N/A Is Not Zero: The Craft of Martial Arts Writing and the Trap of the Wrong Framework

The night in Guangzhou was so sealed that even a heartbeat had to practice whispering. I was sitting in the seventh row of a modest arena, a half-filled notebook in my hand, watching two fighters step into the final round of a lightweight kickboxing bout. There was no screaming announcer, no light show, no noisy VIP section. There was only breathing, footsteps on the canvas, and the quiet whistle of the referee cutting the rhythm. The man beside me — a coach who had been in the trade for more than twenty years — leaned down and said something I still remember: “To watch this fight, you have to follow the rhythm of the feet, not the punch.” I wrote that line in the margin and underlined it twice. Over the years, I have learned that sentences like that are not viewing tips. They are instructions on how to read — how to read a fight, how to read a fighter, and, more importantly, how to read what you are actually watching. What I want to write about today is not a specific fight. I want to write about the silent moment that happens before any fight begins: the moment when the writer decides what kind of martial art he is looking at. Because in my trade, there is something quieter than transfer rumors and quieter than referee controversies — a piece of analysis written without anyone, including the writer, knowing what the subject of the analysis actually is. And that trap usually begins with one small label: “martial arts.” Martial arts is one of the few fields where a single word can contain several different worlds, and each world runs by its own rulebook. A professional MMA bout, a boxing contest, a kickboxing fight under K-1 or Glory rules, a Muay Thai match, a grappling tournament under IBJJF or ADCC rules, a sanda bout, and a taolu performance form — all of them can be called “martial arts.” But they are judged so differently that if you apply the wrong framework, every conclusion that follows is wrong as well. For MMA or boxing, people read by win-loss record, finish rate inside the distance, quality of opposition, and number of knockdowns. For a taolu form, the story is entirely different: it is scored by the difficulty of the movements, the precision of the stances, the rhythm, and the amplitude of the body. Applying “knockout percentage” logic to a taolu form is wrong from the root; applying “difficulty score” logic to an MMA fight is even worse, because it turns a live contest into a performance that gets graded. I cover martial arts for the Chinese market, live in Guangzhou, but was born in Vietnam. That cross-border position gives me an advantage and a burden at once: I can hear both sides, but I am also accountable to both. And that is precisely why I know something few outsiders notice — that the most serious mistake in martial arts writing is not writing a wrong number. The most serious mistake is writing the right number inside the wrong framework. When the transfer window arrives, the noise gets louder. Every day brings hundreds of rumors: this fighter is moving to that promotion, that fighter is changing weight class, another is returning from injury, another is supposedly finished at thirty. Fans drown in that noise, and they need a reliability filter rather than one more speculative voice. My job, therefore, is not to add fuel to the fire, but to rebuild the framework before saying anything at all. There is a paradox I keep running into: the more martial arts content is produced, the worse the quality of reading becomes. The number of articles rises, but the number of articles willing to say “not enough information” does not rise with it. People read more but understand less — because most content is written to fill gaps with a confident tone rather than to point out where the gaps are. I still remember a moment years ago when I mispronounced a fighter’s name in the mixed zone. His name came from a language I was not yet familiar with. I got it wrong three times in a row, and there was embarrassed laughter around me. Afterwards, the fighter himself reminded me that getting his name right was a form of respect — and that respecting his name meant respecting his country. I spent the following month, two hours every night, rereading every name on the competition list according to its native phonetic transcription. Since then, I have understood that verification is not a secondary step. It is the first step. A name is the first promise a writer makes to the world. Let me begin with something that sounds technical but is actually very human: when a piece of data does not exist, what do we call it? In academic writing, people use N/A — “not applicable,” “no information.” It is an honest label. It says: this question does not yet have an answer, not that the answer is zero. The difference between “no data” and “data equal to zero” is the difference between an honest writer and a writer fooling himself. One says “I do not yet know”; the other says “I know there is nothing.” And in martial arts, these two sentences lead to completely opposite conclusions. Picture a fighter for whom we have no knockdown data. If we assign him zero, we implicitly declare that he cannot finish a fight. But the truth is only this: we do not have the information. He might be an extremely dangerous early finisher — or someone who has never stepped onto a big stage. Not knowing does not mean safe. It also does not mean dangerous. It only means not yet known. This is what I call a “framework error.” It happens when an analyst, under pressure to deliver a conclusion, fills the gap with speculation and then presents that speculation as fact. In martial arts, this error occurs on at least three levels. The first level is technical-tactical. A correct analysis must be able to state: whether fighter A’s style counters or is countered by fighter B’s style; in which round a finish is likely to happen; how strong the record quality is; and how the weight class creates a physical advantage. But if the applicable ruleset is not identified from the start, the entire analytical table is just an empty frame nailed onto thin air. I have seen writing dense with jargon — “standing distance,” “punch angle,” “counter window,” “weight transfer” — with not a single named fight or identified fighter underneath. That is the sign of a wrong framework. And sadly, it still gets read, shared, and quoted. The second level is condition and career mileage. Here the central questions are age and the road already traveled. A thirty-four-year-old fighter with twenty professional bouts has a very different physical curve from a twenty-four-year-old with ten. But if no fighter is named, no weight class is stated, and no recent weigh-in is mentioned, then any analysis of “weight-cut risk” or “injury wear” is fiction. And this is where I want to pause, because it touches the thing I care about more than records: human health. In the fighting world, there is an unwritten rule I always follow: risk must not be underrated simply because data is missing. The absence of a risk rating is not the absence of risk. Brain health, rapid weight cuts, accumulated injury — these are things we cannot call “safe” merely because there is no news. Sometimes silence about risk is the very way risk continues to exist. I do not want my writing to become part of that silence. The third level is the organizational and market level. Combat sports operate through exclusive contracts, through the fragmentation of championship belts, through cross-promotional superfights. The structure of clauses and the payroll are the real story, not the numbers shouted across a news ticker. But to read this level, you must know which organization you are talking about: a major MMA promotion, one of boxing’s four big sanctioning bodies, a kickboxing circuit like Glory or K-1, a grappling circuit like ADCC, or a performance-martial-arts framework inside a national sports program. This is where I return to the word “martial arts” — that seemingly harmless label. It is like lumping classical music, rock, and electronic music under one word, “music,” and then asking a critic to review them all by the same yardstick. The classical critic talks about harmonic structure; the rock critic talks about energy and the crowd; the electronic critic talks about production and atmosphere. All music, but entirely different frameworks. Martial arts works the same way. And a martial arts writer, if he wants to be honest, must be the first to determine which world he is standing in. Alongside the story of names is the story of sourcing. A fact written without a source is not a fact — it is someone’s memory, retold in a confident voice. In martial arts, where numbers are often passed by word of mouth from gym to gym, attaching a source and a date to every number is the only way to keep an article verifiable. If I cannot do that, I would rather write “unclear” than write a number that merely sounds specific. At this point, I want to say something that may displease some colleagues. People often believe that when data is missing, the most neutral thing is to say nothing — or to call the situation “neutral.” But “neutral” and “not yet known” are two different things. Neutral is a conclusion; not yet known is a state. If we call a gap “neutral,” we have quietly legitimized it — we have turned ignorance into a judgment. And that judgment usually falls on the weaker side: lesser-known fighters, small arenas, markets that have not been covered. In my trade, there is a great temptation: writing so that it sounds “professional.” That temptation leads to what I call “empty analysis” — an article that looks deep, full of tables and jargon, but underneath contains not a single verifiable fact. Worse, it usually comes with a strong conclusion, because the writer knows a strong conclusion gets read more than a cautious one. But I believe the opposite. An honest martial arts analysis is one willing to say “I do not have enough information” instead of inventing a framework to fill the gap. Silence, in this trade, is not a weakness. It is a beat. The keeper of the rhythm does not strike immediately — he listens, and he knows how to wait. I learned this not from books, but from training sessions with no audience, where I sat in a corner and noted every breath of a fighter before he stepped into the light. The true star is born in the sessions with no audience. And there is one more misunderstanding: many people think traditional martial arts and modern combat sports are the same thing, differing only in how “strong” or “weak” they are. That is a mistake about essence, not skill level. A form is not designed for combat; it is designed for performance — and judging it by combat wins and losses is like judging a symphony by how loud the drum is. Sanda, by contrast, is a genuine combat sport, with rules, weight classes, and the potential for a finish. Lumping all three under one word and applying a single analytical framework to them is the root of most misunderstanding in the field. This may sound academic, but the consequences are very real. When we apply the wrong framework, we are not merely wrong in theory — we hurt real people. A fighter judged as “incapable of finishing” because we lack data about him may lose a contract. A small arena dismissed as “not worth covering” because we have never been there may lose a chance to grow. Writing in the wrong framework is not a harmless slip of paper. It carries weight. The night in Guangzhou was still sealed. I closed my notebook and reminded myself of something I had learned after many years. When a martial arts analysis begins with a gap, the best approach is not to fill it with speculation, but to name it correctly. If you do not know whether the subject is MMA, boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai, grappling, sanda, or performance forms, the first task is not analysis — it is determining the framework. That seemingly small question decides everything that follows. I will leave one question here for those who work in my trade, and for readers too. Next time you hold a martial arts analysis filled with tables and jargon, try asking one simple question: has the writer determined which kind of martial art he is writing about? Because sometimes the most careful writer is not the one who delivers the most conclusions, but the one who withholds them until the framework is right. And in an industry where the noise never stops, that care is the clearest sound there is.