>> Personalized self-defence course Senshido helps the peace-loving fight back against the angry violent rednecks who are looking to beat the living crap out of you

by CHRIS BARRY
photos by RACHEL GRANOFSKY

While I’ve never been an exceptional athlete by anyone’s standards, the few sports I’ve ever been any good at—boxing, wrestling and karate—have always performed a useful function. Essentially, they served me very well as a singularly odd adolescent who enjoyed dressing up like the cover of the first New York Dolls album in a period of time when that was, uh, tantamount to asking for a beating.

And there were no shortage of urban hillbillies in the oh-so-cosmopolitan hamlet of late ’70s Montreal willing to oblige. Especially when I was still in the dog-eat-dog world of high school, where for one to sport an ersatz Ziggy Stardust ’do and avoid the inevitable daily pummelling that comes with said bad haircut, you just had to know how to fight—and fight well.

Fortunately, the good Lord Jesus had blessed me with an innate ability to scrap like a motherfucker when situations called for it—and thank fuckin’ God for that, ’cause as much as I detested getting into fights, there always seemed to be some angry, violent redneck wanting to have a go at me. And sometimes, well, the only way out of these bullshit situations is to come out swinging. And when that happens, you’d better be able to fight like a champ or you’re probably gonna get hurt quite badly. Ah, what a wonderful world we live in.

So let me introduce you to something called Senshido, which sounds like a martial art but is really just the catchy handle Montrealer Richard Dimitri gave to the personalized self-defence program he designed back in 1994. Dimitri, who has certainly incorporated elements of various martial arts and classic hand-to-hand combat techniques into Senshido, is one of the planet’s foremost experts on beating the shit out of people, with Senshido being hailed as the ultimate in reality-based self-defence tactics. And while Dimitri is no longer directly involved in the day-to-day running of the Ste-Catherine W. Senshido academy he founded, his successors continue to stress the “reality-based” elements of his methods.

Real-life technique

“Senshido was born in Montreal after Richard realized, while working as a bouncer, that his formal martial arts training weren’t really the techniques he was using when he’d get into altercations,” Lee Castelani, the Senshido instructor who now co-owns the academy, tells me.

“We don’t spend a lot of time teaching people things that require superior motor skills or anything too technical because it’s very hard to remember these things at the moment your life is being threatened. Senshido is a lot more pragmatic. We basically teach you what you need to know so you can make it home safely at night. We specialize in self-defence, our focus is on protecting yourself in real-life environments.”

Attending one of his classes recently, I got the sense that most of his students had been on the wrong end of a violent confrontation at one time or another and thereafter decided they were never gonna get the shit kicked out of them again. Which not only came as a surprise, but a welcome one at that, because I figured any organized activity that sells itself on teaching people the fine art of street fighting is just going to have to attract the sort of assholes who enjoy beating people up. Essentially, the very same turds who my Senshido co-trainees have come here to defend themselves against.

“You know, we do sometimes get people like that coming here,” Castelani acknowledges, “and sure, we need to make money, but we’ve also got to be able to sleep at night. But I don’t even have to force these people to leave anymore, because once they sense the environment and recognize Senshido is as much about avoiding violent confrontations as it is actual street fighting, they end up leaving on their own because they’re not comfortable here. They feel out of place.”

And just as well for them, because Castelani, a 31-year-old one-time kickboxer and former chemical engineering student at McGill, is definitely a guy you don’t want to fuck with. Soft-spoken, cool, muscle-bound and clearly nobody’s fool, you know the dude could rip you a new asshole in a heartbeat if he needed or wanted to, and not in a fun, Morrissey or Charles Nelson Reilly way either.

Getting the first shot in

After several initial warm-up exercises which totally beat the fuck out of my pitifully out-of-shape bones, Castelani and his co-instructor Kenny gather up the dozen-or-so of us in the class and show us how to take a deceptively passive stance when somebody is getting ready to attack.

Basically, the idea is to put your hands up with palms facing outwards, protecting yourself in a non-confrontational stance saying shit like, “Whoa there sailor, I’ve got no problem with you, I don’t wanna fight, it’s all cool, man,” and then, if you get the sense your attacker is going to attack no matter what you say, when he’s least expecting it… bang, you suddenly poke the fucker’s eyes out, or give him a good shot to the throat, or a solid open-palmed whack to the chin to try and knock the prick out.

“You need to determine just how much violence, if any, you’ll need to be able to diffuse the situation,” Castelani tells us. “Ideally, the strategies we’re teaching will enable you to avoid the fight altogether, but if not, well, you have to be careful, because remember, you could easily kill someone with these moves, so you don’t want to overdo it.”

As the lesson moves along, everyone in the class gets teamed with another student to practise on. I’m kind of hoping I get paired up with one of the two lithe girls in the class, but instead get teamed with Castelani, and, well, I’ve got to admit at first I’m a little hesitant about attacking him the way he’s instructed me to. Like, uh, I don’t want to get a cheap shot in on him only to have him recover and promptly decide to beat me senseless. But after a few goes at it, I realize that’s a ridiculous concern and find myself kind of enjoying scrapping it out with him, you know, under these circumstances at least.

Because you never know

The class lasts for roughly one hour and while I’m a little sore, I’m actually having fun. I’m starting to remember why, as a teenager, I ever bothered taking time out from drug-taking to pursue boxing/wrestling/etc. in the first place. But as I’m getting ready to leave for the day, I find myself thinking that while, yeah, this is probably good shit to know, like, really, what’s the actual likelihood I’ll ever get in a bona fide street fight again? After all, it’s probably been 20 years or something since I last found myself in “a situation.” I bring this up to Castelani.

“You know”, he responds, “we have a saying here that goes, ‘It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.’ With Senshido, you don’t have to study for years to learn how to defend yourself. And sure, Montreal isn’t a city with a tremendous amount of street violence, but it does happen.”

At 680 Ste-Catherine W., first floor,
(514) 879-5621 www.senshido.com