[QUOTE=-disciple-]I'm just wondering, but how effective is WC in a real fightQUOTE]
I guess it depends on what you call a real fight? If you had a real fight with your teacher then he would probably clean your clock - depending on your physical size and mentality.
The effectiveness of Wing Chun just depends on your training method. The art itself is just a form of boxing which isn't inferior to any other kind of boxing. There are punches, kicks, elbows, grabs and anything else. The idea is just to fight economically and to get a lot of experience against all kinds of people. It helps to get into shape. So if you get fit, learn to punch fast and hard and develop the timing to move in against all kinds of people then you should be OK.
The Hong Kong people before seemed to have mostly done Chi sau and after that go out on the street and fight. That method seemed to work OK but totally failed in tournment competition. Then some clubs threw away most of the Chi sau training and then did better in tournament fighting. There is no information on whether that made their street fighting any worse.
Against the Thai boxer, most if not all the classical martial arts like Karate, various Kung Fu styles etc. all lost. These days some of the SanDa fighters have had some success and Gary Lam seems to have managed to keep alive against them as well.
If you want to be a good fighter then it's good to get experience against all kinds of fighters: boxers, Thai boxers, Jujitsu, Judo, Wrestling people etc. After that you still won't be any good against the stick fighters, knife fighters, etc.
The go out in the street method and fight will get you killed off real fast (fists can't handle knives and guns) so the only alternative is to do club sparring and then compete against other styles. Losing a lot is part of learning to be good. If you don't lose then what can you learn?
A lot of the Hong Kong people learned about two years of Wing Chun and then went out to fight. In the 80's we had various students with a similar amount of training and they successfully used Wing Chun for police work, for bouncing work and some in tournaments against Karate. Of course whether you can use it depends against who? Maybe all of the Hong Kong fighters were nothing in comparison to today's fighters. The modern mixed martial arts fighter is no slouch and they are geting better all the time. You can't beat these guys with just standard drills and Chi Sau training.
Most of the newspaper assaults I read about around here usually involve at least knives or multiple opponents like about 10 teenagers kicking your head in.
If I did it over again, I would probably start with grappling, do some boxing/Thai boxing as my core, then study some classical art like Wing Chun and sprinkle in some Filipino weapons fighting. I would keep Wing Chun as my core method but investigate everthing else on the planet too.
That's not to say that you can't just start and end with Wing Chun and also be effective. In theory it's possible. Against the big boys MMA people, no one has showed that any classical art will do the job. Ring and street competition are two different things though. Street people are not restricted to a manly one on one fist to fist fight.
In Hong Kong before, Wing Chun was called the gangster fist because some of the gangs found it quite useful. I would say the classical training should still work in most confrontations except when dealing with a seasoned modern MMA.
Why don't you see what you can learn in about a year's time and then re-evaluate what you are learning. Also take into consideration that going once a week for a year if very different from training 7 hours a day for a year.
I figure that those people who are at the master level, put in about 20,000 hours of training. Even then, they are no gods and not immune to defeat.
Ray
Victoria, British Columbia, Wing Chun