I first met with firearms defense master Massad Ayoob in 1994 in an Ithaca NY convention room. A weathered, distinguished five-foot-seven Arab with thick jet black hair, Mas carried an air of total and easy self-confidence. (Despite his size, he is a tiger in motion.) He was wearing a slightly mismatched suit jacket. The outfit was functional, presentable to a class of common folk, and functional for blending in with them. His face was happy, showing a freedom from all fear based on skill and experience.

I well remember one of my initial sessions at his school in New Hampshire where my class was practicing handgun shooting techniques, six shots at five yards in twenty seconds. To make up for our lack of knowledge and experience, we all tried deceptive, tricky moves that resulted in increasingly poor scores. We were confusing ourselves, and Mas watched us increasingly fail. We quietly and separately became dejected. Mas called us around a battered table under an old metal roof at the back of the range.

"Does anyone notice something happening here?" he asked.

"Yeah. Our scores are going down instead of up." someone mumbles. Others agree.

"Let's do it again. This time, tighten your muscles until they begin to shake. Crush your grip like you were going to deform the metal handle. Push with your strong arm and pull with your weak arm until you nearly break your own fingers. Force your muscles until they tremble. Now, back on the firing line."

We gave each other surprised "what's he up to" looks. Everyone quietly figured that a badly shaking handgun would result in horrible scores. Mas obviously knew what we were thinking; if someone asked why, he said "just do it."

We did. And our scores were substantially higher.

Mas grinned. "Basics. Before, you were getting sloppy and using tricks to try to improve, but were forgetting the basics. This time, with the gun shaking so much you had to focus on the basics: front sight, press. Think about it."

We did think about it. Faced with increasing speeds, distances, and complexity of decisions and stances, we thought back to the "shaking" drill and focused on the basics of "front sight, press" and how they were applied among special needs of the situations. At the end of the course we faced the totality of the qualification run, with all the time limits, distances, stances, noise and pass/fail pressure. But we all fared far better than we had previously done and expected because we correctly applied the basic knowledge and skill.
 

It has been four years since then, and in the intervening years Mas has taught his art to hundreds of students. Even long after their training they think of him as a good friend – and as a wise and gentle instructor who embodies the martial arts' spirit and philosophy.

That experience has stuck with me: stick with the basics. While Hyams refers to increasing one's knowledge, in my experience that act of education almost invariably occurs by a greater understanding and wider application of the basics of whatever art is being practiced.

Many situations have recalled the "trembling drill" and how it demonstrated that tricks do not work despite obvious rationalizations. The "line" of the challenge can, as Hyams observes, can only be shortened by making your own "line" of skill longer. And the skill can only be lengthened by strengthening the basics, and learning the new basics revealed in advanced skills.

The power of lengthening one's line against the line of an opponent (be it human, machine or score) has appeared in many of my experiences.

My progression through the four major Lethal Force Institute classes repeatedly drove home how strengthening basics broadens one's ability to take on greater challenges. Course one, described in the above paraphrase, demonstrated the power of the basics. The following three courses covered more advanced scenarios (hostage rescue, shooting in darkness, etc.) and more complex motions (firing from ground, firing from moving vehicles, weapon retention, etc.), yet were almost invariably just reincarnations of those basics or, in some cases, inclusion of basics from other disciplines.

Similarly, Kali and Iaido actually have relatively few moves and principles. All katas are the result of sequencing these moves, and applying them against new opposing moves. The more these basics are understood, the broader the base of strength and skill, the longer the line. Even when attending a sword clinic led by 8th Dan Hanshi Mitsuhiro Saruta, both learning methods from him and watching him perform difficult (and beautiful!) acts – including his never-before-done seven-goza cut – it was ultimately application of the basics, the creation of a very long line that made all other opposing lines appear very short.

Recently I observed the American International Karate Championship. There I watched top Karate students fight for high honors. Again, as observed by Hyams, those who attempted to shorten their opponent's line by cutting it with tricks failed, while those that lengthened their own line to dwarf their opponent's line succeeded.

Combat training is not the only realm of lengthening lines. The 1997 experience of chess top grand master Gary Kasparov v. chess computer Deep Blue was a great counterexample, demonstrating the failure of tricks. In this chess match watched by the world, Kasparov consciously gave up his powerful techniques in favor of tricks which he believed would dupe the deep-search computer into making crucial mistakes. The machine stuck to its basics, and Kasparov became the first human grand master of chess to lose a match to a machine. He attempted to make the machine's line shorter by cutting it – as Hyams describes in his match – rather than lengthening his own by properly and skillfully applying his own basics.

Even in computing, my studies have demonstrated that everything is built from basics, and while tricks may sometimes work, real computational strength comes from applying the basics. At the bottom of computer science and engineering, the "NAND gate" forms the fundamental building block. As those basic blocks are aggregated into larger components and manipulate greater complexity of information, systems which stick to basics gain stability and strength succeed, and those that stretch with tricks fail.

I could go on with more examples. The point is my perception of what Hyams – actually sensi Parker who taught him – teaches is: to use tricks to overcome an adversary will not make the adversary smaller or shorten his line representing skill; knowing and using basic knowledge fully will make you larger and lengthen your line of skill and dwarf that of the opponent.