When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
The Tyger
William Blake (1757-1827)
A little Tai Chi ephemera for you.
There are very few fictional books which include Tai Chi Chuan within their plot. However back in 1979 a thriller was released entitled ‘Out of Control’.
One of the story’s main characters is a gentleman named T'ang Li, a tall muscular Mongolian Tong enforcer, who had blue fish tattooed on his wrists. Even though huge and powerful he had light footed feline grace and extraordinary speed – as one would expect from a “red belt master of Tai Chi”.
His hands had been modified to improve his lethality. He had thick callouses covering his knuckles (I’ve seen them on people who strike steel dummies – if you still want to be able to write legibly in later life I can’t in all good conscience recommend the practice!). On the back of each hand an inch above the wrist was a calloused knobby protrusion like an extra bone, which in the story he uses to break opponents collarbones. While his thumbs were curved backward upon their first joint like two hooks, which he uses to tear out throats!
In his basement training room the floor was heavy rubber matting and in the centre were three poles forming an equilateral triangle (viewed from above), these were the diameter of telephone poles covered with leather over hard rubber, and about shoulder width apart – which sounds very similar to both the Nine Palace Poles used in Baguazhang (there was a lot of cross pollination back in the 1800’s) and the Tai Chi Wooden Man of Wan Laisheng which are bound in cotton cloth and used to test power and condition the limbs and hands. He would work around these poles delivering strikes using controlled bursts of expanding and contracting (in Tai Chi terms Kai and He or opening and closing), but in silence using no shouts or grunts.
At the end of the book he fights a duel against a White Crane stylist called Sung Bok and his corps of North Korean fanatics. Bok has strengthened and sharpened finger nails and as a red belt master he is “one of the deadliest men in the world” – only one exists on the planet for each style (ok this sounds far fetched but it’s a matter of perspective, I was told that in the Chen family hierarchical system at the pinnacle is ‘on top of the mountain’ of which only one person within the style is awarded per generation ).
During the duel Bok strikes T’ang with a veil of blood technique (for the uninitiated a cut to the forehead so blood runs in the eyes). T’ang himself cuts loose and throughout the fight scene utilises a lot of genuine Tai Chi skills – angling off, recovery stances, empty steps for kick protection, elbow strikes, wrist strikes to the face, breaking necks with kicks and stabbing fingers to the eye sockets.
In the 1970s information about combat Tai Chi was hardly mainstream, in fact it was rather scant. So how did it come to appear in a novel?
The answer of course lies with the author G Gordon Liddy. An avid reader, good natured, mercurial and who even in his seventies ran four miles and did one hundred press ups a day.
Liddy led quite the life – Army, FBI, Treasury Department, Assistant DA, lawyer and eventually radio talk show host. But most memorably he was one of Nixon’s Watergate burglars, which landed him some jail time.
This is the man who to test his courage ate rats and would hold his hand over a burning candle. Could pick locks blindfold and was a master of the dark arts of silent killing. Before there was John Wick this guy was teaching the OSS techniques of killing using just a pencil, always wore his prison fighting ring carefully out of view, and had a collection of over ninety knives – ever the spook he liked to wear a custom push dagger in an ankle holster (being a convicted felon he wasn’t allowed to own a gun licence, his wife however owned twenty seven guns, and to quote the man “some of which she keeps on my side of the bed”). But I digress.
In his 1980 autobiography ‘WILL’ he mentioned that whilst incarcerated on Terminal Island he met and trained with the real life T’ang Li (not his real name) of his later novel.
He was Mongolian and a ‘Red Belt Master of the High T’ai Chi Tiger Style martial art’.
(I’ve never been able to track it down, which is nothing unusual as many family styles have stayed below the radar, though tiger is sometimes a euphemism for a high stance style – as opposed to a snake low stance style. Also Tai Chi has never bothered with ranked belts so I guess he could have been generalising to show his level of skill in Kung Fu terms).
The first day he met him Liddy was walking across the yard when he heard a steady series of what sounded like heavy calibre pistol shots resounding off the walls. It turned out to be a fifty year old man hitting a heavy bag with his bare fists, backhand, elbows, and a kick that nearly de-chained it.
His arm and hand moved so fast his sleeves were making a ripping sound like a flag in the wind. He’d never seen anyone move that fast! (evidently he always wore them long to cover his Tong tattoos).
Lifting weights together Liddy got to know him better. As a child his father had broken both his thumbs deliberately in two places, then tied them back so that they grew into recurving hooks. They were nearly useless for gripping but became rigid as steel able to tear out a throat or disembowel a man with a single backward stroke (in the kung of ‘Iron Fingers’ the forefinger is conditioned so much it can hardly bend at all but is capable of piercing coconuts – green cover and all!).
With hands like that you would have to punch without the reinforcement of the thumb, which is not a problem with some of the older Tai Chi styles as the knuckle use (alignment) is different from external styles.
In the internal tradition of ‘first the mind then the body’ he explained that concentration is needed first and foremost to transform flesh and bone into steel and concrete. His ability to concentrate was such his muscles became incredibly hard, his body seeming to swell and strain from within – basically describing ‘Iron Shirt’ – Liddy said whilst training with him it was obvious he was pulling his blows and they still came close to shattering his bones, and when he blocked his arm or leg it was like hitting a concrete post.
He taught Liddy that the outcome of every battle is decided in the minds of the opponents before the first blow is struck. He learned not only exceptional physical feats but, more important and lasting, an even deeper appreciation of the extraordinary power of the human will.
At the start of his training he solemnly told Liddy “If you ever use what I teach you to take advantage of the weak, I’ll find you wherever you are and kill you myself”. He didn’t doubt it for a second, but it never became an issue as G Gordon Liddy died back in 2021 at the age of ninety.
Blessings
Mathew
Fun fact : After his release from prison Liddy cameoed in various television series, most notably two episodes of Miami Vice. So if you’re a fan I’ll save you some leg work, he played the character William Maynard in ‘Back in the World’ and ‘Stones War’.
For anyone curious about the effectiveness of Iron Finger Kung check out this short documentary.
https://youtu.be/DUbuBFAEmHo
Priceless