Gary gets his kicks

Andrew Mathieson
WHEN Gary Viccars tied up his first karate belt, the discipline was undisciplined in Australia.
Karate was unrestrained back in 1968. Fighters faced a barrage of brutal blows amid a mysterious martial art synonymous with Bruce Lee cult films.
Hidden behind the door of a steamy sauna bath that Gary and his surf mates discovered for healing their beach wounds, the Little Ryrie Street dojo was often flooded with cries of anguish.
“If we train now like they did back then we’d have no students in a day,” Gary reflects.
“It was really physically hard and the fighting was brutal – that would be the best word to describe it.
“People would have bloodied faces, broken noses, busted hands.”
Gary sustained a multitude of bad bruises, most around the groin and all over his thighs from so-called non-contact fights.
The 62-year-old from Manifold Heights, who not only survived but prospered from the sport, is quick to recite a common karate adage: “When you get older, you don’t get better, you just get smarter”.
A testament to Geelong’s highest-ranked karate practitioner was his bout against 50 men in what was then an Australian-first.
He remains one of only eight men to have taken on the unique fight test in which he fought each man individually in 90-second rounds, without break, for 75 minutes of non-stop, knockdown fighting.
“It was one of those times that you almost went on auto pilot,” Gary remembers.
“Between the first and the last fight you can’t remember any specific fights.”
Approaching his 40th birthday and struggling within the first few rounds, it had been seven years since Gary represented Australia at the 1979 world championships.
Each challenger was just another number.
“I suddenly realised that what I was doing wrong was counting back from 50,” he grins.
“I’d be like ‘That’s 10 down, there’s only another 39 to go’.”
Years later Gary became one of half a dozen men in Australia to reach the Kyokushin karate level of fifth dan black belt.
The achievement earned him the title shihan, “a man of example”, as Gary explains.
But the real test came two years later.
Held in such high regard within Kyokushin karate circles, Gary was bestowed the title shihan cho – “boss of the shihans” – when he achieved an unprecedented seventh dan.
To earn the new honorific he put himself through a tortuous six-and-a-half-hour grading.
“We did an hour of physical workout before we even got to train,” Gary says.
“I was already exhausted by the time we started to do the basic techniques.
“I was a month under 60 when I did it, so I wasn’t a spring chicken.”
Despite pushing his body to limit, Gary has settled comfortably into refereeing and judging roles at every Australian titles since 1988 and at the past five world championships.
The former instructor opened dojos at three prominent Geelong venues, his first at the old Ocean Grove picture theatre as a raw green belt nearly 30 years ago.
While teaching 100 students most nights, Gary’s wife gave him an ultimatum a year after their marriage in 1970: karate or surfing?
“I chose karate,” he confesses.
“Of course, I’m not married to that woman any more.”
Just like karate, Gary blames surfing-related injuries for keeping him out of the waves.
He surfed in the days of longboards when leg ropes did not exist, he explains.
“Funnily enough, I reckon I’ve had more injuries from surfing than from full-contact karate,” Gary remarks.
Gary also remembers hearing momentous news over a beer at the Torquay Hotel during his old surfing days.
“A mate came in and said to me that Claw and Sing Ding had formed this new surfing company and they were going to call it Rip Curl,” he reminisces.
“I thought ‘Rip Curl, what a bugga of a name – that’s not going to take off’.”