Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 12

Now, Ah Hing, I’m going to teach you how to fight like a woman.

—GRANDMASTER IP MAN, Bruce Lee’s teacher

REX APPLEGATE got off to a bumpy start with the Twins. He was a massive guy—six foot three inches hardened into 230 pounds of muscle from a boyhood in Oregon logging towns—and so skilled with his fists and trigger finger that even as a young second lieutenant, he was handpicked by Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan to teach stealth fighting to the espionage-and-sabotage unit that would become the Central Intelligence Agency.

Word had it that two old Brits were the best gutter fighters in the world, so Wild Bill sent Applegate to find out what the Twins were up to. “We soon sized each other up,” Applegate recalled, and he was unimpressed. Maybe Fairbairn knew a little judo and was flashy with a pistol, but in a real scrap, Applegate would smother the shrimp. Fairbairn must have sensed what he was thinking, because during a demonstration he invited Applegate to come forward. “I want you to attack me,” Fairbairn offered. “Just like you were going to kill me.”

Applegate was thirty years younger and nearly a hundred pounds heavier, but, more important, he knew how to dismantle these so called martial artists: you psych them out with some noise, then run ’em over before they have time to set up any of their little flippy moves. “The first thing to do when on the offensive is to weaken the opponent’s balance mentally and physically,” Applegate explained. “I let out a roar and went for him.” The soldiers in the front row had to scramble out of the way as Applegate came sailing back at them. “I had been in some bar room brawls and held my own,” a stunned Applegate would recall. “It got my attention.”

Whatever the Twins were teaching, it was different from anything Applegate had seen before. “We are reverting to the type of individual warfare of earlier times,” Fairbairn explained. Your strength won’t help, he told Applegate. Neither will boxing, wrestling, or most anything you might have learned in a karate dojo. Those are just games, with made-up rules and show-offy skills. You can break a board with your foot? Big deal; try it on the Twins and you’ll go home with that foot in a cast. You’re a Greco-Roman wrestling champion? Super; Fairbairn could cripple a wrestler as easily as he’d manhandled Applegate.

“Stay on your feet,” Applegate learned. “A cardinal rule of this kind of combat is never go to the ground.”

But wait—wouldn’t mixed martial artists later claim that 90 percent of all fights end up on the ground and win bouts all the time by bringing the action to the mat? Very true, Fairbairn would reply—and if you find yourself inside an octagon with a cushioned floor and a Brazilian in surf shorts, then go ahead and grapple. But in a real fight—with no rules, no ref, no tap-outs, no guarantee the other guy doesn’t have a weapon—the ground is where you go to die. If an attacker gets you down, you’d better grab his testicles, jam a thumb in his eyeball, tear his ear off with your teeth, whatever it takes to kick free and scramble back up so you can use the “Bronco Kick,” one of Fairbairn’s pet moves: jumping on the guy’s chest until his ribs are jelly. Real violence isn’t about sportsmanship, Fairbairn stressed; it’s about survival. You’re not shaking his hand and wishing him well. You’re hoping he’s still lying there when you leave.

Boxing and wrestling aren’t natural forms of combat, the Twins explained. They’re natural forms of peacocking, created by and for men to showboat two unique male attributes: bulk and upper-body strength. Otherwise they’re useless. No human in the wild would ever throw a punch if he could avoid it, not even against another human. Why risk breaking all those fragile bones and knuckle joints, or jabbing out an arm that can be trapped, twisted, and snapped?

But that’s not even the big red flag. There’s a more glaring giveaway that boxing and wrestling are just recreation: girls and old guys aren’t good at them. As a rule of thumb, performance aberration in a basic skill is a good way to evaluate whether it’s natural to a species. When you spot a giant ability gap between ages and genders, you know you’re looking at nurture, not nature. Male and female geese differ in size but not in speed; otherwise, migration would be mayhem. Same with trout: if males rocketed past the females, they’d always be first to eat, last to be eaten, and on their way to a disastrous shortage of spawning partners. Gender and age differences don’t disappear, of course, but they’re tremendously diminished.

Especially among humans. Compared with other animals, men and women are remarkably alike. We’re roughly the same size and shape, and share the same biological weaponry. Men aren’t specially equipped with horns, fangs, or giant racks of antlers, like the males of other species, and they don’t dwarf women; men are only about 15 percent bigger, not 50 percent, like male gorillas. We need to be similar because for most of our existence we shared similar jobs. Humans survived for millions of years as hunter-gatherers, ranging across the terrain together in search of edible plants, digable roots, and catchable game. We worked together, and as couples we stayed together: humans choose one mate at a time, and we do it peacefully.

That’s why our courtships are a dance, not a death match. Apes and elks battle for the right to reproduce and take multiple mates by force, but humans have a more runway-model approach: rather than fight, we flaunt. Men primp themselves up to look like hearty specimens and sturdy providers, then wait for the women to make their choices. That’s one of the necessities of monogamy: apes can afford to tear one another apart, since the alpha male ends up with a harem. But in a system of one-to-one mating, courtship can’t conclude with half the males on life support.

We’re creatures of restraint—of endurance and elasticity—and that’s where men and women, old and young, are most alike. When it comes to tests of endurance, like distance running and swimming, the performance difference between ages and genders is even smaller than the difference in our size: it’s only about 10 percent. A twenty-five-year-old man wasn’t the one who battled through fifty-three hours of jellyfish stings and bruising currents to become the first to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage; it was a senior citizen, sixty-four-year-old Diana Nyad. The fastest female ever to swim the twenty-three-plus-mile English Channel was just thirty minutes behind the fastest man, and a thirty-year-old bankruptcy lawyer named Amelia Boone nearly won the World’s Toughest Mudder obstacle race in 2012, covering ninety miles and more than three hundred obstacles to finish second overall and ten miles ahead of the guy in third. Middle-aged women are likewise no strangers to the lead pack in ultramarathons. Pam Reed was forty-one when she outran all the men to win the 135-mile Badwater ultra across Death Valley in 2002; the following year, she returned and did it again. Diana Finkel was just shy of forty when she led for the first ninety miles of the brutally hard Hardrock 100, finishing second overall.

With a little more practice, the same could be true for throwing. Anatomically, there’s no reason women can’t fire a ball as hard as men. Strength and physique aren’t the issue: when researchers tested Aboriginal Australian girls who grow up hunting alongside boys, they found the difference in top-end throwing velocity was only about 20 percent. Mo’Ne Davis, the thirteen-year-old South Philadelphia schoolgirl who pitched shut-outs against all-boy teams to lead her squad to the Little League World Series, routinely fires 70 mile-per-hour fastballs even though she’s only five feet four inches tall and weighs 111 pounds. Hip rotation is the key: whipping a rock is simple but sequential, so if you don’t practice the link between opening the hips and releasing the arm, you’ll lose the knack or never learn it in the first place. The reason women don’t throw as well as men, it seems, is because they don’t throw as much. But the raw weaponry is still there, and it’s the best weaponry we’ve got.

That was the Twins’ special talent. For men and women alike, they found a way to turn throwing into fighting.

What’s the worst fix you can find yourself in? Fairbairn asked Applegate.

Jumped from behind, Applegate replied. Someone gets the drop on you. Now you’ve got a gun in your back and your hands in the air.

Fine. Show me.

Fairbairn offered himself up as a prisoner, turning around and clasping his hands behind his head. Applegate approached warily. He pulled his sidearm, jammed it hard into Fairbairn’s spine, and—

Fairbairn helped Applegate up off the floor and handed him back his gun. Care to see it again?

For the second time, Fairbairn turned and put his hands in the air. He spun around more slowly this time, sweeping the gun away with his left hand and grabbing Applegate’s chin with his right, finishing him off with a knee to the groin and a shove to the ground. Even though Fairbairn was moving at demonstration speed, Applegate couldn’t stop him. “Strange as it may seem,” Applegate learned, “the gunman cannot think fast enough to pull the trigger and make a hit before your body is out of the line of fire.”

Now look right at me, Fairbairn ordered. Applegate stuck the empty pistol in Fairbairn’s belly and curled his finger around the trigger, watching Fairbairn’s eyes for a flicker of intent. Fairbairn twisted and slapped, knocking the gun away before Applegate could click the trigger. He bent back Applegate’s wrist, driving the big man to his knees and yanking away the gun. Fairbairn’s feet never moved. All he did was dip his knees, pivot his hips, and bend his elbow.

“The body twist is the basis of all disarming,” Applegate realized, but that was just the beginning: for the Twins, the body twist was the basis of everything. In the jungle, body twist is so potent that baboons use it as a white flag of surrender; to avoid a fight, they let their trunk and abdominal muscles sag, indicating their most powerful weapon has been deactivated.

Humans, Fairbairn demonstrated, come pre-equipped with the same primate power. Fairbairn ran Applegate through a series of gutter-fighting moves—breaking free from a stranglehold; recovering from a knockdown; bringing a bigger man to the ground; and, of course, the “Match-Box Attack.” All Fairbairn’s tactics had three things in common: they were quick, easy, and appalling. “Any individual in combat in which his life is at stake very quickly reverts to the animal,” it dawned on Applegate. “After a few seconds, and especially after he has been hit or jarred by his opponent, the blood lust is so aroused that from then on his combat is instinctive.”

Take the Match-Box. Once you know it, you can walk down a dodgy street at night or escape from gunpoint in the back of a car with nothing more lethal in your pocket than a cell phone—or, in Fairbairn’s day, a small cardboard box of matches. If you find yourself in an apprehensive situation, stick close to the walls on the right side of the street and casually slip your right hand into your jacket pocket. Wrap your fist around the phone, with the top just below your thumb and index finger. Damn! You were right to be nervous, because here comes trouble. Someone’s moving in fast with—what? a gun? a knife?—in his hand.

The phone will now save your life, but only because of body twist.

“Parry the gun away from your body with your left forearm,” Fairbairn instructs. Now bring out the phone; by clenching it in your fist, the bones in your hand compress into a hard block. “Turning your body from the hip, strike your opponent hard on the left side of his face, as near to the jawbone as possible.” You barely need to move your arm; keep your shoulder pinned to your side and come up hard with the forearm, letting your hips do the work. “The odds of knocking your opponent unconscious by this method are at least two to one,” Fairbairn adds. “The fact that this can be accomplished with a match-box is not well-known, and for this reason is not likely to raise your opponent’s suspicion of your movements.”

Applegate quickly grasped the power of Fairbairn’s discovery. Body twist, like instinctive aim, works for anyone and can be mastered fast: you can pick up the basics in an afternoon and perfect them with just ten minutes or so of daily practice. You don’t need years of training in a dojo and a drawerful of colored belts. What you need most, Applegate realized, is to remember what it’s like to fight for real. In our quest to become more humane, we’ve forgotten that self-defense is a survival skill, not a spectator sport. Fighting has been turned into entertainment and toned down so much, it’s more about what you can’t do than what you can:

You can only fight guys your size, with padded gloves, under a referee’s supervision and a physician’s care, for three minutes at a time before taking a one-minute break and sitting on your own stool in your own corner of a roped-off ring. You’ve got to keep your feet on the judo tatami and tie back your hair, and you can’t lock your fingers together or kick your way out of a grip. Even in the Wild West of Ultimate Fighting, it’s forbidden to bite, spit, curse, claw, pinch, throat-strike, head-butt, flesh-twist, eye-gouge, hair-pull, fishhook, groin-grab, heel-kick a kidney, head-kick a grounded opponent, or fake an injury. You must wear officially sanctioned shorts and “be clean and present a tidy appearance.”

Clean and tidy? We’ve become so civilized over the past hundred years, we’re denying what it was like for the previous two million. Worst of all, we’ve mothballed our deadliest weapon and taken our fascia out of the fight.

Except, as Fairbairn discovered long ago, when the sun went down on a certain Chinese waterfront.

Fairbairn first heard about Wing Chun while recovering from the beating he suffered when he first arrived in Shanghai as a new policeman in 1907. The name means “humming a song in the springtime,” and it nicely captures Wing Chun’s ease and apparent languor. Your stance is barely recognizable as a stance. You don’t put up your dukes to protect your head or clench your hands into tiger claws. Your hands are so loose and open, you could be playing patty-cake. But beneath that effortless appearance is a shrewd insight into the science of elastic energy.

If you’ve heard of Wing Chun, it’s probably thanks to Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr., who credits it with saving his life. Downey was one of the most promising young actors of the 1980s, but by 1996 he’d become a toxic menace. He was arrested for cocaine; for heroin; for crack; for carrying a concealed Magnum pistol; for breaking out of court-ordered rehab. One day he was arraigned on drug charges, then arrested again hours later for stumbling into a neighbor’s home in an apparent heroin stupor and passing out in his underwear in one of the children’s bedrooms. “It’s like I have a loaded gun in my mouth and my finger’s on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gunmetal,” Downey said shortly before he was sentenced to a year in prison and led off with his hands shackled to his waist. After he was released, Downey discovered Wing Chun and began training for hours at a time, often five days a week. Something about Wing Chun made him feel balanced and alive. It wasn’t the discipline; it was the sense that his body was finally doing what it was supposed to.

“Wing Chun teaches you what to concentrate on, whether you’re here or out in the world dealing with problems,” the actor explained once when a reporter joined him for a workout. “It’s second nature for me now. I don’t even get to the point where there’s a problem.”

“You don’t want to fight the truck,” Downey’s instructor added. “You want to step out of the way.”

Legend has it that Wing Chun is the only martial art invented by a woman. Ng Mui, it’s said, was studying at the Shaolin Temple when it was attacked by Qing dynasty soldiers. The temple was destroyed and monks were slaughtered, but the Five Elders—including Ng Mui—managed to escape. While Ng Mui was hiding in the forest, she saw a crane being ambushed by a wildcat at the side of a stream. There was no way the crane, with its two awkward legs, could survive the cat’s fangs, razor claws, and four-legged athleticism—yet it did, pivoting and twisting its wings until the cat was defeated by its own ferocity. The parallels to Ng Mui’s own situation were unmistakable, and she began transforming the lesson into a fighting style that would make her as formidable as any man. That meant solving the toughest puzzle of any martial art: surviving inside the “trapping zone.”

Whenever your opponent is close enough to grab you, you’ve entered his trapping zone. Boxers depend on the length of their jab and the quickness of their feet to escape the trapping zone, while karate and tae kwon do teach long, snapping kicks; the goal is to pop your opponent from a distance and keep as far from his hands as possible. The trapping zone rewards bulk and brute force; it neutralizes speed and skill. It’s the big man’s friend and the little guy’s nightmare—yet oddly, it’s where the feminine style of Wing Chun works best.

Wing Chun tells you to step right into the trap and make yourself at home. Don’t bob and weave or even turn sideways to offer a smaller target: just face your attacker, square up your feet, and wait for him to do his worst. But first, make sure to “mark your centerline.” The essence of Wing Chun is the belief that human power is strongest when it spirals up from your feet through the center of your body. You can access that centerline energy by following these four steps:

Slide your feet out to shoulder width.

Sink your thighs into the slightest of squats.

Cross your open hands in front of your crotch.

Then raise them chest high in that most instinctive of defensive positions—an X.

Now you’re ready for Sticky Hands to turn your opponent’s trapping zone into your own.

Sticky Hands is next-level wobble power. It takes your attacker’s force, merges it with your own, and slams the doubled-up energy right back at him. The key is body connection; as soon as he starts throwing punches, you lightly “stick” your hands to his, deflecting the blows rather than blocking them. When he cracks a hard right at your eye, you divert it with your left wrist and use his force to pivot you like a wheel around an axle. Now it’s your turn to hit, using the momentum of his push to power your right arm. He’s belting himself in the face with your fist.

“The hands are swinging doors, built on the fortress of legs,” the great Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man liked to tell his students. “Ip Man did not move a great deal,” one of his followers observed. “When someone punched at him, he moved just enough to avoid it, but when he attacked he went straight for his opponent’s center, either striking him or making him lose his balance.” Ip Man was just as stingy with his feet. The higher your foot, the more compromised your balance, so Ip Man only kicked low; never those big, crowd-pleasing head shots you see in tournaments, only short bug-stompers aimed at your knee, crotch, shin, or ankle. Wing Chun isn’t a spectator sport; it’s a science of crippling force, designed to end fights fast by hitting quickest where it hurts the most.

William Fairbairn was exactly the kind of guy who wasn’t supposed to be learning Wing Chun. China was suspicious of outsiders even when times were good, and the early 1900s were anything but. Chinese fighting secrets were for Chinese only, not to be shared with foreigners who could use the arts against them. But even though he was a blue-eyed Brit who’d been in Shanghai only a few months, Fairbairn had a chip to play. One of the duties of the empress’s security-and-intelligence force was to recover royal antiquities pillaged during the Boxer Rebellion, that disastrous uprising by Chinese militants against foreign influence in 1899. Fairbairn was a great resource for finding lost booty; between his raids on underworld dens, his contacts in the British military, and his relationship with the European nationals he helped protect, he could get leads on lost treasures the empress’s men had no hope of finding. In return, Fairbairn was allowed to train with Cui Jindong, the Wing Chun master who taught the empress dowager’s bodyguards.

Under Cui Jindong’s tutelage, Fairbairn learned something surprising: violence has a pretty thin encyclopedia. Every way you can think of to punch a windpipe or knee a groin, someone else figured it out ten thousand years ago. For self-defense, that was great news: if Fairbairn could master Sticky Hands, he could download every conceivable attack into his fascia memory and turn his body into an Automatic Response System. Like instinctive aim, Sticky Hands takes your higher brain out of the fight and activates your animal self. When an attacker grabs your wrist, up comes your elbow; if he tries to tackle you around the waist, your foot takes out his knee before he gets there. You don’t need to think or even see—just react.

For the Shanghai police, often facing long odds in dark basements, fascia-powered fighting was a lifesaver. And when Fairbairn and Sykes brought it back with them to Britain, they found it was just as effective for the women and poets and professors about to be dropped behind German lines on sabotage missions. “Sykes was the instructor who taught me silent killing,” recalled Nancy Wake, the Australian party girl who became one of the SOE’s best agents. Nancy’s specialties were strolling past Gestapo offices in France to chuck grenades through the door and rescuing downed Allied fighter pilots by using her sex appeal and ice-cold nerve to distract checkpoint guards.

“I’d slink right up and purr, ‘Do you want to search me?’” Nancy would recall. “God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was.” The Gestapo nicknamed the mystery woman the White Mouse and put her at the top of its Most Wanted list, but Nancy was uncatchable. Seventeen times, she successfully led British fighters all the way across the Pyrenees to freedom. “If a German came at me I’d kick him in the ‘three-piece service’ and chop him in the side of the neck.” Once, when her Resistance band was surrounded, Nancy shot her way out and stole a bike, pedaling more than 125 miles through the night to safety. When a German sentry blocked her escape during an arms plant raid, the Mouse’s hands came up just the way Sykes had taught her. “Whack,” recalled Nancy. “It killed him, all right.”

Miraculously, Nancy Wake survived the war and lived to a fiery age ninety-eight. During a postwar dinner in France, she heard the waiter mutter under his breath that he preferred Germans to “the rotten English.” Nancy followed him to the kitchen, hit him Sykes style, and knocked him cold. When the manager rushed over, Nancy’s dinner companion advised him to walk away or she’d drop him next. “There had been nothing violent about my nature before the war,” Nancy shrugged. “The enemy made me tough.”

A Mouse who thrives inside the trapping zone: what a perfect bookend for Ng Mui, the battling abbess who three hundred years earlier proved that women could fight as well as men. Except the origins of Wing Chun, it turns out, are a little more complicated. And a lot more Greek.

Deep within the Labyrinth on the island of Crete, Theseus felt his way through the dark stone maze, nudging his feet past the gnawed corpses of men and women who’d come before. He was just a teenager, with no help or weapons. Turning a corner, he came face-to-face with the Minotaur: half man, half bull, and hungry for human blood. A new art was about to be born.

“Much weaker in strength than the Minotaur, Theseus fought with him and won using pankration, as he had no knife,” goes the legend from Pindar’s Fifth Nemean Ode. Pankration basically means “total power and knowledge,” but the word resonates deeper than the definition: it’s associated with gods and heroes, with those who conquer by tapping every talent. Pankration is a fighting style that not only combines boxing and wrestling, but exceeds them, with a savvy of its own. Some pankration techniques, like the gastrizein heel kick, have never been surpassed. “It’s one of the most powerful offensive moves we’ve ever seen,” a modern martial-arts expert marveled after watching a demonstration. “The attacker’s knee and foot are chambered like a piston and then stomped into the opponent’s stomach, genitals, or thighs. It channels some 2000 pounds of force into the opponent, more than enough to break a baseball bat.”

The scariest thing about pankration is when it’s not scary at all. The ready position is so nonchalant and relaxed, you could be a blink away from taking a gastrizein to the knee and never suspect the person across from you is poised to attack. If you’re set to play catch with a toddler, you’re set to fight pankration: just face forward, dip your knees, and raise your open hands. It looks less like art and more like an accident, which speaks to pankration’s ancestral authority: it feels so natural because it is. Pankration refines raw impulse, chucking out everything that doesn’t help and focusing on the three things that do: ease, surprise, and stopping power. You activate without thinking. Attack without signaling. And strike, like any other animal in a fight for its life, without mercy.

Pankration is so frighteningly true to real violence that for years it wasn’t included in the original Olympics. “To get his opponent down and by throttling, pummeling, biting, kicking reduce him to submission is the natural instinct of the savage or the child,” explained E. Norman Gardiner, D. Litt., the Oxfordian ancient sport specialist. “But this rough and tumble is not suitable for athletic competition; it is too dangerous and undisciplined.” Pankration finally made it into the 33rd Olympic Games, in 648 b.c., with two rules: no biting, no eye gouging. Otherwise, it was anything goes; the entire range of human cruelty and creativity were at your disposal. The Spartans still grumbled and refused to participate: if you can’t blind your opponent and chomp his nose, then what’s the point?

But for everyone else, pankration became “the most exciting and worthiest of all sports in ancient Olympia,” as the Greek chronicler Philostratus put it, even though some bouts didn’t last much longer than a sneeze. There were no points or pins; you won as soon as you put the other guy into unbearable agony. One champion won three Olympic titles by getting really good at snatching his opponent’s fingers and bending them back. Matches could end only in death, submission, or—as in one epic contest—both: the great champion Arrhachion was in a choke hold when he managed to grab his opponent’s foot. Ankle breaking is a classic pankration move, and so effective that thousands of years later it would be the reason the Twins protected their feet by never risking anything higher than a crotch kick. But Arrhachion locked on too late. His opponent begged for mercy, forfeiting the match, but not before Arrhachion suffocated. Victory went to the dead man.

Pankration’s creation myth is peculiar, and not just because it has two. Storytellers couldn’t agree on the original event: was it Theseus against the Minotaur, or Hercules versus the Nemean Lion? But they were unanimous on one key quirk: while boxing and wrestling were fruits of the gods passed down from Apollo and Hermes, pankration was born from human weakness. Theseus was just a boy out to prove himself when he went to Crete, and Hercules wasn’t exactly the hulking He-Man we’ve come to assume. Hercules was never the strongest guy in the fight; in fact, Pindar even went hard the other way and chalked Hercules’s achievements up to little-man syndrome: Hercules was “of short stature with an unbending will.” The heroes were still plenty powerful, but muscle alone would never get them out of a jam. Their real strength was their ears: Theseus and Hercules were lifelong learners and equal-opportunity students, always seeking advice and just as happy to get it from women. That was the mark of a hero and the signature of pankration: total power and knowledge.

And that knowledge has been around a long time. History actually has a dog in the fight in the Battle of the Pankration Myths. When archeologists cracked open sealed caves on Crete—the site of Theseus’s showdown with the Minotaur—they discovered pottery and wall paintings from 1700 B.C. with the earliest depictions of pankration. King Minos really did rule Crete, and his ships often returned from Egypt with hot new discoveries—like the peculiar Hittite religious rituals of bull leaping, boxing, and grappling. On Crete, these rites were honed into martial arts, then exported to mainland Greece. Naturally, anything involving total power and knowledge was irresistible to a combat scientist like Alexander the Great, who still slept with the Iliad under his head. Alexander became a true believer as soon as he saw his best Macedonian warrior defeated by Dioxippus, a pankration fighter from Athens. Alexander’s armies learned pankration, and as they marched east into Persia and India, it’s believed pankration spread toward Asia and became the inspiration for all modern martial arts.

So—no Ng Mui? No Five Elders, no cat-whomping crane?

Nope.

There’s no evidence that the origin myth of Wing Chun is any more real than the Minotaur. But just because it’s make-believe doesn’t mean it’s not true. Wing Chun took the crucial elements of pankration and improved the backstory: if you’re really out to prove that natural movement and elasticity can make anyone a fearsome fighter, don’t use a couple of monster-killing heroes to make your case; use a fightin’ nun on the run from an evil dynasty. Ng Mui wasn’t dreamed up just to repackage Greek fashion for a Chinese audience; rather, it took pankration off the battlefield and away from the oiled-and-naked manly Games and steered it back to its original message: that when it comes to real strength and self-defense, muscle power isn’t the path.

Despite the revamp, the art that could help everyone was taught to almost no one. Dynasty warfare and clan secrecy kept it underground in China, while for everyone else it was ruined by the Romans. Under the Caesars, pankration was degraded into a gladiatorial spectacle and became so savage it was eventually banned by the Christian emperors. No one really had the stomach after that to revive something so closely associated with the blood-crazed Colosseum. “It may be suggested that the Pancratium is too terrible to serve any useful purpose in these modern times,” conceded a British sportsman who failed to bring pankration back to life in 1898.

And so the greatest Olympic sport faded away and vanished….

Except on the island where it was born. In the mountains of Crete, pankration was passed down between generations of rebels who never forgot what it could do and why it was created. After the German invasion, an odd photo made its way back to British Intelligence: it showed three German soldiers being ambushed by a trio of Cretan freedom fighters, one of whom has his legs scissored around a German’s back. It’s classic pankration, and exactly the message the Twins were trying to get across to their students back in the dirty-trickster training camps:

All the strength, speed, and suppleness you need, you already have. You just need to release it.