London: martial arts with Sifu Seyfi Shevket and Wolfgang Rain

“My style NCWC is primarily based on Traditional Wing Chun but because of my connection with Jesse
Glover and his process Non-Classical Gung Fu I decided to change the name of my school to Non-Classical
Wing Chun, this is because Jesse allowed me and gave me recognition to teach aspects of Non-Classical Gung Fu. The two styles are compatible because when Jesse started training with Bruce Lee he was teaching Jesse Wing Chun so NCGF was born from there.

After naming my school Non-Classical Wing Chun I discovered from one of Jesse’s students that in fact Bruce Lee used to call his style Non-Classical Wing Chun, this was before Jun Fan and JKD so this was a nice surprise for me. I think this is a perfect name for what I am teaching and I am very fortunate and proud to be connected to Jesse and Bruce Lee” said Sifu Seyfi Shevket asked about his style.

In December Seyfi Shevket wanted a martial deepening moment with Wolfgang Rain

On 1st December a new seminar was held with exceptional guest Wolfgang Rain in the most cosmopolitan city in the world, that is London. Exactly East London, in the Sinergy, the European UFC headquarters and UK. Wolfgang Rain is a man who has a lot of passion for martial arts and the closest student to Jesse Glover (Bruce Lee’s 1st student). “Wolfgang also naturally inherited the Jesse Glover NonClassical Gung Fu procces and is the main spokesman”, Sifu Seyfi tells. The seminary was very instructive. “Everyone gained from Wolfgang’s clear and precise instructions. Although we were limited in time he covered basic core elements which included footwork, closing, striking and sticking hands (Chi Sau). The students benefitted immensely by Wolfgang’s ability to teach in a way that everyone from beginner to advanced level could understand and gain first hand techniques in simple terms” Sifu Shevket points out. We ask Wolfgang Rain about him and Jesse Glover “What is remain of you more than Jesse teaching? And from the human point of view?”.

Who is Wolfgang Rain? And his friendship with Jesse Glover?

“I first met Jesse in dark log cabin where a group of men were sitting. His dark, smooth skin blended into the shadows, except for the reflection from his small, round professorial glasses. And to this day, those men were the toughest guys I have ever known. And there they were, sitting on the tattered, fake leather sofas around a coffee table cut out of a slab of burl wood. In the darkened room of the log house, they were sitting there crying like babies. I’d met them just recently—my new friend’s father and his friends Jesse Glover and Ed Hart– but I could see they were tough. They talked a lot about fights they’d had, like my dad sometimes did, or brawls they had been in together in the past. But my dad was a soft, overweight salesman now with a heart attack just past. These guys were working tough. They were roofers and bouncers in rough bars. Now, as my friend and I walked into his father’s house, they were sobbing and talking about their friend Bruce. For guys with fight experience like that, and seemed proud of their abilities, why did they need to talk about someone else, this guy Bruce, whom they couldn’t even touch if he said –Attack me any way you want-. And it made them cry even more. I mean, really cry. They were crying about a guy who just played with them when he’d tell them -attack me!- and they attacked with all they had. They weren’t humiliated. They were just awed.

Exactly two months earlier they had buried him. This day on September 3rd, 1973, was the first time they’d gotten together since they’d come down from the cemetery that day. It was a day of tragedy for me, too. First day of school, I was a kid in a new school. It was a strange place to come to with my new-found friend Victor Garcia, his father’s house up on the hill in an overgrown lot, with old cars in the gravel driveway, a tar kettle for roofing; a big old ’57 flatbed truck that still ran, named Green Monster, piled with roofing materials and sacks of garbage. Wilting, brown camelias hung over the graveled driveway in front of the log house overgrown with ivy.The gravel underfoot was full of flecks and balls of tar and shreds of tar paper and had been scraped from a roof along with the roof gravel, and handily used to fill the drive.

Leroy was the toughest of them all, at least according to them. He really loved their friend Bruce, the one who had just died. Leroy had taught Bruce how to drive a car, and how to shoot rifles and handguns. When Leroy’s wife Sherry wanted to go dancing Leroy was no dancing type— he’d send her off with Bruce, who was a dancing king, especially when it came to the Cha Cha. He knew every step in the catalogue of Cha Cha. Leroy like Chinese philosophy- in the late 1950s, Chinese philosophy was not something most Americans were aware of—but he had already read The Art of War and a lot of stories, poetry, mythology and philosophy. A man named Jesse Glover was among the men that day, just one of the guys in there when Victor first brought me home to his house. Apart from teaching Bruce a few things, Leroy taught his son and me a few things, too. He taught us how to punch the double-ended bag he had strung on bungee cords under the porch overhang of the log house. He taught us how to do an arm bar and knee to the groin, and a foot sweep. Leroy told us to never hesitate to bite big chunk out of some guy’s face if that’s what it took to get them to let go of you. He meant that for kidnappers, robbers, or bullies from the school football team. Whatever it took. It took about two years for me to realize that Bruce, their dead friend, was the same Bruce that kids in school liked to mimic when they were play fighting, or when they just decided to try to kick one another in the nuts for fun. Bruce Lee.

I had yet to see a Bruce Lee film and except for understanding that he was the friend of my older friends, I didn’t care at all about Bruce Lee. I didn’t watch television, so I’d never seen The Green Hornet. As a kid, I was not interested in martial arts at all. In fact, I wouldn’t see a Bruce Lee film until I was 32 years old. I loved hiking in the mountains, fishing, hunting. I also like to work hard. Leroy had a roofing company, and employed his son and I when we were kids. We packed 100 pound packs of shingles up three-story ladders. We packed buckets of hot tar up ladders and down. We learned hard, hot, heavy work, and we loved it. A few years later I met Jesse again. We were working on one of Leroy’s roofing crews, and Jesse and I were teamed up. He was mopping the hot tar in a meter-wide swath, and my job was to quickly set the 50 kg roll of paper, line it up, and steer it into the tar on a precise line before it could cool and the roll would become immovable.Then you’d have to cut it off and start again, which slowed everything down. And when you’re mopping hot tar, you don’t want to slow down because it just makes everything exponentially worse. At one point, Jesse splashed 500 degree tar out of the mop cart and it came whizzing at me like a spatter of molten magma. I dodged the spatters by inches of my bare chest and arms.

Jesse was impressed. -You have reflexes like Bruce. I don’t know how you even saw that coming. Shit. Goddamn. You ought to put a shirt on-. -I saw it before it happened- I said. -You’re sloppy and it’s easy to know when you’re going to make a mess-. He laughed, his understated -Mhmf!-. -That may be, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got good reflexes. You’d be a good gung fu man. You should come train-. I wasn’t interested in gung fu, and we left it at that. We continued to work together during the summer when I was on school break. Jesse had heard from Leroy that Leroy’s son and I would spend weeks in the mountains without sleeping bags or tents or matches, living off of fish and mushrooms and berries and edible plants. He was fascinated. He wanted to learn some of that craft. Later, he would take up me into the mountains in his old red 1963 Volkswagen, far back into the wilderness on logging roads and tracks I knew by heart. Each time, he had a particular lesson he was interested in. He always wanted to re-cap what we’d gone through the time before. He liked to repeat things again and again. Every time, it was how to make a fire without matches or a lighter. At first, he didn’t believe one could catch trout in a stream with their hands. He wanted me to show him.

It’s no easy feat, but I did show him. Other times, it was edible plants, or poisonous plants and fungi. He wanted to learn how to use a throwing stick to take down grouse, hares, other small game, and how to prepare them without a kitchen. It was after one of these adventures, we had gotten lost in the heavy fog and dense trees and rain in a wide, dark mountain valley, and were late getting out to find the car.He had a gung fu class to teach in his apartment on Capitol Hill in Seattle, and we were running late. -Why don’t you come to my place, you can call your parents from there and tell them you’ll be home late.I have to teach, and I’ll take you home afterwards-. Having an opportunity to train with Bruce Lee’s first and best student, first instructor, and close friend is not something most kids would take for granted. But I didn’t know any different, and I honestly didn’t much care. Being the smallest person in every class in school, I’d learned out of sheer reaction, and help from Leroy who taught his street fighting tricks to his son and I, to smash a bully in the nose and kick him down by his knees if he tried to grab me, and then run away. What more did I need of that nonsense? I didn’t like fighting. I didn’t want to practice against other guys. It couldn’t be a good thing.

That night while standing with my back to the wall, still in my wet boots and clothes from being lost in the cold rain up in the mountains all day with Jesse, I watched his guys hit and chase each other around the tiny apartment. I didn’t like it. But Jesse came over and said: -If you’re going to be here why waste your time standing around? You might as well train. Here, I want you to hit this punching pad like this-. And he gave me a slow motion demonstration of what he wanted me to do. It was, I later learned, based on the straightpunching of Wing Chun gung fu.This was my real introduction to training in gung fu. For the next two years, I straight punched my way across flat warehouse roofs, parking lots and sidewalks, grass fields, with Jesse running backwards while I chased him up and down and in zig zags and circles, sometimes for hours– nothing else but straight punching. After two years I could punch for over an hour at full force without stopping and Jesse timed me at 10 punches a second—but hard punches. After that, he encouraged me to come to his class. Often we were leaving a roofing job together or had been working on a car, so it was just an extension of our days working or hanging out together.

I trained and traveled with Jesse for about the next 37 years. One day he just said: You’re your own teacher. I don’t have anything more to teach you. I still practice as much as I can, and I teach people when I can—mostly seminars because unfortunately I travel too much for my work and cannot reliably run the school in Seattle.It sits empty now. Sometimes when I am back in Seattle I let myself in, and go down into the basement where we trained for many years. There are still drawings and marks that Jesse put up.Old photos, old mitts and punching bags and other training equipment. I sometimes feel sad that I do not have a regular class, but I am really grateful for the kind of freedom it provides to have fighting skill. I am grateful to Jesse for his concern, his friendship, his teaching and his honesty.

I believe that my non-classical gung fu, like Jesse’s non-classical gung fu, continues to evolve. As Jesse taught and traveled around the world, he sometimes encountered martial artists who he felt had great skill, and others that he thought had some good ideas or concepts, but they might not be applying those concepts effectively. He would take such a concept and then work on it endlessly to see if he could make it work, or make it work better. So his training developed from those early days in the 1970s when he used a lot of very straight-ahead forward pressure, to more curves and tight circle-kinds of controlling and attacking. One’s personal evolution is important. For example, while I don’t discount the importance of powerful punching, the reality is that as one ages, hard training for maximal punching power can more easily damage joints, tendons and ligaments. If the point of training is to avoid being injured by another person or people, then it is counter-productive to train in a way that damages oneself. One has to develop different techniques and learn new ways to take out an attacker that rely less on sheer power and more on pressure sensitivity, good footwork, and timing. I strive to get more effect from less effort.

Let me be clear about one thing: Non-classical gung fu is not a style or a system. It is simply an open-ended process with a loose framework as its basis. As such, I have found that as a method of learning and selfteaching, it is applicable to learning anything, or resolving conflict in the most economical and effective way. For this above all, I am grateful to Bruce Lee for breaking the barriers and restrictions of closed, classical systems of thought, and to Jesse for having continued all his life to teach this kind of self-education. It is really a path to self-determination”. Wolfgang recounted his path that led him to the knowledge of Jesse and his path with Jesse. The preference to leave his story intact is dedicated to you who read. To you who love martial arts. We ask Wolfgang one last question “give us a report of seminary and what have you worked on most?”. Rain W. supports and responds with extreme precision “in answer to your question about our activities in London, I enjoy teaching Seyfi’s Shevket’s group. They have both a foundation in Wing Chun and clearly incorporate a non-classical approach to learning as well.

For this seminar I focused on focusing the body’s natural turning motion to attack and turn an opponent

We also practiced footwork and keeping a proper centre of gravity; finally we worked on some endurance punching and some chi sau exercises that Jesse created in order to develop strength and pressure/angle sensitivity to create openings when attacking or being attacked. Seyfi will have some observations as well”. In the end of interview, Sifu Seyfi Shevket concludes by adding a special thank you with a promise “I would like to personally thank Wolfgang for taking his valuable time out to come to the UK and conduct the seminar and for his continued friendship. We are all looking forward to seeing him and hosting another seminar again next year in June/July”. Thanks to the two masters for teaching us the respect between two martial artists.