You probably know this already, but Geoff Thompson knows violence. He has worked as a doorman for nine years in the clubs and bars of Coventry during the eighties and those were really violent years. And of course, when you've been shovelling s**t for a long time, you sure learn how to use the shovel in the most efficient ways. Thompson has been also studying martial arts for a very long time - he's done karate, judo, boxing, Sambo, Greco-Roman and Freestyle wrestling, you name it. He's produced more than thirty instructional DVDs on these martial arts, but still, when you ask him which one he considers as the most important, he always answers "the Fence".
What is, then, this "Fence"? It's a self-protection principle, so simple that it becomes sophisticated enough to need explanation. There are three kinds of street attacks, according to Thompson. The first one is the match fight, all but obsolete in our days, since practically nobody is going to honourably ask you to step outside and settle your differences. The second kind of attack is the ambush. The third and most common attack is the one leading to the "three second fight", where your opponent uses stealth, talks his way close to you, so that he can knock you out with a surprise attack. Why would he want to come close to you? Because from a talking distance, you don't have enough time to block his attack - whatever he throws at you, you eat.
So from talking distance, you need a structure that allows you to control your opponent and preempt with an attack of your own, if needed. As Thompson explains in detail in this DVD, this structure is the Fence, a non-agressive hand posture that can be used to:
- occupy the space between you and your opponent so that he can't move even closer to grappling distance,
- monitor his attacking weapons (hands, feet and head, that is) through light tactile contact,
- psychologicaly control him in a subconcsious way,
- launch an attack with your "heavy artillery" (probably the right cross or left hook), in case you don't manage to verbally defuse the situation.
Thompson also describes the signs you should look for to know that your opponent is ready to launch attack (e.g. when he's talking in single syllable words, like "so?", "what?" and so on) so that you can literally beat him to the punch. One of the most eye-opening and amusing parts of the DVD comes when Geoff describes the different variations in which a number of fellow doormen from Coventry used the fence.
The DVD is a digitised version of the VHS tape that has been on the market for quite some time, so the quality of the image is not outstanding, but there's nothing here you will loose because of the analogue picture.
Get your hands on a copy of this if you want to reinforce your empty hand self-protection skills. And regarding the "empty hand-part", keep in mind that Guro Marc Denny of the Dog Brothers, was clearly influenced by Thompson's fence when he came upon the concept of the "Kali Fence", which is to be used against knife attacks, as explained in the DVD series Die Less Often.
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