The Rise of a Next-Generation XMA Star

Black Belt Magazine's Interview with Matt Mullins
October/November 2004 (Los Angeles, California)

Matt Mullins has trained in the martial arts for 10 years. He statred at Sharkey's Karate Studio in Naperville, Illinois, when he was just 13. "I started hanging out at the school before and after class," he says. "Then I started taking double classes, and then I was there all the time. I began teaching, and soon Sensei Sharkey took me under his wing."

During those early years, Mike Chaturantabut was also influential in Mullins' training. "He was how I wanted to be," Mullins says. "I wanted to be able to have as much focus as he did and concentrate on my training like he would. I wanted to be as dedicated to the martial arts as he was."

When Mullins moved to Los Angeles, he began learning taekwondo from Simon Rhee and wushu from Black Belt Hall of Fame member Ming Liu.

Mullins' diverse background makes him a perfect athlete for Xtreme Martial Arts. "I love shorei-ryu forms," he says. "I love the high-energy, high-jumping acrobatic maneuvers of capoeira. It's a nice combination of martial arts and acrobatics. I also love the fluidity of wushu – the grace of the kicks and the hand [techniques]. In taekwondo, I love the speed and power of the kicks. That's the great thing about martial arts: You're able to learn different things from different arts and put what you like together."

The level to which Mullins has risen using that modus operandi landed him a major role in a Discovery Channel documentary titled XMA: Xtreme Martial Arts. "When they started doing the casting for the project, they got 1200 submissions from different martial artists and about 600 videotapes," he says. "They started looking at those tapes and found that the quality of the martial artists wasn't exactly what they wanted. They had the coordinator, James Lew, suggest guys he knew. I went in and auditioned."

When he got the role, the focus of the documentary wasn't supposed to be XMA, Mullins says. It was intended to showcase efforts to use science to verify the claims often made in the martial arts.

"When we were looking for another character to work on my techniques with me, I mentioned Mike Chat as one of my instructors," he says. "They asked if he was good, and I told them he's amazing. So they called him, and he became the other guy in the documentary.

"They found out that at Sharkey's Karate Studio, we had an amazing lineage. So the wanted to show a human-interest story. The whole thing came together about basing it on my training and the transition from traditional martial arts to Xtreme Martial Arts. My goal was to make sure the martial arts were portrayed in a good way because it had done so much for me. I wanted people to know it's much more than fighting and forms."

Mullins views XMA as a way to inspire the younger generation to join the martial arts. But no matter how successful he becomes in his new endeavor, he will never abandon his roots. "If I do a lot of XMA training, I always feel the need to come back to my traditional forms, to get back to my basics," he says.