On Tournaments

There has been a considerable discussion recently on tournaments, tournament fighting, and tournament formats in the SCA.  A lot of what I've seen and read can be generalized to pretty much any organized competitive martial art, though the historical background between, say, modern karate and historical martial arts from any continent is obviously not quite the same.

So here's my take on tournaments: I don't like them.  I actively dislike tournaments.

Before I continue, I should put some boundaries on that statement.  It is not a statement that tournaments are bad and should go away.  It is also not a statement that martial events are bad or that fighting should not be competitive, that would be silly and defeat the purpose of fighting.  It is not even a statement of intent to boycott tournaments as a form, because the unwritten rules of the game require that tournaments are where you get people to listen to you.

Now, why do I dislike tournaments? There are a few reasons, but let's start with the fact that tournaments are basically job interviews or auditions.  You go and you have to out-pitch-perfect everyone else on that field to convince your prospective employer that you're the best at whatever that's out here today.  There may be people who enjoy job interviews, but the furthest I've gotten toward enjoying job interviews is not minding them.  I know people in federal service who apply for jobs they theoretically qualify for just to get the interview experience, just because interviews are stressful.  Why would I take the thing I do because it feeds my soul, and add that to it?

Tournaments also emphasize a subset of martial arts that just don't interest me, which is to say, how best to exploit the rules.  The all-Japan kendo championship has been on my Facebook feed a lot recently, and one of the things it really drives home is how much sport fencing, eastern or western, relies on being better at speed tag.  I judged a tae kwon do tournament recently and similarly saw that it utterly de-emphasized defense and positioning and rewarded attack.  While I have never personally seen it on the adult field, SCA fighting stories are full of simply not acknowledging the blow, or outrageous claims like "light to the face."  Youth fighters have to be reminded that theirs is a touch game, and not to ignore obviously-good contact.

The third thing is harder to explain and relies on my theory of fighting as conversation.  Fighting for an audience transforms that from a conversation into something more like a formal debate or an academic disputation.  Your objective in a disputation is not to learn about your opponent and yourself, it is to defeat them in a narrowly defined format, regardless of the actual merits of what you are doing.  Tournaments reduce an art that I practice for self-improvement to a performance.

All of this adds up to a dislike of tournaments.

Now, having said all this, what is a tournament good for? Historically they were job fairs.  Tournaments and exhibitions tended to flourish where there were more knights than jobs, and tended to be banned during periods of serious instability because job fairs for armed men were also job fairs for rebellion.  Armed rebellion tends not to be a major factor in modern martial arts circles; instead they tend to be more opportunities to show off.  The same principle of exhibiting one's school's techniques and abilities still stands.

Second, martial arts of necessity must have a competitive element.  A martial art that is not tested in application against another person is at the end of the day nothing more than a collection of ideas without experimental basis, more philosophy than science.  Unfortunately, everything that belongs to Mars is dangerous.  Some level of artificiality is needed to make it safe enough to practice short of fully lethal engagement.  Having standardized safety considerations and rules for those engagements leads to some level of rules-lawyering, but it is also strictly necessary.

At the end of the day, just like job interviews, I view tournaments as a necessary evil, one that often distracts from the much more useful conversations that happen on the sidelines.  The point of the interviews isn't to interview, it's to get where you want to be.  Once you have the job you want, you don't need to keep interviewing, but that's absolutely no reason not to continue professional development and networking - which in this case means pickup fights, judging or marshaling, teaching, and sideline observation.