To read Part One: 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship: Sheltered in Place, click here. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do so because I’m not doing a recap. I’m picking up right where I left off.

The Shaolin Koan

We originally designed our Songshan Shaolin division in 2018 to separate them out from the Traditional Kung Fu division. The curriculum of Songshan Shaolin is muddled. There’s been a lot of Modern Wushu influence because Shaolin Temple is surrounded by private Wushu schools, dozens of them with tens of thousands of students. They are incredibly competitive. And they compete in Modern Wushu. Furthermore, the Shaolin demonstration teams showcase Modern Wushu because it is more spectacular. Songshan Shaolin competitors were opening a door to sneak into the Traditional Kung Fu divisions, and we strive to keep those authentic. As a Shaolin layman disciple, this division is close to my heart.

This gets tricky because there is a body of traditional Songshan Shaolin forms that completely qualify as ‘traditional.’ And now, traditional Songshan Shaolin is being infiltrated by Modern Wushu in competition. When a school enters parallel 3-section staff forms for Modern Wushu and Songshan Shaolin, you know they’re playing those loopholes. While it’s true that these forms have different compositions, their essence is the same. If you took off the labels, anyone would be hard pressed to determine which was which.

When I first wrote the Songshan Shaolin rules, I anticipated this might happen, so I set it up in a way that it showcases traditional Songshan Shaolin forms like (and I quote from our rules): “Xiaohongquan (小洪拳), Dahongquan (大洪拳), Tongbiquan (通臂拳), Liuhequan (六合拳), Changhuxinyimen (长护心意门), Qixingquan (七星拳), Meihuaquan (梅花拳), Lohanquan (羅漢拳), Taizu Changquan (太祖长拳), Paochui (炮捶), Xinyiba (心意把), Tongzigong (童子功) et. al.” That has always been in there whether the competitors and judges honored it or not. I always hope that genuine Songshan Shaolin practitioners were literate from reading the sutras. I hoped they would read the rules. But the truth of the matter is this is seldom the case.

At first, I was troubled to see the younger Songshan Shaolin winners were dominated by Modern Wushu, but I was pleased to see that as the competitors got older, they also got more traditional. I salute Escuela Internacional Shaolin Temple under Shi Yanya for bringing that traditional Songshan Shaolin to our 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship con gran fuerza. They made a lot of Shaolin proponents in the USA take notice.

Such is the nature of Shaolin perhaps. All things are impermanent. Amitoufo.

The Elder Aches and Pains

The age brackets were based on average ages of YouTube users. As it turned out, those statistics didn’t translate into entries as directly as we hoped. Instead, it bookended our championships so that the biggest pools were the first and the last. While we would’ve liked to have reached our competitor cap in every division, that was the second-best outcome because it started strong and ended strong.

I’ve been getting so many requests for older divisions and the oldest that our user statistics would tolerate was the Elders 31+. This raised some eyebrows because at 31, you don’t really think of yourself as an ‘elder’ quite yet, but with Young Adults 18-24 and Adults 25-30 divisions, we didn’t want to call the eldest division ‘Old Adults.’ That sounds even worse.

The Elders division was the only age bracket that fielded any Tai Chi/Internal competitors. For all four of the previous brackets, if anyone bothered to enter, they could’ve won a trophy and a place in our records. And they could’ve done anything. Anything. And it could have been terrible. We weren’t so discriminating when we didn’t have any entrees. Now I know there are some excellent Tai Chi/Internal players that are younger than 30, but as it played out, all the younger divisions were an open field.

Of course, there was no way to know this beforehand. Entrants just had to take the risk by entering and I salute everyone who dared to enter and gave it their best shot. To the bold go the spoils.

Tragedy Narrowly Averted

On a personal note, I had one major behind-the-scenes catastrophe. It wasn’t as devastating as the year I got my new car broken into at the Welcoming banquet but it almost ruined everything at the start. I’ve stayed sheltered in place for the duration of the pandemic. I only left the area twice in 2020, once to flee the forest fires that ravaged the San Francisco Bay Area (my home was only a few miles from the evacuation zone and the smoke was intolerable) and once for my daughter’s birthday, which was the same weekend as the launch of the 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship. We rented a cabin at Mammoth Lakes, California, that was socially distanced. We figured we could stay isolated up there. The cabin had a full kitchen, and we brought all our food, plus WiFi so I could work and my kid could still attend university.

It was my only real vacation last year, only a few days, and being 2020, it was intensely stressful, much more than I anticipated. There was a storm that hit when we were driving up that closed the mountain passes so we had to take a detour that added hours to our trip, going into Nevada to get there. Then we got snowed in.

it was my duty to upload the videos to our YouTube channel. Our YouTube channel has been curated by me and TC Media’s Senior Graphic Artist Patrick Lugo. The two of us set up all KungFuMagazine’s social media sites on our own accord back in 2009 because we saw the potential. However, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was the beginning of social media for us. No one quite knew where it might go. Unfortunately, our YouTube Channel was set up in such a way that it eventually locked us both out of approving new administrators. Unfortunately, both of us were laid off when our print magazine folded, although I’ve been gratefully kept on part time for our web interests. We had been struggling to turn over those YouTube keys while we both looked for new work.

For some unknown reason, YouTube locked me out when I got to Mammoth. It was some issue about not being in the right location that I had never encountered before. And because I was snowed in, there wasn’t any work arounds, although I spent a whole day of what I intended to be a vacation trying to find one. We only had a few days there and the upload should have only taken an hour or so. Instead, it cost me one of the few days of my precious respite. Damnable 2020. 

Inevitably, Patrick came to the rescue. He was the only other person who could do the upload. We’ve solved the YouTube access issue since then, but we owe a debt of gratitude to Patrick for returning like a superhero and saving the day. Please take a moment to show thanks to him for that and for all his work for Kung Fu Tai Chi and KungFuMagazine over the years by supporting his art at PLUGOarts. You’ll find some really cool martial arts oriented products there, everything from masks to shirts to phone cases to mugs and more.

The 2021 Tiger Claw Elite Championship

Sadly, we won’t be hosting the Tiger Claw Elite Championships as an in-person gathering like usual this May. Even if the pandemic subsides more quickly than predicted and mass events can be held by May, we cannot be ready. Planning for an event of that magnitude begins in November for us. Given the impact of the pandemic on our company, we simply did not have the bandwidth to invest.

However, we are exploring the possibility of more online tournaments like the 2020 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ONLINE Championship for 2021. Perhaps we’ll do something more specialized akin to our Drunken Style Championship or our Ku Yu-Cheung Bak Sil Lum Championship (I was really hoping to stage my dream our Heavy Guandao Championship but I can’t imagine how we’d stage that online). We shall see.

I look forward to when we can hold an in-person tournament again. I sorely missed seeing all my wulin friends in 2020. I truly hope that we will be able to stage another Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championship soon.

Until that time.

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