Wally
Wally Slocki
The 1967, 1968, and 1970 Canadian National (Karate) Champion
I first became interested in martial arts through my friend Scott when I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven years old. He studied martial arts in my home town of Summerside with his brother. At his house he’d show me how to flip someone, and we’d practice flipping one another. It was pretty effective. I remember it being Karate that he was taking but flipping people is more of a Judo thing so probably he was learning a hodge-podge of stuff. At one of my karate dojos many years later we’d study techniques from all sorts of styles. I enjoyed that.
So Scott placed the idea in my brain but I didn’t pursue it until I was living in Toronto attending Ryerson. One of my friends in the Radio & Television Arts program told me she was taking self-defence classes from a guy in downtown Toronto on Yonge Street in a second-floor studio above a store. I accompanied her one day and met Wally Slocki. Wally was born in 1947 and this was about 1986 or 87 so he would have been in his late thirties. I remember him with blondish hair, a bit long in the back, slim and strikingly athletic. He looked like the real deal, like he could handle himself in a pinch, yet despite the obvious latent power there was a genuine warmth to him, which became obvious to me later. According to my friend he was a “somebody” in the martial arts community but I had no idea what this meant. I always remembered his name (I couldn’t tell you why) but for decades afterward (until just a few weeks ago, actually) I thought his last name was spelled “Sloki” so the couple of times I thought to look him up on the internet I never found anything, and presumed he’d vanished into obscurity. Then, after mentioning Wally in a previous blog post, fellow Karateka Brian Martin corrected my spelling of Wally’s name and I looked him up again and discovered somewhat to my astonishment that Wally Slocki was the 1967, 1968, and 1970 Canadian National (Karate) Champion, retiring undefeated. He was the 1968, 1969, and 1970 Ontario Champion. He once fought boxer Joe Lewis in a demonstration match during which Joe Lewis broke Wally’s nose (Lewis apparently had forgotten about it being simply a “demonstration”). And by the time I met him he’d been teaching martial arts for several years.
We didn’t wear gis (Karate uniforms) in Wally’s class. It was T-shirts, sweat pants or shorts. Wally was the first to tell me (and the other students) that the best way to win a fight was to run away, if you could. “Somebody always gets hurt in a fight,” he told us. So, best not to fight at all.
He taught us several self-defence techniques. They were clever, effective. One of my roommates was dating a woman interning as a physical therapist with the Hamilton Tigercats football team. She told me that one of the football players liked to grab her from behind, wrapping his arms around her, pinning her arms. She felt helpless to defend herself. I taught her Wally’s method for getting out from such a hold: with the limited range of motion available to her with her arms pinned, she would still be capable of pinching this nincompoop as hard as she could in the tender flesh between his inner thighs. Have someone try it on you: it hurts like hell. The next time this guy wrapped his arms around her she did it. He yelped, let go, and yelled, “Where the hell did you learn that?” From Wally Slocki, that’s who.
I loved what I was learning but maybe a little too much. I loved to try the techniques out on people. One friend in particular, who quickly grew annoyed with me, cuz most of these techniques hurt. Also, the classes were early Saturday mornings, I was a student, and my lifestyle in those days wasn’t really conducive to studying martial arts early mornings. One day after class I told Wally that I wouldn’t be continuing.
Wally sat with me on the stairs and tried to talk me into continuing. He told me that he saw something in me, that he thought I could be good at martial arts. Maybe there was some latent ability but the one thing I lacked, in so many areas of my life at that time, was discipline. An ability to commit. I just didn’t have it in me. He attempted to refuse payment for the classes I’d attended so far but I insisted on paying. I may have lacked discipline and commitment but I did possess a certain integrity.
After a few years had passed I began to regret not continuing Wally’s classes. Now that I know who was attempting to teach me martial arts back then I not only regret it but usually do so with a brief burst of profanity. Still, despite my brief tenure with Wally Slocki, I remember much that he taught.
And about a decade later, after an unfortunate incident on a subway, I tried again, with a different teacher.
