The best way to win a fight is to avoid it completely. As Bruce Lee once said, this is “The art of fighting without fighting”. But by the end of the Seventies every city, town and village was kicking each other's arse up and down the street. When ‘Enter the Dragon’ opened at the village hall (1974), it is said that it was packed every evening for seven nights straight. And at the end of each show, Heol-y-Neuadd and High Street became a dojo. The Dragon, it seemed, had started a fire. Even here in a sleepy ex-mining village of Tumble. A fire that would see martial arts become the way of life throughout the country.
In the Mid-Eighties both the Village Hall and the Great Mountain Workingmen's Club would become the host to its first Bushi Kai Karate Class. Taught every Tuesday and Thursday by its Sensei, Lyn Morris. And when its students were ready, they got to demonstrate their skills to Eighth-Dan Wado-Ryu karate champion, Richie Noblett (1946-2009). Bruce Lee, once taught a generation, that we must be shapeless like water, for when you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup, when you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Tumble, although shapeless, was shaped, and martial arts once had something to do with that. It sometimes fights without fighting, it is never formless, but it is always like water. Changing and adapting.