Page 164 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

demonstrating their “power” by offering the expl anation: “If you and I were to
spar, I might kill you.” Whenever I hear thi s I kno w that I am listeni ng to a

charlatan—true masters have control. On the other han d, some very po werful
skills really can be developed and it is true that the gr eatest secrets are ke pt for
a very select circle. There is always the linger ing ques tion—w ha t is really
possible and what is hype?

Until I went to Taiwan, I had no idea what to expect . And sur e eno ugh, the
top competitors were armed with a ski ll set I had never dreamed of. The y were
remarkable athletes who had grown up in a cul tur e that cul tivated the
refinement of Push Hands in the same way that the old Soviet Uni on ha d

mastered the engineering of gr eat chess pl ayers. Fo llowing tha t fi st
tournament, I was armed with direct obs ervation and many hour s of vide o of
the toughest Push Hands players in the world. That video footage of the top
Taiwanese competitors would prove to be a cr uci al well of inf ormation.

After my first trip to Taiwan, I saw that the greatest pr actitioner s were no t
mystics, but profoundly dedicated martial artists who had refine d certain
fundamental skills at a tremendo us ly hi gh level. The subt lety of the ir
unbalancing techniques was sometimes mind- bo ggl ing. Whi le an unt raine d

eye might have seen nothing, thes e pl ayers were us ing incredibl y po tent
combinations designed to provoke the tini est of leans—an d the n oppo ne nt s
were on the floor. From 2000 to 2002, I studi ed thes e tapes in det ail and slowly
refined my game. During those years much of my training was with my de ar

friend Tom Otterness, who is William Chen ’s senior studen t and one of the
most powerful internal martial artists I have ever kno wn. Tom is a scul pt or
who spends his days molding clay and who subs equen tly has hands and arms
that feel like a bear’s—add over thirty-fi e years of Tai Chi training and it’s no

surprise that Tom hits like an avalanche. When Tom and I first started worki ng
together, he would smash me all over the ring. I felt like a tenni s ba ll meeting
a wall of force, and to make matters worse Tom was also a heat-seeking missile
—there was no avoiding his power. I was forced to add subt lety to my

neutralizations and to build up my root I so I could survive his onslaughts.
Working with Tom night after night gav e me the con ce that I coul d stand
in the ring with anyone.
When I went back to the Chung Hwa Cup in late November 2002, I was

ready, or so I thought. By now I had won the U.S. National s for thr ee straight
years. I regularly competed in multipl e weight categories, often gi ving up over