Tres Espadas Influences

Tres Espadas does not actually have "lineage" per say, because no professional instructors ever gave us permission or endorsement to start the club. Instead we have influences. Here are those influences, giving credit even though it may not be wanted...

1. Cold Steel - No living Tres Espadas members have had correspondence with Lynn Thompson, and no member has ever met him (least bit trained with him) in person, but his instructional videos are easily the most influential influence on technique in our club. HOWEVER, we don't endorse all of his material, a lot of the strategy to us seems like it is based on fencing style stop and go sparring, and since that is heresy to Tres Espadas, we spar continuously, and so that makes which, how and when techniques are applied different. To be clear, Thompson has studied numerous martial arts, but the ones he is most vocal about are Filipino Martial Arts (FMA):

2. Dog Brothers - showed us that Gatherings (what we at Tres Espadas call "Tipons" because of the local Warrior Tipon Tipon North West gathering) were possible. Get together and really fight without it being a competition, as safely as possible, with different martial arts schools, continuously without the stop and go fencing nonsense? That inspired this Tres Espadas to form in the first place. More recently at the local Tipon we have seen people who train to participate in Dog Brothers, and that has influenced us as well. To be clear, most people participating in Dog Brothers study FMA explicitly. We do NOT consider ourselves to be a serious as most of the people participating in Tipons, as we are more fans than participants:

3. Doc Fai Wong - or more specifically his first student to be endorsed to start his own branch of Doc Fai Wong's Tai Chi & Choy Lay Fut system, Vern Miller, is the guy that really taught the original Tres Espadas members to brawl back in the day. We learned various staff, dagger and Tai Chi forms from him, but his Sanda-derived Duch-style kickboxing system changed how we saw martial arts forever. He is why we can never return to stop-and-go sparring. You know those long range knife swipes we catch people with when they are retreating? Very Choy Lay Fut there. With that said, no Tres Espadas members ever did weapon sparring of any kind when studying Doc Fai Wong's system, though we have been able to apply some of the moves in sparring since:

4. Dave Bird - mostly by way of Dave Coplan, was the older Tres Espadas members first martial arts master. Known for his FMA and kickboxing, he gave us our first experiences with Arnis and contact sparring in the late 80's:

5. SCA - Or more specifically the now deceased martial arts master Jess Roe who had studied everything from FMA to Budo to Chinese Martial Arts to US Naval Cutlass fighting. He would have been the first to tell you that the serious side of SCA martial arts was originally founded on FMA, which they adapted to western weapon simulations. I recently had a well respected FMA instructor and HEMA (European weapon martial arts) participant comment that as HEMA adopts continuous sparring they should not become WEKAF (a sport form of FMA stick fighting.) But I have to wonder how far removed HEMA is from FMA if SCA of 40 years ago was closely related to FMA:

5. Esgrima Criolla - South American Knife Fighting, which involves a lot more than knives. If I had to classify Tres Espadas as a Martial Art (which I don't), I might classify it as an Esgrima Criolla club. FMA practitioners in South America have resurrected this nearly lost art form, and we have had some direct correspondence with them over the years on Facebook:

6. Aikido (Honolulu Hombu Dojo) - by way of Bruce Baumann, he was focused on teaching us self-defense, bokenjitsu and Samurai strategy. Our "never stop moving" footwork strategy and dive rolling for weapons goes back to our Aikido from early 90's high school. Our swift overhead counters really go back to Aikido style bokenjitsu as much as they do Choy Lay Fut. Also our tendency to look at Tai Chi as a martial art rather than a yoga style is rooted back to our earlier Aikido days.

7. MMA - more recently various Tres Espadas members have taken to studying boxing, wrestling, BJJ and MMA generally and have started to incorporate that knowledge into the Tres Esapadas repertoire of techniques.

So a final note on FMA: when FMA was codified, they drew on Martial Arts from all over the Philippines. That is an ethnically diverse place, meaning they were drawing from martial arts from all over Asia and parts of Europe. FMA is one of the first weapon MMAs to incorporate martial arts from around the globe. As a result, FMA has 99% of all the weapon techniques from all other martial arts.

Because of the fighting and sparring traditions in FMA, many FMA schools have a truly deep and vast understanding of weapon martial arts. As a result FMA has become a shared language for talking about weapon martial arts (for example almost everyone exposed to FMA can tell you what the 12 angles of attack are) and it has been used as a basis to bring back mostly lost western arts such as SCA fighting, Esgrima Criolla, and probably somewhere along the line even HEMA.

Tres Espadas has been known to irreverently mock lineage. However we appreciate the fact that as recently as the 1900's people in East Asia were getting chased out of their homes and killed over the Martial Arts knowledge they possessed, and that in each generation teachers of the martial arts sacrifice vast amounts of time and other resources in order to pass their knowledge on. Though the nature of our club leads us to eschew lineage, we have great respect for the masters who exposed any of their knowledge to us.