FEATURED AUTHOR
TOM MEADOWS

Tom Meadows began his study of the whip in 1957 at the age of 5. In 1962 he began his formal training in the martial arts with the study of archery and Kodokan judo in Tokyo. Twenty-five years later, in 1987, he began his training in the Filipino martial arts under Guro Dan Inosanto. Currently he holds instructorships under Guro Inosanto in the Filipino martial arts and the Jun Fan martial arts of Bruce Lee.

In 1988 Meadows began his study of Doce Pares eskrima under Skip Jordan in San Luis Obispo, California. He continued his Doce Pares training with Diony Canete and later as a personal student of Grandmaster Cacoy Canete, who is the current head of the Doce Pares system. Meadows holds a master’s ranking under Grandmaster Canete in eskrima/eskrido and is a fourth-grade black belt in Grandmaster Canete’s system of bare-handed combat known as Pangamot.

In 1989, as a member of the 21-man U.S. full-contact eskrima team, Meadows went to Cebu City, Philippines, and won the superheavyweight world championship title at the first international eskrima, kali, and arnis championships. In 2000 he won the World Eskrima Arnis and Kali Federation U.S. Master’s Forms championship using the whip and dagger.

With encouragement from his instructors to explore other arts, Meadows has also trained in Muay Thai kickboxing, Lucay-Lucay Kali, Indonesian silat, traditional wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu and has earned belt ranks in aikido, aiki-jujitsu, judo, and savate.

As an author, Meadows has published feature articles in Black Belt, Inside Kung Fu, Inside Karate, and Martial Arts Training. He recently coauthored the biography of Grandmaster Cacoy Canete, which details many of the more than 100 challenge fights Canete fought during his lifetime.

Video footage of Meadows’ full-contact sparring with the whip, the baton, and the staff can be found on tapes one, two, and six of the Real Contact Stickfighting videotape series available through Panther Productions.

Meadows lives in Cambria, California, where he teaches the Latigo y Daga whip and dagger system, Doce Pares eskrima, and Jun Fan/Jeet Kune Do Concepts.

The following is Meadows’ account of how Latigo y Daga and The Filipino Fighting Whip came to be.

The birth of the Latigo y Daga system can be traced to a fateful day at an Indian trading post somewhere in Arizona on U.S. Route 66. This is where I stood clutching the dollar bill my father had given me to buy a souvenir. I had a tough decision to make: would it be the rubber tomahawk with the green and red feathers or the Genuine Chief Sitting Bull-whip? The bullwhip won the day, and so began the chain of events that led me to write The Filipino Fighting Whip.

I used that little whip for many years and, as time went by, thoroughly wore it out. And I managed to convince my parents to buy me a bigger and better one every time we took a road trip through the American Southwest. It was on one of these trips that I received my first formal lesson in whip technique. It was around 6 a.m., and I had sneaked out of my parents’ motel room for a little early morning whip practice. It never would have occurred to me to do this except they had specifically told me, “Don’t wake up the other people in the motel by cracking your whip early in the morning.” As I was quietly cracking my whip in the parking lot, a mestizo man who worked at the motel came over and gestured for me to give him the whip. He took one of the hand towels from his service cart, hung it on the stairwell, and neatly lifted it off the railing with an overhand crack, which I had never seen done before. He spoke no English and I spoke no Spanish, but our mutual understanding of the whip required no spoken language.

Finding further instruction in the whip in the 1960s was problematic at best. The movies proved to be my only resource: the Lash La Rue movies, the rare serialized The Man with the Steel Whip, and sometimes a cowboy movie featuring a scene or two with someone using a whip. The Man with the Steel Whip was the best of these, as it featured a cowboy with a whip painted shiny silver so it looked like steel and an electronically amplified crack that could spook the bad guys’ horses from a half mile away.

Forty-eight years after that fateful day at the trading post, I am amazed at how the bullwhip has become a lifetime passion for me and is central to many of the friendships I’ve made that continue to this day. At age 5 I discovered that having a bullwhip makes you the coolest kid on the block, mostly because the other kids’ parents won’t let them have one, and they all want to try it out. Oddly enough, now that I am 53, my friends still want to try out my whips. I will admit that the majority of them are martial artists. In fact, it was through the martial arts that I found these friends, along with an incredible wealth of resources and training in the whip and its related arts.

I began training at the Inosanto Academy in 1987. The academy was small then and very much like a private club, with few restrictions or rules. You could train until three in the morning if you chose to (which sometimes we did), and any piece of training equipment was available for use without restriction. If you wanted to practice your dummy sets on Bruce Lee’s original wooden dummy, you could; if you wanted to dig around in Guro Dan’s personal weapons cabinet for his whips, that was your option. This was how, in my first week there, I found myself out in the parking lot cracking a whip with reckless abandon. Anthony DeLongis, who is now considered the top Hollywood trainer and stuntman for whip work, was training at the academy that night, and he came out to offer help with my whip training. We still train together to this day and continue to develop new material and techniques.

The Inosanto Academy proved a limitless resource for exposure to martial arts instructors. Guro Dan actively encouraged as much cross training as possible, and to date I have trained under 35 different instructors. The majority of these were brought in through the Inosanto Academy, and they in turn led me to others. Guro Inosanto, through his academy, actively supported formal research and in-depth study of the martial arts, and it was this encouragement and support that saw The Filipino Fighting Whip through to its completion after 18 years of research. It was at the academy that I learned Bruce Lee’s rules about training in the martial arts, and these governed my research into the whip:

• Absorb what is useful.
• Reject what is useless.
• Research your own experience.
• Add what is specifically your own.

The culmination of this research is the Latigo y Daga whip training method, a revolutionary approach to whip work that combines elements from a dozen branches of the martial arts found in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. This methodical approach to training dispels many common myths and misunderstandings about how a whip actually works, replacing them with a practical, progressive system that develops a rock-solid technical ability. One of the most significant offshoots of my research has been the creation of a standardized vocabulary for whip techniques that allows whip users to effectively communicate with each other about their ongoing training. Just as dance choreographers have individual steps they call out for their dancers to execute, now whip users have standardized names for the techniques and fundamental positions they can use in their training.

Since proper technical manipulation of a whip is independent of its intent and final usage, the Latigo y Daga method is equally suitable as a foundation for combative whip work, ranching and herding, movie stunt work, and sport whip cracking.

Q & A

Paladin: Which martial arts use the whip?
TM: The whip is found in a remarkable number of formal martial arts systems and is also used in self-defense applications by ranchers, cowboys, and others who herd animals for a living. Out on the range, self-defense applies principally to wild animals and their predatory attacks. Defending yourself with a whip against these kinds of attacks requires the same skills that martial artists work to develop. A significant number of techniques found in martial arts systems can be traced back to whip techniques used in animal husbandry. This may help to explain why the predominant cultures that have systems of the whip are the Malaysians, Filipinos, Indonesians, East Indians, and Chinese. These cultures have always relied on small-scale animal husbandry, where each animal represents a significant portion of the community’s wealth, and a herdsman’s skills with the whip are his only means of protecting that wealth. This has resulted in effective whip techniques that were easily incorporated into their martial arts styles. A significant number of Filipino systems have integrated the whip into their eskrima arts to some degree or other. The Malays seem to have ritualized the whip into more of a spiritual or symbolic weapon. The Indonesians wear a folded piece of cloth called a sarong around their waists and have integrated their many techniques for using the sarong as a weapon into their systems for use with the whip. The East Indians developed steel whips for use in warfare, and many Chinese systems have formal techniques for the battlefield-designed chain-whip. The Africans use a four-foot-long, semi-rigid, rhinoceros-hide whip for self-defense. This type of whip, known as a sjambok, is issued to the South African police for riot control.

Paladin: Is there a difference in the Western and Eastern philosophies of the use of the whip?
TM: The Western whip users are principally ranchers and cowboys used to working large herds of animals on vast grazing lands. Thus you will find that Western techniques use long whips, eight to twelve feet in length, that require considerable amounts of space to be used properly.

The situation is very different for the island cultures of the East, as they are used to herding small groups of animals in the narrow corridors of the jungle, and so they have traditionally used very short whips of three to four feet in length. This resulted in a lot of close-range techniques for the whip that were easily integrated into their martial arts systems. Combat is all about range control, and as Guro Dan Inosanto used to sum up the concept of effective range control, "If you are fighting in a phone booth, you want a knife, not a hand grenade." The Westerners have developed techniques that work in their own combative range and environment. A perfect example of this long-range effectiveness is seen in the cowboys who used to cut the heads off rattlesnakes with their whips while on horseback. The Eastern cultures have developed equally effective techniques based on the combative range dictated by their environment and can easily disarm a knife-wielding opponent with their short whips.

Paladin: What does Latigo y Daga mean, and what are the main components of its fighting system?
TM: Latigo y Daga translates from Spanish to "Whip and Dagger." Many Filipino systems have integrated Spanish words and terms into their systems and they refer to the leather whip as the latigo and the dagger as a daga. I created this term in 1987 as the name of my system. As the system has increased in popularity, the term latigo y daga has become synonymous with the whip and dagger techniques used in many Filipino martial arts styles.

The main components of my system are the use of the four-foot short whip, the integration of the dagger with whip techniques, and the use of the empty hand in conjunction with the whip. The system includes long-, medium- and close-range techniques, and as it has developed, different instructors have specialized in techniques for each of these ranges. Anthony DeLongis is developing long-range combative applications, I specialize in the medium range, and Professor Ron Lew works in close range. Professor Lew has created a subsystem of Latigo y Daga called the Tibetan Wave, which uses Latigo y Daga as its foundation but has a strong Chinese influence in its philosophy and movement.

Paladin: The whip technique that seems of most interest to the layperson is cracking it. Can you explain in simple terms how this is done?
TM: It is important to understand that you don't crack the whip; it cracks itself! You provide the basic energy, which the whip amplifies as the energy moves down its length, and this results in the cracking sound you hear. The easiest way is to lay the whip out behind you, pull it forward and then up over your shoulder, and from that position throw it just like you would a baseball. At the point in the throw when you would release the baseball, stop all movement with the whip, and it will go forward and crack: it's that easy! After it cracks, you continue the motion around in a circle, and it is ready to crack again. Just remember never to pull the whip back when you are trying to do this, because it will come right back at you, which really hurts. The baseball-throw method creates a very smooth follow-through with the whip so that it will always clear your body safely as it continues on its path.

Paladin: What are some of the other key techniques?
TM: There are currently more than 170 individual techniques in the Latigo y Daga main system and as many as 50 more in the DeLongis long-range subsystem and Professor Lew's Tibetan Wave subsystem. Lew, DeLongis, and I are in regular communication and we are developing and adding new techniques to the system weekly. The key element that links the main system and the subsystems is the use of the free hand to control the whip. The sophistication of the use of the free hand is what sets the Latigo y Daga system apart from other whip systems. The free hand can be used to reach out and control and re-direct various parts of the whip as it is thrown, and it can carry a knife or other weapon, which can be used to direct and control portions of the whip as well. When the free hand is used properly, it causes the whip to change directions much more rapidly than it would if was just moved in a circle. Professor Lew is a master of these techniques, and when he throws the whip, he will reach out with his free hand and lightly touch the body of the whip. This light touch can cause a total reversal of direction and makes it nearly impossible for a defender to predict from what direction an attack will come. This lack of predictability enhances the combat effectiveness of what is already a formidable weapon.

The free hand also allows the whip to be gripped and used as if it were a short section of rope, which opens up a whole range of grappling techniques. The Latigo y Daga system has four formal methods of grabbing the whip to use it as an aid to grappling, and each of these methods allows a different entry into grappling range. The transition to the two-handed grip for grappling can be executed in flow in about a third of a second. With the two-handed grip, an extensive number of traditional Filipino rope grappling techniques can be executed. At any point in these techniques, the whip can be released from the free hand to its full length and then be used in medium or long range.

Paladin: Are there different types of whips for different uses?
TM: Generally, whips can be classified as working whips, sport whips, and combative whips. The working whips are usually eight feet or longer and are designed for herding cattle or other livestock. Sport whips are specially designed for multiple high-speed cracks or precision target work, and combative whips are usually four feet long or less. The best whips are made from kangaroo leather, and any whip maker can custom tailor a whip for your specific needs. Peter Jack, New Zealand whip maker, is the supplier of the official Latigo y Daga fighting whip. This is a 12-plait kangaroo-hide whip that I designed specifically to be used with the techniques in my system. Whips can be ordered from Jack at www.thewhipman.co.nz. I also recommend whips made by Joe Strain in Idaho. I've used his whips for many years, and they have served me well. Strain’s whips are finely crafted and are a nice addition to any whip collection. He can be reached at www.northernwhipco.com.

Paladin: Your system pairs the whip with the dagger. Are there other support weapons used with the whip?
TM: The whip can also be supported with a stick or another whip. Using the stick as a support weapon allows a seamless transition to any of the traditional Filipino eskrima techniques. Using a second whip of equal length or one that’s longer or shorter opens up a wide array of double-whip techniques. Developing double whip techniques is a slow and sometimes painful process. Once mastered, though, they are the most graceful techniques that can be executed with the whip.

Paladin: Are there laws that govern whip ownership and use as there are for firearms and knives? How would one find out about such laws?
TM: For many years there were no laws at all governing the use of the whip as a weapon, and you could openly carry one in your car or anywhere else. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, the whip was added to the list of items that are prohibited in carry-on luggage. I live in California, where ranches are very common, and the police have told me they consider the whip no differently than a bridle or other piece of ranch equipment.

The best thing to do is contact your local district attorney’s office and someone will gladly explain to you the local laws, in detail and application, as they apply to the whip.

Paladin: Is it dangerous to learn to use or spar with the whip?
TM: The whip can be one of the most dangerous martial arts weapons to learn. It can easily blind you or permanently damage your hearing. Always wear safety glasses and ear protection when training whip techniques. A proper training progression, such as the one I have outlined in my book, is the key to safe training with the whip. Always go slowly in your training until new skills develop. Sparring is probably the most dangerous thing you can do with a whip. Any whip sparring should be approached with caution, and full safety gear is recommended and absolutely necessary.

Paladin: How can someone find a qualified whip instructor?
TM: Qualified whip instructors can be difficult to locate. Many practitioners will informally teach others what they know, but oftentimes this leads to the spread of poor technique or bad habits. I have six certified instructors in the Latigo y Daga system, all of whom received a minimum of five years of whip training prior to their certification. I am very pleased to have them in my system, and they are highly recommended as instructors. Each of them is so technically distinct that I recommend cross-training with any or all of them. These are the certified instructors: 1) Mike Krivka, the head instructor for the system, has been with me for more than 15 years. 2) Jeff Finder has been with me for more than 15 years as well. 3) Ron Balicki has more than 10 years of training with the whip and has a very active seminar program he teaches with his wife, Diana Lee Inosanto. 4) Professor Ron Lew has been with me for more than 12 years and teaches his Tibetan Wave subsystem. 5) Anthony DeLongis has more than 20 years of training with the whip and is very active as a Hollywood stuntman and choreographer. 6) Steve Kohn taught with Balicki for many years and, like Ron, has more than 10 years of training with the whip. Kohn is thoroughly versed in the techniques taught by DeLongis as well. All of these instructors can be contacted through the official Latigo y Daga Web site at www.latigoydaga.com.

Paladin: Are there competitive events for whip practitioners?
TM: There are traditional Western cowboy events that feature quick-draw gun work, rope twirling, and the like, and these always have whip target competitions of some type. Usually these consist of trying to put out a series of candles in the shortest possible time. The skill demonstrated at these contests is always of the highest level. The Australians absolutely love to see good whip work, and there are numerous competitions for the display of sophisticated whip techniques held across the continent. They recently came up with a new method of regulated madness called "whipboxing," and I suspect it will become quite popular over there. The fighters wear traditional Australian duster-style jackets and fencing masks and then simply have at each other with their whips. They have formalized rules and scoring and are establishing a tournament circuit. Video clips can be seen on their Web site at www.whipboxing.com. Filipino martial arts tournaments now routinely have whips, or whips and daggers, presented as part of their forms competitions. In the future I hope to see more entrants with the whip in these events.

Paladin: Has the whip made appearances in any recent films or TV shows that you know of?
TM: The whip has been featured in a surprising number of movies recently. Halle Berry's recent starring role in Catwoman (2004) has attracted quite a bit of attention to the whip, particularly after her whip demonstration on Oprah this year. As a note of interest here, the whip work in Batman Returns (1992) performed by Michelle Pfeiffer was taught to her by Anthony DeLongis. The whip also appears in The Rundown (2004) and the new Antonio Banderas movie, The Legend of Zorro (2005). DeLongis helped choreograph the whip work in The Rundown. They had custom whips made for that movie, and I am shown holding one of them in the photo [at right]. He also did whip work in the trailers for The Legend of Zorro. DeLongis can actually throw a whip so that it forms the shape of the letter Z, which went over quite well with the producers, to say the least. DeLongis recently spent two weeks in China as a feature character in the new Jet Li movie, Fearless. They had originally planned to use the whip in some fight scenes, but for various production reasons they decided to feature DeLongis’ Spanish saber work instead. Hopefully, we will see Anthony's whip work in more films soon.

THE FILIPINO FIGHTING WHIP
Advanced Training Methods and Combat Applications