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Highlights from 2019 Winterfest
Very nice letter from a long time student and friend, Harvey Liebergott to George Mattson. He has attended 99% of the camps since we started.
I have never been on facebook. What I wanted to say about the camp is that it was beyond my expectation. I learn something every time you and (during the last few camps) John Spencer take me through a kata. But quite aside from that, I watched (because the four inch gash in my leg from an injury before the camp kept me out of) one of the best classes I have seen in more than forty years of training and camps. Roy Bedard taught an unforgetable, lucid, class in how to read an opponent and lead him out of position. I had never taken a class with Roy because I thought that I was too old for what he was teaching. But in fact, I needed exactly what he teaches and even though I could not participate, I agree wholeheartedly with the great Yogi Berra, “you can observe a lot by watching.” It would have been worth driving fifteen hundred miles for that class alone.
That is not to say that the other classes were not great. In fact, winter camp felt like the early Uechi camps of the 1980s. And what I found particularly inspiring was seeing the senior seniors learning from each other. The greatest athletes and musicians and actors have coaches. And it occurred to me that the best martial artists are not the ones who think they know everything, but the ones who keep working. I have not been to Okinawa, but I am guessing that I would not see the “great names” there working together the way they do here.
Best,
Harvey