The Art of Violence with Ashley Henderson

“Keep going Grasshopper, down the line again! Hey hold on, nah go back, you’re getting ahead of yourself again!”

Grr.

I repositioned back into my fighting stance and continued my laborious crab walk up and down the rubber seams on the floor at Title Boxing Club, moving my lead foot forward and dragging my rear behind. I was training with a couple of other newbies in one of Ashley’s women’s self-defense courses, and our first ten minutes had been spent entirely on forward and backward movement. 

“Walk like this all day long, walk to the bathroom in the morning—do it in your sleep!” he chuckled, chewing on his licorice soaked peppermint root and throwing back his thick head of dreadlocks and laughing heartily. 

Ashley Henderson could be what you might call a creative fundamentalist, because as important as a puritanical foundation was to him, his true emphasis was individuality. In addition to teaching regular classes at Title, this extremely likeable ex-infantryman and former bodyguard has a thriving self-defense group that he trains with regularly. And with a nickname like Sho’nuff coined after the flamboyant “Shogun of Harlem” from the cult-class 80’s hit The Last Dragon, and his usual greeting to new members “you ready to learn to kill a man whicha bare hands?” It stands to reason that rigidity isn’t Ashley’s style.  

       

“I never try to teach more than one student the same,” he explained to me as we sat down a few days later to have a chat at the club. “Because when you take the martial arts and just look at the art, it should be an expression of one’s soul--we all have different thought processes, different passions…why shouldn’t I build you up and use your passions instead of telling you that everything that you want to do is wrong, that this is the only right way to do it?”

Ashley said that his teaching method begins with an initial sparring session—no instruction, no critique—just his observation of the individual’s natural fighting style, then he takes it from there. He gave the analogy of his instruction as a painting teacher showing how to do different brushstrokes: creating depth, mixing colors etc., but the final creation is entirely the expression of the student.

“Do you have to learn the rules first before you can break them?” I asked.

“Honestly—I always grew up with the analogy that if you fight with rules you fight to lose,” he said matter-of-factly. “If you go back to fighting literature i.e. The Art of War and stuff like that; if you read the book and look at it from a bigger view, all the book is saying is break all the rules, that’s pretty much what he’s telling you to do. Instead of meeting on a traditional battlefield, he’s telling you things like go up on a hill and use the sun to blind your enemy--these are rules that no one ever thought to break.”

Ashley has been training and fighting for 17 years and studied with upwards of around 14 different martial arts disciplines, but only considers himself a true practitioner of four: Krav Maga, Muay Baron, Capoeira, and combat Sombo. He got started with boxing way back in the seventh grade through part of a community outreach program and said that he fell in love with combat sports from then on. “I was ok but my Coach told me that I was a better fighter than a boxer,” he mused. “But when I joined the military after high school I met a SF guy on deployment who started showing me Krav Maga, so I started my journey with that when I got back stateside.”

“So which practice is your favorite?”

“I have to say Capoeira,” he replied. “Because I enjoy the beauty and the expression of violence—how something that looks so cool could be so deadly, it speaks to me on a different level.” He also explained that in his experience, Capoeira was the hardest skillset for him to learn because it doesn’t adhere to a set of common principles like other disciplines. “In Capoeira there are no stances, instead they say hit it really hard from somewhere that they aren’t going to see it coming; it’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever gotten in to,” he laughed. “But still I can see the overlap, I see a take down and how it goes into Russian Sombo, I see how all of the arts connect and make sense.”  

But it’s not just art for art’s sake; everything he has learned has a practical application. “When I’m teaching, I like to focus on why something works,” he explained. “So when you’re going over any move, even something as basic as a punch—you say, ok you need rotation, torque, and structural alignment—you take that initial knowledge and turn it into why ALL of the strikes work and you’ll find a way to implement them across practices.”

Ashley equates being a fighter to being like a physiologist: learning how the body moves and following natural momentum (and other practical knowledge like i.e. a blow delivered with locked knees creates a reverberation) but also knowing how the body works to know how to disable it. “Think of it like a car,” he said. “To disable a car you have to understand that a car needs battery, fuel, and air and if you cut off one of those three sources the car will not run but you can’t just be randomly cutting wires hoping for the best—it’s the same with the human body.” 

Ashley is no stranger to real life violence—after leaving the military he worked for a local security company called Pound for Pound security, a small elite group that worked the parties and clubs that even the police were afraid to touch--the street gangs and drug dealers-- the worst of the worst. He worked as a professional bodyguard for several years, for as he puts it “just about every rapper with Lil’ or Young in the name.” He also went on to work for the Tennessee department of Corrections and became a part of their special response teams, cell extractions, and riot control. “When I speak of violence it’s not just that I’ve seen violence,” he said. “I’ve trained for it and I’ve been in a lot of violent situations—to the point that you become comfortable with it.”

“Wow, you must have to have an extreme level of calm to do that I imagine.”

“It’s not a level of calm, it’s more training for and expecting violence. I read a book a couple of years ago that really stuck with me, it said: train with death in mind, until you no longer mind death. That’s the way I look at my training and I look at violence,” he said. “If I’m worried about dying or getting hurt then my focus is wrong--I take that same principle within training and try to train as hard as I possibly can.”

These days Ashley has a bit less violence in his life. He says perhaps it is some kind of divine retribution that he is now the father of three girls. He might not be throwing angry drunk men out of clubs or breaking up prison riots anymore, but he’s now in the toughest role of his life: a doting father to teenagers. “I love it though,” he laughed. “Most people try to resist that stuff but not me, I want to be the soccer Dad.” He is also very involved in the youth program at his church, but aside from his spiritual passions and family duties, he still continues to train with an incessant desire for self-improvement. 

“In training mode I like to listen to speeches from the movie 300, there’s nothing better than the idea of being prepared for the battlefield,” he said. “I take that same approach every morning when I wake up--I look at it like it’s going to be a fight-- like bad things happen, but I don’t let it get me down because I understand it’s temporary. In a fight I’m going to get hit there’s things that aren’t going to work out in my favor, so I have to fight and keep moving….always, I need to be able to adapt, I need to be able to overcome.”

Article by Kirsten Hall