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SB: Hi Rodney thanks for taking the time out to have a chat!
ROD: No problem.

SB: Rodney I thought first it would be nice to chat about the Crazy Monkey Defense System….could you tell us how the name came about, I am sure many people ask this?
ROD: It really started of as a joke. Prior to the name coming up, CM was in development, but we had no name for it at all. As you know I live in Africa and one of my friends happened to go on Safari. On the Monday morning he came back to the gym and said, “Even the monkeys do it”. After enquiring what he was talking about, he explained that during his holiday he saw a troop of “CRAZY monkeys” as he explained it, fighting and they used something similar to defend themselves which we had been doing in the gym. Hence the name CRAZY MONKEY has stuck.

SB: That’s a funny story….allot of people are asking where did the inspiration for CM come from…..could you elaborate on that?
ROD: As most people know I began boxing at the age of 16, competing to Golden Gloves and it has been a passion of mine ever since. Added to this at the age of 18, I traveled to Thailand where I stayed for three months, competed and have been going back twice a year, sometimes more, ever since. I had the great fortune of training with some of the old style Thai Boxers. Some of the ideas for CM I had already seen then. It took me many years to change my style from an attribute driven game to something less driven on them. I also spent several years as a doorman in some of South Africa’s roughest nightclubs. As anyone who knows South Africans reading this interview, South Africans love to fight.

It was during this period and many altercations later that I began to figure out what really worked for me without gloves on the street. This included defense. It became evident that a standard attribute driven boxing game, where you had the boxing gloves to help you defend lent little in a street environment. Added to this was my experience with Matt Thornton, who truly introduced and coached us in a mixed martial arts environment. Once we started adding takedowns and clinch into out fighting game, our stand-up game had to change and adapt.

So ultimately CM is a combination of all my fighting and training experiences. You could say it is just modified Muay Thai, or modified Boxing and you would be both right and wrong. Looking at a map of any location is never the same as actually been there on ground zero!

SB: Rodney I have heard you mention attribute based and non-attributed based style before….could you please explain the difference?
ROD: Sure! The easiest way would be to ask you if you have seen Prince Nazeem fight…(SB nodding his head). Well he has a typical attribute driven game. It is a mixture of superior timing quit evident in his unorthodox style of boxing coupled with power, strength, good footwork and many, many, years of experience. For him too be able to do what he does takes hours of training a day, which very few of us have available to us who work 9 to 5! Outside of this it would be hard for a beginner just starting of in training to imitate his style of fighting and actually make it work…..

K1 is also a great example of attribute driven fighters. They take immense amount of punishment and often sacrifice good form for a power driven strike. Of course as they all have good attributes, such as strength, power, speed, conditioning, great chins and all over a 100kg, they can get away with that style of fighting. I highly respect those guys as I know the amount of sacrifice they have had to make in order to get that far…..

But what about the guy who may lack superior attributes, size and only a couple of hours a week to learn martial arts…that’s my mission to train that guy to be the best he can be with the minimum time allocated. If I can get him into a sparring environment where he can not only survive and win with two hours a week, imagine what we could do for someone who could spend several hours’ day training. Many people have seen how western boxers take enormous amounts of punishment to the head; this was the first mission of CM, to lower that amount of unnecessary beating. I can spar several rounds using CM as do my students, and probable not get caught flush in the head once, or at least where it could knock you out. In boxing, it is an every day event to get hit hard in the head. The scary thing about a standard boxing gym is that allot of people drop off along the way leaving only those guys who can take a punch. Even less of them will ever make it to competition, and probably no one will ever make it to the level of a world contender. This is why boxing is probably watched more for spectator value than actually practiced.

I feel by promoting a non-attribute based boxing structure in the beginning allows students to acclimatize to boxing training while taking the fear out of actually getting in the ring to spar. What this does is allow arts such as boxing to gain popularity amongst people who would never have thought of doing it in the first place, who do not want to compete and want to use it purely as a vehicle for self-discovery, fitness and self-defense.

SB: Rodney I like that approach….but would you say you are against an attribute driven game?
ROD: Not at all…..the way we coach in the beginning which is non-attribute based has allowed many of my guys to develop a attribute driven game in the end. Had I just thrown them into sparring on the first night and expected them to pull off bobbing, weaving, slipping and ducking, with the added ability to take a punch most of them would have never got there and would probably quit after night one.

Once people have the non-attribute game down, I feel it is perfectly fine to have an attribute driven game.

SB: Thanks Rodney
ROD: Sure thing bro!