Hammers & Baseball bats

I've heard that comparison of Savate to Muay Thai.

Muay Thai is pretty popular these days here on the west coast, it was up in Seattle, and it really is here in the Bay Area. You can see its practitioners in various mixed martial arts (MMA) competitions. as well as in several action movies that came out in the las couple of decades.

Savate is quite different. It's hey day was before the War to End All Wars. It's French, and several people have picked it up, and incorporated it into their own systems. Bruce Lee's system Jeet Kune Do(JKD) uses several techniques that Mr. Lee adopted early on, and several academies on both coasts still teach.

There's a decent definition at the Wikipedia site here for Savate and for Muay Thai. Ironically, the article on the Thai style includes a list of video game characters who use it. The only ficitonal character mentioned regarding Savate is Batroc, a character in the Marvel Comics who, though created by Jack Kirby, gets treated more like a bumpkin than anything. I'll write more about that some other time.

The best sites I've come across for Savate is one in Australia here and a JKD site based out of New Jersey, the Basulto Academy of Defense has a really good overview as well as several articles I recommend reading on the subject. Especially this one that relates Mr. Basulto's experiences with training in France, as well as the difference in the style versus asian approaches. There's a really good online glossary of savate terms here.

As an American and growing up in the 70's during the Bruce Lee, David Carradine, Chuck Norris times, everything that's worth knowing about Martial Arts came out of Asia. I first studied jiu jitsu as a kid, it mostlycomprised of joint locks, take downs and the like, not all ground work like the Brazilian flavor the Gracie Family made so popular these days. I studied some kung fu, and tai chi. When I was a bouncer, or worked security, I relied more on my tai chi training than anything else, mostly due to liability concerns.

It wasn't until I moved back to the Bay Area at the turn of this century that I really discovered my western martial heritage. I used to try to find some Salles when I lived on the Franco-German border, but pretty much gave up on the whole scene when I got out of the Air Force.

Savate is one of those topics that keeps turning up in my life. In Los Angeles and Orange County, there's a whole group of schools, but I know of only one person who runs the Amsterdam Gym, Ercivan in the whole Bay Area that teaches, but he only holds private lessons, because his gym hosts Muay Thai and regular boxing. It appears there's just not enough interest around here to support a regular class.


Not yet anyway.