Sensei had a reputation for incredibly fast hands, but this was absolutely astonishing! That’s actually the only part of the kumite that I remember.
Sensei Murphy was also quite accomplished with the katana…
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