Defending the clinch to "stop a fight going to the ground" is a lot harder than you might think. Anyone who's done full ranges MMA sparring wil know this.
Unfortunately many who haven't assume they have the answers.
There are a lot of Wing Chun people who claim to have effective "defences against a Kickboxer" or "against a grappler" but they never try them out in free sparring real time, they just do them in theory.
If you watch things like UFC you don't see WC people entering and keeping the grapplers at bay with traps and blasts - it just doesn't happen that way.
Having said that, the WC adaptations into Jun Fan that Bruce made do work against a KB or grappler, and are played regularly in JKD training clubs - we do the same drills here.
So as for the "Wing Chun" phase the JF will work on the mat in MMA as will the Feng Wei, as they cover the KB and grappling phases.
But don't expect some WC stuff you've been shown in some club by a landswimmer who's only seen MMA and UFC on TV from the comfort of his armchair to work against a real shoot - the clinch will happen and you will go down!
A good example I've been using - go outside the confines of MA and watch concepts from athletics. An athlete can do a 100 metre sprint in around 10 seconds. That's 10 metres a second.
How fast does the gap of under 2 metres across the mat get closed? That's why grappling range happens and why it's almost impossible to stop.
You need to learn how to fight on the floor.
Remember, we know very little about the real Yip Man (to use the proper spelling) - I trained under two of his students - Victor Kan and to a lesser extent William Chueng and they had lots of tales, but he is very much now a mythical figure.
What would Yip do to "kick everyone's ass"? Trapping and straight blast? It doesn't work in a cage against a boxer or a shooter! Nobody can make it work that way! Just because one guy, who now has a mythical name, was a bit good in Hong Kong, which is really all he was, years ago and there's now a film about him out, don't make the mistake of assuming he could translate that into MMA.
He never would have fought a 16 stone boxer or 18 stone wrestler back in Hong Kong. He would have non idea how to adapt WC against such an opponent. Bruce found this out when he moves to California - he rapidly had to alter WC to become Jun Fan because of the new people the had now had to fight against.
And even Bruce lost a fight to Gene Lebell - a Judo man!
Believe me, if Yip had come straight from Hong Kong, no matter how good he was there, to the US, and got in the cage with a Gracie, he'd be on his back and tapping in less than a minute!
There is nothing to indicate there is a level in WC that can be reached that would ever make these facts moot. However there are levels in fighting that the limited range and structure of WC cannot accomodate.
We have even seen a TKD man beat a JJ man with a head kick in UFC now. All the "head kicks don't work in real fights" debate now has a new level, as it probably always did have. The theory that a real kicker can take down a grappler has been proven.
But a WC man in trapping range against a boxer, Thai boxer or grappler has always found he cannot manage the range. There is nothing to indicate this will ever change.
Hence no WC men winning the UFC.
There has always been a lot of bullshit from the WC community and they nver step up to prove their theories, never enter competitions. All we get from them is "what we do is a MA not a sport". Now known as the "Wing Chun cop-out"!
WC is a great art, if done properly, but it is very rarely done properly, especially by Westerner taught by Westerners.
And it is now known and accepted that training in ANY one art, and getting caught in their structure will be limiting and a recipe for defeat.
it's about becoming a competant fighter, not a representative of a fighting style.
In our case, becoming a "White Tiger" is our goal, not being just someone who "does" STMA, which is why what we do is harder to label - and what stops us getting bound by any particular structure which leads to limitation.
The truth is outside all structures - that's what Liberation means.
