All martial arts are a quest for beauty and transcendence. I found those not in doing karate but rather having karate done to me. I was honored to be tossed like a bag of wet cement by the shihan.

There was no looking down for a soft spot to fall, nor for the leg that would undercut my own. I had to properly simulate the fighting condition, willing myself unaware of my fate so that I didn’t reflexively start falling until I was actually being felled.

On my descent, I locked eyes with the shihan and grabbed a fistful of the sleeve of his gi. I had let him and gravity do their business and landed in position to counter. He might have been the only one in the room who recognized this, but no matter — it wasn’t about me, and I wasn’t brought up to compete.

The shihan let go of me . I sprang to my feet and assumed a fighting position. Once again I was thrown to the floor. And again. And 20 times more. Each time I broke my fall as if out of an ancient textbook, none the worse for wear.

In the material world the martial arts are often described and even advertised as a means of self-defense. You sincerely hope you never have to use your martial art outside a dojo. And you definitely hope that you never have to perform a break-fall in any situation. That said, my ability to fall spared me injury and possibly saved my life in the workplace.

My job as a sportswriter has often landed me in strange circumstances, but none stranger than my trip in 1991 to Calgary, Alberta, to write about Bret Hart, a big dog in the World Wrestling Federation. This led to a fateful encounter with Bret’s father, Stu, who had retired as the proprietor of Stampede Wrestling, leaders in the mayhem industry in Western Canada.

Stu Hart began his ring career in the 1940s and threw one of his last elbow smashes in apparent anger on an early-1990s pay-per-view show, knocking out Bret’s rival Shawn Michaels. Some doubted the authenticity of that blow: Could a septuagenarian really ice a 240-pound champion in his prime? I, too, considered it far-fetched, but only until I wound up in the same position with Hart as I had with the shihan. That position, as ever, was supine.