Excerpt – “Conversations With the Master: Masatoshi Nakayama” (Randall G. Hassell, 1983)
HASSELL: Finally, Sensei, if you were permitted time to say only one thing to the people who are training in JKA karate today, both students and instructors, what would you say to them?
NAKAYAMA: I would tell them to meditate on the words of Anton Geesink, the Dutchman who defeated the Japanese and won the World Judo Championship. Geesink faced and defeated every major Japanese judo competitor, and he shook the very foundations of martial arts in Japan. It was just unthinkable that a young European could so skillfully and cleanly destroy the Japanese masters in their own art. But that is exactly what he did.
I remember that the leaders of judo and even some other martial arts in Japan were in a tremendous uproar, and they made elaborate and detailed plans to study Geesink’s “secrets” of competition. Ultimately, they arranged for a Japanese journalist to interview Geesink in depth to try to discover the training methods this man had used to defeat the Japanese. Geesink’s answer was perhaps the most important statement I have heard in all my years in karate-do, and I will never forget it. He said:
“The Japanese have devoted themselves to the study of judo for competition. They have gone to lengths to develop winning contestants and fine champions. I, on the other hand, have never trained for competition in my life.
All I have ever done is trained in judo as a way of life, exactly as Dr. Kano taught. While the Japanese were devising competitive strategies, I was in the dojo, practicing basics and kata.
I defeated the Japanese because I know judo better than the Japanese.
The “secret” is to train every day in the basics. This will make you unbeatable.”
Basics are the foundation on which all succeeds or fails.