MARTIAL ARTS… for the uninitiated

The Hercules Gym, in existence since the 1930s, is Dublin’s oldest, and has built up quite a reputation through the years. Let’s just say it’s not the sort of place you go to if your normal workout involves a half an hour on an exercise bike followed by an aromatherapy massage. The gym plays host to a wrestling class which has become something of an institution in Dublin’s north inner city, and no self-respecting martial arts column could afford to ignore it.

I arranged with instructor Mick McAuley to drop along ahead of time and he informed me that a large proportion of both the gym and the wrestling club members were from abroad. I had a picture in my head (as I always do) of the place before I arrived – a few big Eastern European guys and tough-looking Dubliners – but what I found was beyond what my imagination could muster. It was like what you might expect the gym of a Russian military prison to be like.

Hercules is located off North King Street, near the junction of Capel Street and Bolton Street, around the back of a small working-class housing estate overlooked by a series of blocks of flats. Anyone who has ever popped along to a gym or class will be aware of the intimidation factor that emerges when you’re wandering around not really knowing what to do, but this place took it to a new level. Before I got into the class I first had to grapple with the locked entrance door which nestles at the back of an empty concrete yard. The old-school keypad was very much getting the better of me until an absolute giant of a human being silently shoved me to one side before somehow gaining entry and disappearing inside.

I followed, wandering gingerly into the dimly-lit hallway. The building’s morbid silence was broken occasionally by manly, lion-like roars and the clang of metal, which seemed to be coming from above. I negotiated the stairs and went into the gym-proper where I stumbled upon a gathering of the 30 largest men on the planet, at least half of whom quickly rotated their meaty necks so they could get a look at the new guy.

At the far end of the room was what I recognised as an Olympic-style wrestling mat with a few slightly smaller lads gathered around it, so I made a beeline. The youngsters’ class was just finishing when I arrived and the group of 8 to10ish-year-olds were practicing a drill which involved two of the nimble little ankle bitters racing towards and then wrestling over a ball which was placed in the middle of the circular matted area. A group of kids playing around with a ball was probably the last thing I expected to find in this bastion of sweat and testosterone, but they seemed oblivious to the gargantuan figures slowly moving from one piece of well-used apparatus to another. That was until one of the group accidentally bumped into a guy who was busy pumping a ludicrously large pair of dumbbells. The youngsters were forced to beat a hasty retreat as the hard-done-by Goliath boomed some alarming threat to do bodily harm.

Our class eventually kicked off but it was somewhat rudderless. Trent, the only other Irish guy taking part, informed me that their regular coach, a Bulgarian guy, was out of the country – and it was a bit up in the air as to who was actually in charge. Nonetheless, the guys all seemed to know the drill so we started off with a few laps of the matted area. Before long, the size of the little circle in which we were running meant that I got really dizzy, really quick.

Next, suitably warm and disorientated, we went on to a stretching routine. Everybody wasn’t doing the same thing, so it was a bit hard to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing, but there were some very good aspects to the routine; particularly the neck stretches.

We then paired off and got going on learning some drills. The type of wrestling practiced in the class was, as best I could gather, Olympic or Greco-Roman. I was paired off with a friendly East Asian guy called Anand. We started off by drilling an arm-drag move – you grab the opponent’s wrist with one hand, get your other hand onto their tricep (underside of their upper arm) and then rotate yourself behind them and lock your hands around their waist. From there, you swing them around and plant them face down onto the mat. It took me a while to get it, but fair play to Anand; if he was pissed off at having his workout ruined by virtue of being lumbered with giving remedial wrestling lessons to the new guy, he didn’t let on.

The bulk of the class was taking up with drilling on similar moves while two of the more advanced guys went head-to-head in the centre of the mat – namely Brent, and a small guy who I think was from either from Russia or one of the former Soviet states, whose body shape was simply made for wrestling. He was only about five foot nothing, but was implausibly muscular. His forearms were nearly as thick as they were long. His little head also looked like it had taken quite a hammering over the years, with a burst nose and cauliflower ears, but he had a friendly face and he gave Brent, who was far bigger than him, a good fight. Sadly, the bout was brought to an early end when one of the small guy’s fingers went straight into Brent’s eye. The force of the blow made me (and probably Brent) think that he’d lost it but there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage. Brent later told me that he’d had his eye badly scraped by someone’s fingernail in a similar incident.

The rest of us eventually went on to some fighting, but predictably, Anand was more than a match for me. I remember being on the ground at one stage, trying to put my feet onto the mat so I could propel myself forward in order to get a better position on my opponent, only to notice when I looked to one side that both feet were actually beside my head. Anand was like a scout practicing various knots, with me as the rope. The fact that you’re being soundly beaten is never a good enough reason for you to stop what you’re doing and eventually, I did get my reward. Anand mistimed a takedown, I grabbed round his waist from above and pinned him. Just the once, but it was enough to send me home happy.

When I was leaving the Hercules Gym I was delighted by the fact that I’d found a really tough training session, which has been lacking over the last few weeks. It then occurred to me that there’s something quite strange about this and by extension, martial artists in general. I had just endured an experience which left me bruised from head to toe and covered in other people’s sweat, yet it was something I would have happily done again. But even the less hardcore forms – like that practiced by the metropolitan swashbucklers of the iaido class I joined last week – suffer for their art in the same way. Doing odd sword strikes barefoot on carpet left stigmata-like burn marks on the tops of the feet of its aficionados. Martial artists – we’re definitely an odd ‘aul breed.