Knife Ground Fighting, The “Rattlesnake“ course by W. Hock Hochheim

“In the 1970s and 80s, as a patrolman and detective in the Army and in Texas, I knew a whole lot of fighting occurred on the ground. Certainly knife fighting. I began to explore this subject thanks to the Inosanto family with Hartsell (Catch) and Shootfighting. But with a wary, skeptical eye on the sports angle. Adaptation not replication. By the early 90s, with BJJ - UFC there was a martial revolution on the ground material and we all thought...’ho-hum? New? No.’ With the knife subject, by the 1990s there were just a few of us, part of a “knife redux,“ relook, evolution, the past systemologies being mostly about big-knife-dueling and we realized there was so much more in knife crime and war than that dueling “slice.“ I started slaving over the knife subject which had to include knife ground fighting. Much of the knife courses you see today take for granted what a few of us did and investigated starting in the 90s.“ - Hock In May, 2014, Hock conducted a semi-pri