The passing of a great man.

On Thursday night (22nd May) I received devastating news. My sensei and friend, Robbie Smith passed away suddenly in his home. It has left the dojo members and the greater budo community reeling.

R.I.P. Robbie Smith Sensei.

Having had some days to reflect and mourn I wish to celebrate the good things this man did for me and budo in general.

I would like to start with a comment I wrote on this post back in 2012. I had written this:

"Not only is Robbie an exceptional martial artist he is also an incredibly nice guy."

Such a simple yet no truer sentence. As a teacher and mentor he was patient, kind and had a way of working out what each individual student needed to work on to get better. He set his standards high for his students and even higher for himself. 

Through his effort and expertise Robbie grew a small TSYR study group into one of the strongest TSYR branches in the ryu. He selected quality people who he then invested time into and turned us into a tight group of not only martial art enthusiasts but also good friends. I gave up my aikido training to concentrate solely on TSYR and it was what Robbie had to teach me that sealed the deal. I lament that I couldn't glean more from him. He had so much more to teach. 

NZ TSYR branch with Threadgill Sensei.

Such was the caliber of Robbie's technical ability that Toby Threadgill spoke of being fortunate to have had such a student want to train under him. This speaks volumes for Robbie's abilities as Toby travels the world and has seen what budo talent is out there. 

His technical ability was first apparent in his karate. Robbie held the rank of 7th dan on Wado Ryu karate.

One statement mentioned from the many Facebook posts since his passing has been this one, from Takagi Sensei, 8th dan Wado Ryu:

"Robbie, according to Takagi Sensei, was a true budoka in every sense of the word. He exemplified all that was good about Wado and the Wadokai was a better organization for having Robbie as a member." 

As a teacher he was patient and had an eye for detail. He could distill the essence from a movement and drill the components to make an overall technique stronger or more precise. He enjoyed the sword-work of TSYR as he often said it was new and exiting for him. 

Robbie was very humble. An example of this was when he traveled to Japan for an instructor's seminar for karate. Upon his return his students discovered that he had gone to grade for his seventh dan and had told nobody that he had achieved it. They discovered this at a later date. 

If anyone was to praise him he would brush it off or pass it onto someone else. He simply didn't accept praise. 

In my opinion Robbie saw karate as his work and career but TSYR was where he could really enjoy being a budo student again. However, in both pursuits he put in his all with passion and pride.

It is a great loss to his family, friends and the budo world.

Robbie, may your training continue wherever you may be and that you watch over our own training and keep us on the path.

Koru Dojo - New Zealand

Recently I attended a training camp with seven others in the beautiful Coromandel of New Zealand. We stayed at the Koru Dojo built and hosted by David Lynch and his wife Hisae. The dojo is the perfect place for a small group of serious budo students to sleep, eat and train. It is built onto the main house and David and Hisae are very welcoming and great conversationalists. To top it all off, they have a hot tub to relax the muscles after a day of training.

We drove to the dojo on a Friday and trained in the afternoon. We then had dinner prepared by the wife of one of the budoka who is a professional chef!  The food was exquisite. We socialised in the evening and drank wine and sake until about midnight.

The next morning we started with a pre-breakfast training session consisting of conditioning exercises. After a hearty breakfast we trained through to lunch. Then it was onto afternoon training, dinner and then more sake.

The third day started with conditioning exercises before breakfast again, we then fueled up and trained through the morning. We then packed up our gear and cleaned the dojo. For the final lunch of the weekend we walked into the bush and ate near a waterfall. 

Then it was final farewells and back in the cars for the trip home. 

Over the whole weekend we covered such things as sword and tanto disarms, kumitachi, kumitanto, battojutsu, taijutsu and even a bit of shiatsu for aching bodies. 

In the Koru Dojo, NZ.

It was a fantastic weekend full of earnest training and lots of laughs in the breaks.