Tres Espadas Gear Shift

 We have had a hard time describing what "Tres Espadas" is over the years. The best definition has been "a club for weapon free sparring." Phil Gribbin was clearly the founder of the club. As time went on I was more and more involved with the club. Here I will explain some differences Phil and I had now that we've had time to mourn his death, and what these differences may mean for the future of Tres Espadas.

First though I want to point out that though between the two of us we had studied weapon technique from several experts in several styles, in 2010 none of those experts wanted to do what Phil wanted to do: full contact free sparring with weapons - no calling kill shots, no stopping to listen to judge's opinions, no wasting the precious sparring time that you have with frequent formalities, no spending two thirds of the round getting back into position before resuming sparring. Phil saw what the Dog Brothers were doing, and he wanted to make that safer and more casual so a wider range of friends could participate.

For Phil the entertainment value of watching people fight with weapons was more important than any specific technique being mastered. Phil was skilled at fighting with weapons as he demonstrated many times, but it was more important for him that people had fun. Because of this, it was important to Phil that the weapons look like weapons. Phil believed this had the added benefit of making the fighter react to attacks more as if that fighter was being attacked by a real weapon, but the main reason for the LARP weapons was for the spectacle.

I have had a life long passion for both games and martial arts since I was a young teenager. I have never been comfortable mixing the two together, and I am known to be very uncomfortable around people who are LARPing. The biggest disagreement Phil and I had was over sparring equipment - I wanted it to look like martial arts training gear, but Phil didn't want the interference of martial arts organizations that might attract. Phil won primarily because most of the safety gear that was high quality enough to spar with full contact and without significant regular injury was high end LARP gear.

At first most of the Tres Espadas participants were people with martial arts backgrounds from either traditional Asian martial arts, combat sports, or from people used to fighting in the SCA. At that time it was critical for Tres Espadas to NOT have a curriculum, because it was a research laboratory and we wanted as little bias as possible messing with this style vs. style experiment. Beyond that, Phil was very interested in what effect the shape and reach of weapons would have for different combinations of weapons being used against each other.

But it we had a number of newbies who wanted to do Tres Espadas without having significant previous martial arts experience. At this point I started to ask Phil some very hard questions. His vision, when we reduced it down to the very core, was the Gladiatorial Arenas of ancient Rome. When I accused Phil of essentially wanting to throw newbies to the wolves, he responded "Yes, like Christians to the Lions... Weapon fighting is natural, pain will teach them what not to do."

But it wasn't long before newbies were insisting we teach them something about technique. Phil opened his personal library, a collection of most of the Cold Steel instructional videos, and notes about the weapon technique from our previous training in Filipino and Chinese martial arts. We did not hold lineage in any system, and we had become convinced that any such association or lineage would actually impair the progress of Tres Espadas because of the politics that are inevitably involved in most martial arts organizations.  

Unlike Phil most newbies didn't have the appetite to watch dozens of hours of instruction and pouring over old hand written notes over and over again. This is when we came up with the Tres Espadas badge system: each badge was a crash course in how to use each major type of weapon in Tres Espadas. We tried to keep the badges short enough to be completed in one day, and we tried to reduce the amount of techniques in the badges to only the most useful techniques for free sparring (not all techniques that work in stop and go sparring work well in free sparring, and most weapon martial arts in our area at the time did only did stop and go sparring if they sparred at all.)

The badge system however was still too time consuming, and beginners were not getting up to speed fast enough. Also without a uniform - and we were most decidedly against uniforms - where would the badges even go? To this day in the Tres Espadas supplies there are unused little weapon badges meant to go on martial arts uniforms, which we never did figure out how to use. Because of all of this, plus safety concerns for newbies, we beefed up the Tres Espadas orientation to include enough basic weapon technique that newbies would have some basic idea of how to protect themselves in a free sparring round.

And just as we were perfecting that, Phil died. A few years before Phil died, we were approached by real martial arts experts (Lamont Glass of the Black Bird Training Group and Belton Lubas of Warrior's Strength Martial Arts) who were putting together a Dog Brothers style gathering here in Western Washington, to be called the Pacific North West Warrior Tipon Tipon (or Tipon.) Over time it has proven itself to be a gentler, kinder, more newbie friendly gathering than what you typically see at Dog Brothers, and they intentionally attracted the widest variety of martial artists they can at this local Tipon. We considered this project to be extraordinarily important, and we did all we could to get the word out for the first one, but we were not convinced we should participate. One of them told us that they needed a wide variety of opponents and that we should come, even if we didn't think we were "good enough." We didn't make it that first year, and the second year Phil and I showed up as spectators. After Phil's death I participated in the 3rd year, and there has been Tres Espadas participation in most of those Tipons since.

It turns out that they were right about what we had to offer to the Tipon, even though none of us claim to be martial arts masters. But this had a very significant impact on Tres Espadas, which is it forced us to have two separate sets of safety gear: fencing helmets for fighting at Tipons, versus the plastic face shield karate helmets that wouldn't be too hard on the expensive LARP weapons (because the fencing masks literally grate the latex skin of the LARP weapons.)

Up until Phil's death, two gear problems haunted Tres Espadas after all of our research and financial investment into sparring gear. First, we never had neck protection that we felt was adequate - the longer the weapon - for reasons we don't completely understand - the more likely it is to end up in your opponent's throat, regardless of your intentions. Second, we could never get any weapons LARP gear manufacturer to make a sword short enough for us to use as a machete while sparring. This vexed Phil, who was so into machetes that when he finalized the Tres Espadas logo, he modeled the weapons on the logo on machetes produced by Cold Steel (a gladius representing the Gladiatorial Arenas and the democratic nature of Tres Espadas, a Kukri representing the eastern martial arts, and a pirate cutlass, representing a classic machete that has been slightly more weaponized, and reflecting the pirate-like rejection of authority that Tres Espadas is based on.) This forced us to do things we didn't want to do, such as having a "sword badge" instead of a "machete badge," because we just didn't have any sparring machetes.

At the last Tipon (years after Phil's death,) the famous Blood and Iron Martial Arts school from British Columbia introduced Tres Espadas members to a new brand of sparring weapon, Nihonzashi. Nihonzashi had been producing sparring weapons for traditional Japanese sword fighting arts to be able to spar with, which would have a similar heft to a real sword. If you swing a Nihonzashi sparring katana around, it really feels like you are swinging a katana or boken around rather than some hollow bamboo toy. But what Blood and Iron had brought was western Long Swords that Nihonzashi recently started to manufacture for HEMA type groups.

Upon further investigation, we discovered Nihozashi manufactured a Wakizashi. In theory, this would be the perfect sparring machete - it would look like a martial arts training weapon instead of a LARP weapon, but instead handle like a sword, and not like a flimsy fiberglass and latex sword, but like a bokken or steel sword. Funds were tight, and soon the pandemic shut down most martial arts practice in our area. But that question remained: was the Nihonzashi sparring wakizashi the holy grail for Tres Espadas?

Then it was my birthday, so I ordered a pair. Our hardest padded sparring sticks - the Dog Brothers issued super-hard action flex - were falling apart after almost a decade of abuse and we needed replacements. We recently tested the Nihonzashi Wakizashi:

First, swinging them the wakizashi is considerably more taxing than anything else we spar with. This is generally a good thing, because though not recognized outside of our club, inside of Tres Espadas it is well understood that our wrist and hand conditioning is not up to par with many other weapon fighters who spend a lot more time in drills and katas than we do strengthening their lower arms and grip. This will make sparing itself such a conditioning exercise, as well as help keep us honest about our ability to wield real metal weapons, and our need for appropriate conditioning to wield such weapons.

Second, they are about as painful as the Dog Brothers issue super hard action flex - they don't get the same speed, momentum, and whipping effect, but the strikes have more weight behind them. This again is basically good news - Tres Espadas was never meant to be a stick fighting club - Tres Espadas was always supposed to be about knifes, machetes, hatchets and spears, the weapons of survival that you might actually have to use some day. The extra heft is also more like a randomly obtained improvised weapon - rather than like a well crafted baton or staff - improvised weapons being our main practical justification for training weapons in today's pre-apocalyptic world.

Third they don't flex. Your parries and blocks actually work. This would be a first for a Tres Espadas sparring weapon. Here's what this means for the future of the club, assuming that these weapons will continue to be popular with the club members: 

1. Good bye LARP gear. No more frivolous Calimacil, no more pricey Karate helmets with plastic face shields. We will keep and use the ones we have, but we probably won't replace them as they expire.
2. Most of the time you will be sparring with a Fencing mask, because the actionflex staff, Nihonzashi wakizashi and Cold Steel rubber Tanto all work well with the Fencing mask and will be our most common sparring weapons.
3. This means that in order to own your own head gear, you don't have to buy two helmets, just the least expensive one - the fencing masks.
4. The more people own their own head gear, the more hygienic Tres Espadas becomes, as sharing helmets is definitely the least sanitary thing we do at the club.
5. This means that functionally, there may be in the future a sort of Tres Espadas uniform, namely, the fencing mask itself.
6. This means Tres Espadas members may finally have a place to put their badges - on the neck guard of their fencing mask!

This is all tentative, depending on what club members decide after the pandemic as time goes forward. I would point out that this fits the vision of what Phil had in mind: a club that would continue to evolve to develop the best practices and gear set for weapon free sparring. The change is that it is probably going in more of a martial arts aesthetic direction than a LARP aesthetic direction.