IN SELF-DEFENSE: SCREENWRITER/MARTIAL ARTS JOURNALIST CLAY MCBRIDE HAS ALWAYS STOOD UP TO BULLIES

This is the box art for the video release of "Ghost Riders," McBride's first produced feature.

McBride matched his Gracie Jiu-Jitsu skills against his regular teacher, Royce Gracie.

CULVER CITY, Calif. -- Americans learn martial arts for one basic reason, says Clay McBride, who has studied judo, hapkido, wing chun, Western boxing, Filipino self-defense systems and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.

"You go to it to keep from being beaten up."

A screenwriter and martial arts journalist just named writer of the year by Inside Kung-Fu magazine, McBride is a Cape Girardeau native who needed to defend himself early in life.

He contracted polio at 13, but losing the use of his left leg didn't stop McBride from being the same boy who'd always taken on bullies.

"My dad was very old fashioned and he taught me to stand up for what you believe in and for people that need standing up for," McBride said.

Only now he couldn't fight and he couldn't run.

"I was a target of the Neanderthal bully-type guys," he said.

Through the 1970s he studied first judo and later hapkido under various teachers at Moo Sul Kwon, a martial arts school on Broadway in Cape Girardeau. The school is now called the Lee H. Park Martial Arts Institute and is located on Independence.

Among his teachers were the late Lee H. Park along with Mike Morton and Daniel Beard, now principal of Jackson Middle School.

"Clay was one of the kind of guys who had a tremendous amount of drive and desire," Beard says. "And he would put out all the effort that was needed."

Beard could see the difference martial arts made in McBride's sense of well-being. "Clay was a strong individual but he become more confident in himself. I think his self-image was definitely influenced."

Because of his disability, McBride couldn't perform many of techniques in the traditional ways but that didn't deter either him or his teachers.

"They were always very encouraging," he said. "That's not true of a lot of martial arts instructors. Many are very rigid and linear in their thinking."

The son of Cedric and Erica McBride of Cape Girardeau is still outspoken. He was recognized by the magazine for his work as official spokesman for the controversial Ultimate Fighting Championship and later on behalf of the World Combat Championship.

"...He remains the premiere proponent of reality-based, empirical testing of the arts, making him something of an annoying thorn in the side of many an established martial arts `personality,'" Inside Kung-Fu said.

Since 1992, McBride has published more than 35 articles in such magazines as Black Belt, Inside Karate, Martial Arts Masters, Karate International, Ultimate Warrior and Inside Kung-Fu.

The honor from Inside Kung-Fu came as a humbling surprise to him. "It was never my intention to be a writer," he said from his Culver City home.

McBride's primary work is screenwriting. He has a degree in motion picture production from Columbia University and his wife Madeleine works for Universal Pictures.

His list of credits includes "Ghost Riders," "Ghetto Blaster," "Night of the Cyclone" and "Sweet Murder." Two of his latest screenplays, "Night Storm Rising" and "China," are in pre-production and he hopes to see his science fiction adventure "Glory Hounds" produced this year.

"They have modest budgets, $2-4 million," he says. "They're the kind of things Chuck Norris started out making -- good solid `B' movies.

"That's the way you break into the business."

McBride never has employed a martial arts theme in one of his movie scripts. "Ghost Riders" is a ghost tale about spectral cowboys, "Ghetto Blaster" is an inner city drug and crime story, and `Night of the Cyclone' and "Sweet Murder" are erotic thrillers.

These days he's speaking out for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, developed by a family of Brazilians who learned Jiu-Jitsu from a Japanese master in the 1930s.

"Over the next 20 years they built what I consider to be an invincible self-defense system," McBride says. "In 65 years they have never been defeated."

One of the Gracies is the perennial champion of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a no-holds-barred competition that critics have likened to human cock fighting.

"I say kids should watch this," McBride counters. "They should see what works. And they should see that when two men fight there's an actual cost involved. It's not like WWF wrestling."

Gracie Jiu-Jitsu is so good because it doesn't require great athletic ability and can be performed as well at 55 as at 20.

"Royce Gracie said (Gracie Jiu-Jitsu) is for the slow, stupid, weak and uncoordinated person," McBride said.

Martial arts are only worthwhile if they provide a practical means of self-defense, he says, recounting a number of times he's had to street-test the usefulness of his techniques.

The most recent occurred when he lived in a gang-infested area near Hollywood Boulevard. He helped start a Neighborhood Watch and the group went on nightly patrols.

One afternoon he saw eight gang members attack a neighbor and was able to subdue two of them.

"Ninety percent of what's taught in traditional martial arts classes is a lot of hokum," McBride says. "...It looks nice in class but if you try to use it on the street you're going to get killed."

To McBride, martial arts schools have a responsibility to teach their students techniques that actually work when you're trying to protect your life.

"I always go back to remembering being that 13-year-old kid afraid of being beaten up," he says.