For the previous Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championship report, click here: 2019 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championship Part 2 – Is It Raining with You? by Gene Ching

The 2020 pandemic has robbed all of us of so much. It forced us fold our newsstand magazine, Kung Fu Tai Chi and cancel our annual tournament, the Tiger Claw Elite Championships. Nonetheless, we soldier on. This is the martial way. So, near the end of 2020, we held our first Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship. It was intended as a small event, our gift to rally the wulin over the holidays, and it ended up gleaning global attention.

Since 2011, I have published a post-mortem report on the Tiger Claw Elite Championships. Every year, I’ve posted these after the dust settled – the last one was in 2019 for our last live gathering. I’ll be damned if I let 2020 rob me of another one for 2020, even if I wasn’t able to post until 2021 (2021 got off to a rocky start).

Now as I write this, the dust from 2020 has far from settled. Quite the opposite, but at least there’s hope.

Going Online

Tournaments are the pillars of our martial communities, but the pandemic toppled them. All those cancelled tournaments cost the promotors money, including us. Towards the end of 2020, we joined several other tournaments in staging online competitions in hopes holding our community together and to recover some losses. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes for a major tournament. A lot of financial risks that are taken well in advance, investments like deposits on the venue and services, production of promotional materials, ordering of medals and trophies and more. All was lost when our tournaments were cancelled. There was no PPP. It came directly out of the pockets of private promoters.

The Tiger Claw Elite Championships was fortunate. We were monitoring the pandemic situation from the beginning because we have so many Chinese contacts. They shared what they were experiencing firsthand. This led us to pull the plug on our tournament early, just prior a major deposit deadline. In 20/20 hindsight, that was the right move. Some other promoters clung to their attachment to their events until the very last minute, which surely made things more costly. It also reflected poorly upon their characters as promoters. It was a display of disregard for the health and welfare of their attendees. We watched that happen with great sadness. We even advised a few to pull out as soon as possible like we did. But when they failed see that writing on the wall, they paid for it in the end. Every major sport including the NFL, NBA, even the Olympics is struggling to survive. For independently produced martial arts tournaments, we don’t have car or beer sponsorships or anything like that. It comes out of our pockets. We’ll see who manages to survive and rebuild.

Online tournaments are uncharted territory. There were no guidelines on how to do an online competition. Each one was an experiment. Most tournaments are promoters are from the private sector. We aren’t beholden to anyone beyond ourselves and our community, especially with Chinese martial arts. Only a few martial arts styles have regulated tournaments. While there are national governing bodies for the Olympic sports like Judo and Taekwondo, as well as what was to become Olympic at the postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Karate, only a few enforce international standards. Most are independently produced.

It’s even more confusing for the Chinese martial arts because the Olympic contender sport of Wushu is only one small style within a multitude. There are national and international governing bodies for Wushu, but there’s a lot that they do not oversee. The standards are high and difficult to meet. In 2016, we ran an unsanctioned Wushu Nandu Championship. It was a challenging and expensive division to run and frankly, the entries were too few to make it financially sustainable.

The 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship

When tournaments went online, they became even more subjective. Some weren’t well contained – competitors sent in links to their videos with their entrance fees and were rewarded (or not) with medals and trophies. Most osimply mirrored their physical tournament model with few adaptations to the medium of online video. It seemed a little flat, but it was new for all of us. Like always, we wanted our championships to stand out, so we changed the game up a little. In all fairness, we wanted as much transparency as possible for our competitors to demonstrate their skills. And we wanted to keep things exciting.

The 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship was different than the online tournaments were being held at the time. Our championship was a Grand Championship event only. There were no beginner or intermediate divisions. Although there were no qualifiers to get into these Grands, the implication was that only the best would bother to enter. If you entered, you had no idea who you might face, which was daunting for anyone who wasn’t a top-level competitor. Top level competitors embraced it.

We kept entrance fees low and ran it over the holidays. Beyond the showcase, we aspired to promote our sponsor, MartialArtSmart. In lieu of bombarding everyone with sales spam, we showcased competitors along with inobtrusive reminders to support our sponsors so we might continue to bring the absolute best of martial arts to you. With all the schools closed, martial arts gear sales have plummeted. Every business was struggling to get back in the black on Black Friday. The 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship ran for five weeks, starting just prior to Black Friday and ending just prior to Christmas. We didn’t go so far as to place ads within our competitors’ videos because ultimately, we wanted to showcase them. We hoped the gentle reminders at the beginning and ending of each video would be enough to generate some sales.

We split the competition up into 5 age brackets and capped at 30 each. Most importantly, all the competitors’ videos were showcased on KungFuMagazine.com’s YouTube channel for all to see. First, Second and Third Place Trophies were awarded for our four different style divisions – Traditional Kung Fu, Songshan Shaolin, Modern Wushu and Tai Chi/Internal for all five age brackets. Additionally, a trophy was awarded for a Grand Champion across the four style divisions for each age bracket, as well as a People’s Choice award (the competitor that receives the most views during the competition window).

Do the math. That’s 16 potential trophies (the Grand Champion is additional) across 30 competitors, so if you entered, you more than a 50% chance of winning a trophy. Your odds were even better when we didn’t reach our cap and we only capped out on our first age bracket. Ultimately, we wanted this to be a rewarding experience, something positive that would reinforce competitors to keep their practice going during the pandemic by showcasing their talents. 

Even though this was online, there was still tournament craziness. I didn’t have my dear Dragon Crew and there was no load-in, afterparty, or load-out. But it wouldn’t be an experiment without some fails. And I wouldn’t have anything to write about here.

The Wushu Virus

I was tempted to go off on an analogy of Wushu as a virus but the coronavirus and Kung-Flu racism, it’s just too soon. I’m keeping the subhead because Modern Wushu has spread virally across the world of martial arts. We have struggled to keep it contained from the very beginning of the Tiger Claw Elite Championships.

The first age bracket, Kids 13 and under, was almost all Wushu. It was also the only bracket to meet its competitor cap. Modern Wushu competitors outnumbered the other divisions. The Traditional Kung Fu competitors would’ve been reclassified as Wushu in our regular tournament but here we let them stand to so we could give out more trophies. The Songshan Shaolin suffered from similar issues – more on this in part two of this report. We really wanted to give out all our trophies so letting those stand seemed the best way to go, but it worried me. I feared that Modern Wushu players would dominate the entire Championship. Don’t get me wrong. I have tremendous respect for Modern Wushu. It’s just I respect the other divisions too. Traditional Kung Fu matters.

The simple fact is that when it comes to forms competition, Modern Wushu rules. Unlike Traditional Kung Fu, Songshan Shaolin or Tai Chi/Internal, Modern Wushu was designed as a sport from the very beginning. Sure, it can claim its martial roots, but it is built for competition first and foremost, so it has an intrinsic advantage. Modern Wushu forms are composed to win competitions. The other styles have more complex agendas with what goes into their forms, but that’s superfluous when it comes to competition.

And Modern Wushu coaches are extremely competitive. They didn’t get to the position that they are at by losing. They trained for sport and they trained to win. When it comes to competition, I admire that. There’s the martial arts, and then there’s sport which is an aspect of martial arts. For the sport, you play by the rules. That’s the point. For the art, you live it, rules be damned. But that attitude won’t get you up on the podium when others are playing by the rules. That’s not how it works. Break the rules and you’ll get disqualified. That’s how you play the game.

The competitive nature of Modern Wushu coaches makes them extremely aggressive at tournaments. They play to win and win the most. They push the boundaries of our divisions to position their students to garner the most trophies. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how you play the game if you’re a competitive school.

They work the rules and I respect that too. I put a lot of thought and work into writing the rules and I appreciate when competitors bother to read them. For example, one of the stipulations of the rules was that the videos could not have any music. There was a good reason for this. YouTube doesn’t allow us to advertise because some of our music in our videos is copyrighted. A lot of our YouTube videos are from tournaments, and competitors always use copyrighted music. This means we cannot monetize our YouTube channel. That extra income might have kept us in print a little longer, but what’s ship has sailed. In the past, we experimented with replacing some demo music with copy free music in the past and our competitors got rather upset. Someday, we may go back and delete all the copyrighted music so we can monetize our YouTube channel (it’s a huge undertaking) and in anticipation of that, we banned music for our Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship. Yet a few competitors still submitted videos with music. Obviously, they didn’t read the rules.

Some competitors read the rules very well, particularly a few Wushu coaches. One of the prizes that we offered was a People’s Choice award. This was given to whoever got the most views within a certain window of the competition. All the videos were posted at the same time on a Friday and by the next Monday, we selected a winner. This sounded good in theory, but something I didn’t calculate for was that YouTube presented the videos in the same order, so there was a primacy effect. The first videos had a better chance of getting more views. Fortunately, this didn’t affect the final count as the winners pulled ahead.

Some of the schools invested in paid advertising through social media to increase their views. We got a few cries of foul on that, but no where in the rules is this forbidden. Those crying foul, they didn’t read the rules. Ultimately, we want to get more views on our YouTube channel, so when competitors pay to advertise content on our channel, we’re fine with this. Additionally, there’s no way for us to control for it.

I’m impressed when competitors find the loopholes and exploit them. I was an NCAA athlete for fencing. I was also certified as a Provost Fencing Master in college. My NCAA coach, Maestro Michael D’Asaro, taught us how to exploit loopholes in rules. That’s not cheating. That’s playing smart.

By the way, there’s a new documentary on my NCAA coach by Greg Lynch Jr. of Bad Ass Bunny Productions, who shot a lot of our Tiger Claw Elite Championships and provided more video content to our YouTube channel than any other contributor. Be sure to check STRO: The Michael D’Asaro Story. I even have a cameo in it, filmed at our former TC Media International Headquarters no less.

For more, read Part Two: 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship: Social Distance by Gene Ching

To see the 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship results and videos, click here.