RYU

Here' s a little known fact about Ryu: Whenever he fights Chun-Li, he always hits her a little bit harder than anyone else.

True story: We both made it to the second-tier of the 1994 tournament, I just kicked the crap out of that stupid Russian and I decided to go support my buddy. I leave the ironworks set and go over to the Chinese market set.

The documentaries and the video game people want you all to believe that we all fly around the world on a weekly basis, kicking the crap out of each other. We don't. It's expensive. They have set designers that can create any environment you want, and they always film the fights in Eastern Europe because there are all these master craftsmen they don't pay shit. I could tell you all the other ways the movies and the games get it wrong, but it would break your heart.

Go figure.

Anyway.

In the game, Chun-Li fights on a street in China, surrounded by her friends and family. They did fly her folks up from China, but the street itself is some rinky dink market area in Bucharest. I caught the fight mid-way through, after ordering a grasa from the street vendor nearby. It was one of the most vicious things I'd ever seen.

Make no mistake, Chun-Li gave a hell of an account of herself. I used to believe this was a man's sport, but she really spun my head on that, especially after the Venice semi-finals where she popped two of my ribs out of place. But she really got taken down a peg by Ryu.

It's not like he's Sagat. He won't just tear your head off out of spite or grind you into the ground when you're down. He just made her feel...I dunno...powerless. He countered every move she tried and added a little bit more pop to his strikes than he usually does. I'm sure the cameras didn't catch that, but I trained with him. I know the guy. I could see it. So could she. You'd think she just dumped him or something.

There was something about fighting a beautiful woman that made him act squirrelly. When they called the fight and she was lying on the ground, y'know what he said to her?

"Try harder."

Then he just picked up his stupid homeless bindle and walked away.

How's that for some cold shit?

Anyway, Chun-Li was hanging out with her family (Bison hadn't shown up in the picture yet and her father was still alive) and she was completely devastated. She was just out of her teens, she made it to the finals, and she just got completely served. I think being so coldly outclassed really hit her hard. I can't say I didn't feel sorry for her, but them's the breaks. I took her out to dinner later, but nothing really came of it.

Anyway, she never was all that comfortable around Ryu after that. In fact, I'm pretty sure she made it a point to take him down in the future. Before the whole Shadowloo thing kicked up, they had a fierce rivalry going on and I think she swung the win/loss ratio to nearly sixty-forty. It used to drive her nuts when the magazines speculated that the rivalry had a romantic element.

"Keen" she'd say because her English wasn't so good, "I rearry hate that bastard! Wha's his probrem wif me?"

Tell you the truth, I think Ryu is the way he is because he doesn't know how to talk to girls.

He has always been like that.

I remember this one night when we were in our teens. Ryu was happy to spend all that time in sensei's cabin. Sensei thought it showed diligence, but I think that it had more to do with the fact that he was always uncomfortable around kids his own age. Myself, as much as I loved training, I couldn't wait to hit the city. I was a handsome white guy living in Japan. The economic bubble hadn't burst yet and there was always another club full of kids wasting money or streets full of Yakuza to beat up, or girls who would fall in love with an athletic jing gai who spoke perfect Japanese.

So we're at Cloud, one of those neon-lit little dance clubs in Shinjuku and I'm chatting up a couple of honeys for about a half hour. Ryu was standing over my shoulder, not saying anything, but I'm getting this really intense vibe off him. I try to bring him into the conversation:

"And this is my friend. Hey Ryu, why don't you introduce yourself?"

The girls giggle. He's a handsome dude and he's got that stoic thing going on that chicks dig. Then he opens his big crazy mouth.

"The warrior's path is a lonely one."

And he turns and walks away.

Friggin' awkward.

Ryu has lived in RyuLand for a long time.

Tell you something else about him: He really does wear that stupid gi all the time.

See that guy at church wearing the karate outfit? Ryu.

See that guy in the gi at your sister's wedding? Ryu.

See that guy waiting in line at the bank? Ryu.

He doesn't need to. Motherfucker's a millionaire by now. He just socks away his money, then runs around, acting homeless and staying in fleabag hotels the world over.

Sometimes I feel bad for him. The rest of the street fighters moved on. We fought our battles, killed our demons, found whatever it was we were looking for (to various degrees) and rejoined the world. He's the only one that's still out there.

If you were to ask me, I think Ryu is a very lonely dude. He's very unhappy and he doesn't know how to talk to people so he has this big scary persona to help keep the people around him on his terms. Seriously, who would spend their entire life just wandering around looking for someone to hit?

DHALSIM

Dhalsim was the real deal.

I had a hard time with that, y'know. I was twenty-three and didn't know shit from shinola and here's this twiggly little Indian guy in his sixties doing stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend.

The most common question that I get from fans is about the ha-do-ken and the sho-ryu-ken. Being able to do that, people think you're some kind of wizard or superhero. You're not. It's just a trick. It's a trick that takes a lot of practice, but all it amounts to is channeling a part of yourself most people don't even realize they have.

So I get how I work. I don't get how Dhalsim works. His stuff feels different. Very different. Truthfully, I've always been a bit frightened of him.

The business people running the tournament never quite knew what to do with him. He wasn't gunning for sponsorships, he didn't chase after groupies, and he wasn't exactly a party guy. Mostly he hung around his tiny congregation until it was time to fight. The only time I ever saw Dhalsim lose his cool was when he got into it with a set designer over Dhalsim's fighting area. The original design looked like the Temple of Doom and even by Street Fighter standards it was terrible. There was a lot of back and forth, but eventually they changed the set, even though they forced Dhalsim to keep that stupid skull necklace.

That same set designer is currently working on a Mexican Teletubbies knock off and Dhalsim has turned out to be one of the great spiritual leaders of the new millennium.

Which is the other thing. I don't understand why a guy like that is fighting in the Street Fighter tournament. That yogi thing is not an act. He really believes in it. I just assumed that going around, kicking people's asses would be blashphemy or something.

I asked him about it once and he said, in perfectly unaccented English, because the world missed the point the first time around. Conflict emboldens us, allows us to break the cycle of our karma.

Or something.

Go figure.

BLANKA

Blanka.

Right.

The tournaments really started going down hill when that...thing showed up.

I read the bio. Plane crash in Brazil, raised by animals, learned to channel the body's electrical field from eels, blah blah blah. Bullshit. Somebody made him, and they didn't make him to be friendly.

I fought the guy six times, and half those times I was convinced that the business guys dyed a baboon and pissed it off. I continued to believe that until I threw him into a stone wall in Prague and he called me a cocksucker.

When you were in the ring with Blanka, you were fighting for your life. He used his claws and he bit with those big ass teeth and, if he felt so inclined, he would hit you with that defibrillator skin of his. He was not actually a very good fighter, but it was hard not to panic when he's coming at you. That's what happened to Guile in Rio De Janero. Whenever he wants to get chicks, he shows him the scar on his forehead from that claw slash in round two.

Anyway, I have no idea where Blanka is now, nor do I care to. For all I know, he's back in the jungle, bothering other critters and screwing around with the ecosystem. But I'll tell ya this: Blanka had handlers. Serious looking guys with military crew cuts. They'd watch the fights, take notes and film, then tranq his ass up and stick him in a box.

God knows what kind of damage Blanka could do in the right hands.

GUILE

Colonel Guile is the one fighter popular culture has gotten the most wrong.

No, he was not in Special Forces. No, he wasn't a spymaster or a man who had the ears of generals. Yes, he flew fighter planes. No, he didn't have an eight-foot tall flat top. He was in the military for God's sake. That kind of lunatic detail could have only been thought up by the Japanese.

He could wing that sonic boom, though. I never quite figured out how. It comes from a different place than the sho-ryu-ken. Getting hit with it was like getting hit by a pure sound. Try standing next to the speakers next time you're at a rock concert. Then turn the volume up past eleven.

He rolled with the tournament to the end and he still trains fighters to this day. He really loved the whole thing. I don't know too much about him, but I gathered that his interest in the tournament really pissed off his superiors. He wanted to go higher in his career, but they cut him off after the third go-around. "Not enough focus" they used to tell him.

Fighting him was always an interesting challenge. Out of all the competitors, he was the most patient. His tricks didn't fare so well if he rushed in like the rest of us. He hung back, let someone else make the first move, then WHAM sonic kick.

What's he like? Watch the reality-TV show. He's not acting, that's him to a tee. He's an intense, disciplined dude. Possibly too much so. He was a great opponent, but he's not someone to get drunk with later.

ZANGIEFF

First off, and I'm being honest here, most of us wrote Zangieff off as a comedy act. Yeah, if he hit you, you would have a helluva time remembering your name, but he was slow as molasses and couldn't stack up to anyone who was quicker or could throw fireballs. His win/loss rating was the worst in the tournaments and the only time he dropped me was because he got me drunk the night before.

That was one thing he could do: party. I'm almost convinced that he didn't enter the tournaments for the fighting, but for the celebration afterwards. The guy was gregarious as all hell. I remember one evening in Honolulu. Earlier that day he beat the living snot out of Dan, stomped him so deep into the ground I thought they were gonna need construction tools to get him out. Personally, I can't deal with that kind of loss comfortably, but that night both he and Dan were drinking and laughing and picking up groupies at the local bar.

That's just the kind of guy he was. I could only take him in small doses, but when I was in the right mood he was a lot of fun to be around.

Little secret about Zangieff: half the time I wondered if the whole "dumb Russian galoot" thing was an act. Every now and again he'd catch me at a bar or a restaurant or something and we'd spend hours discussing politics or literature or whatever, and it turned out that he was always better-read, more articulate, and more insightful than I was.

So he was a very intelligent, very well-educated man. Who fought bears.

HONDA

Honda. Wow. I haven't thought about him in years.

I kinda promised myself I wouldn't talk about what happened in Beijing. Fei Long felt terrible about it, and it's pretty clear that incident caused him to retire from Street Fighting. Shame. He was an incredible fighter with a long career ahead of him. Besides, someone should set the record straight.

People look at the tapes of Honda's later bouts and they wonder why a guy in such obvious poor condition was allowed to reenter the ring over and over again. They tend to hold us, the fighters, culpable for Honda's tried to warn him. We said that the whole Street Fighting thing is much more strenuous than sumo, but he just ignored us. As unpleasant as he was to be around, the gigantic chip on his shoulder didn't help matters much. He felt he had something to prove, and that's what killed him in the end.

Besides, this was right after the whole Shadowloo thing. The fights had become more private, more secretive. The advertisement types got squeamish about spending money in a tournament hosted by a known tyrant and after Sagat beat Thunder Hawk to death, the whole thing became deadly serious. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure the climate change appealed more to Honda more than anyone else.

"Finally," he said to me during the Thailand semi-finals "this is a tournament of warriors."

And that's how he saw himself. Yeah, he worked hard and killed himself at the gym, but he had the wrong mentality, the wrong tools, and he didn't know how to change.

In the end, he was Chris Farley, only not funny at all.

CHUN-LI

Chun-Li...

(interviewer's note-at this point in the conversation, Mr. Masters paused for several moments. We both stared at the waters of the French Riviera for awhile before we continued)

Chun-Li was the smartest among us. She got out.

I used to have some, well, preconceived notions of the women who would enter these tournaments. Honestly, I thought most of them were either dykes or crazy as a shithouse rat. Cammy proved the latter to be true, but Chun-Li didn't fit into either category. Initially, before the whole Shadowloo thing went down, she was like Ryu. She loved the study of martial arts and she wanted to prove to herself that she learned something. Unlike Ryu, she didn't get so wrapped up in herself that she couldn't see the world around her.

Then Bison wrecked her life.

Chun-Li was a Daddy's girl through and through. I actually met they guy once. He had this big, open, Chow Yun-Fat smile and he was a lot of fun to be around. Her mother died when she was young and they were pretty much inseparable since. Whenever he got some leave, he used to come out there and watch her fight, and afterward they'd go out to dinner somewhere.

You all know the rest at this point. Bison had Chun-Li's father killed for investigating the guns-for-opium link between Shadowloo and the PRC. What's not very well remembered is the fact that Chun-Li's father was tortured to death and filmed the whole thing.

And that was the worst for her. Suddenly her father's death was international news, like Daniel Pearl or that Russian soldier. People would download footage of it on the Internet. She was bombarded with questions at the gym, outside her fights, anywhere she went. The girl couldn't get a minute to grieve...

(Mr. Masters stares silently out into the ocean)

I don't blame her for what she did in Thailand. Let the movies and the books and the manga say that Ryu fought Bison to the death. Let them paint him as a mastermind or a warrior or a dark magic prince. He was just another evil-hearted bastard in a world of evil hearted bastards, and the world is greater for his passing. But I was watching her face when she crushed his throat.

Even getting payback didn't help her. I think it did more harm than good, actually. It took Chun-Li to a very dark place. She was a very unhappy person. She lost the love of the contest. It was good for her to leave when she did, otherwise the cruelty would have eaten her up inside.

I see her every once in awhile, when I'm in her neck of the woods. She still has the scars from her fight, when that son of a bitch burned himself into her body. She's still beautiful and time hasn't taken the light from her eyes. I won't say anything more of her than that. She wants her privacy and I respect that.

The road not taken...

(Mr. Masters becomes silent)

BALROG

Back in the day, none of us could figure out how a boxer made it to the semi-finals.

Come on. He only uses his hands, he's made his career in the rule-heavy boxing world, and to top it all off he's a disgrace at that. We might as well just be passed on to the second round.

The first time I fought him, it took him 37 seconds to demolish me.

Say what you will about his conduct before and after the tournament. Say what you will about his lengthy legal issues with his management firm. Say what you will about that civil suit with the Bellagio. The man can fight.

Little secret about boxers: They know that the fight game isn't about fancy moves and ancient Japanese mystic hoo-doo. The fight game is about conditioning. You need to be strong enough to hand out pain, hearty enough to take it, and confident enough not to get rattled. He had all that in spades and he probably would have gone higher had the deck not been so purposefully stacked against him.

VEGA

In pop culture, Vega tends to get portrayed as a fine-skinned lothario dandy. He's pretty, but he's got a fighter's face. Get hit in the face with 80 pounds of pressure for 10 years and see how much good a metal mask does. He is still an egotistical son of a bitch, but since he has a different girl in his bed every night I suppose he has a right to be.

Again, pop culture gets it wrong. Vega is not in the employ of Shadowloo and he doesn't spend his time bringing beautiful death to unlucky mooks around the world. Vega is basically a vain sensualist. When he's in public it's all silk and Egyptian cotton, wine wine and luxurious surroundings. In private...well...every time I run into him he's always got some new countessa hanging off his arm.

The real irony is if you scratch very deep under the surface you will find a semi-decent guy. He anonymously donates more money to charities than the rest of us, he's very close to his family (especially his much cuckloid ex-wife) and he's a really fun guy to spend an evening at the bar with. He's basically Puss in Boots from Shrek.

Having said that all, he's not a hard guy to beat in a fight. All he has is speed and once you figure your way around that, it's over for him.

SAGAT

If there ever was a man who could be described as an engine of hate, it was Sagat.

He's one of the most dangerous men you can meet in the ring. In a profession where the average fighter retires at twenty-six and is dead by forty, Sagat is still fighting at pushing fifty. He does it by engaging in the most punishing work-out I've ever seen a man subject himself to. I often wonder if one day he'll be on his well-deserved deathbed and he'll look back and see the endless wasted years that stretch behind him before the long dark takes him.

It's kind of funny that he pushes himself like that, because he's a man without hope.

The man became fixated on Ryu. That scar on his chest is all the more hideous up close, and I really doubt it will ever heal, internally or externally. He made the rematch become his whole purpose for being, only to be taken out in the last thirty seconds of the match I watched the tape obsessively and in truth I don't think Ryu won a second time because he was better. Ryu just had a lucky day.

So Sagat goes back to the jungle. He left the world, goes back to training obsessively, and something really nasty grew inside of him. We all watched him advance in the 1999 tournament and he was...well, he was always a scary dude, but something dark lived in him.

Then came the fight with Thunder Hawk.

Look, deaths do happen. This is a full-contact tournament with some of the biggest, baddest, meanest people in the world. But stomping on a man's back while he's down and obviously out is cold-blooded murder.

They stripped him of everything. Every tournament he ever one, any tournament he will ever be in, all of it gone. They even polished his name off the big golden trophy at the main office. All those years, all that work, all that hate. Gone in one go.

Whatever. After what he did in Thailand, he deserves to rot in obscurity. Forgotten. Alone.

BISON

I've said my peace on Bison and that evil land he called home. We all have.

Suffice to say, he was a blight on the world and it's a very good thing that he's gone.

I just wish someone didn't have to give up so much to end him.

KEN

Me?

Well, I loved it. The good times, the long dark times, the whole thing. Say what you will about the tournament, about the deaths, about humanity's endless love for spectacle, the most vivid times of my life were those days.

People called us whores for participating during the Shadowloo-hosted years. Some times I can't say I blame them. What did it say about us when we were willing to shake hands with the devil to get one more match? That's the only question that keeps me up at night.

My life is good. I made a tremendous amount of money during the whole thing and I use it to travel this big stupid globe. I've been to each corner of the world and I've seen a million amazing sights. I've fallen in and out of love. I've been a father and I've buried my son. I visited Thunder Hawk's family and we shared our grief and became clean. Every once in awhile I'll wander back to California and do a direct-to-DVD movie.

I even reconnected with my old friend. He's still out in RyuLand, and he's getting a little too old for this shit, but we sparred by moonlight in the darkest forest of Germany while wolves howled around us. That was pretty cool.

I've done a lot of things in my life, but I can't say I'm any more wise or mature than when I started out. People can go to the farthest reaches of the world, then come back and be the same ignorant assholes they were when they left. I still make a lot of the wrong decisions and stumble over my feet because I'm only human and I carry myself where ever I go.

Lately I've been thinking of settling down and teaching what I know. Sensei always expected Ryu to take up his position, but it's pretty clear to me that Ryu will never stop. I will find some bright, capable young man or woman and I will sit them down and I will say this:

"If you choose to learn what I have to teach, it will become your whole life. Everything you do, everything you have, will be tied into the path of the warrior. It's like being married to an impatient lover. It will not always be kind. It will break your body and your soul, but the rewards are vast. You will see the world with open eyes. And you won't be afraid."

I'll teach them. Maybe they'll listen.

This interview was recorded in Black Belt Magazine, May 6th 2010 in Nice, France

Ryu could not be reached for comment.