Long before this site turned its focus to the New Zealand martial arts scene, blitzmag.net was the online home of Blitz, an Australasian martial arts magazine that covered fighters, instructors and training methods across the region for many years. The magazine ran feature interviews and profiles spanning karate, taekwondo, kickboxing and kung fu, alongside training advice and a self-defence section aimed at readers outside the competitive circuit.
Much of that material predates search-friendly publishing and went offline along with the original site. A number of the magazine’s interviews and profiles are still referenced today, though, cited in other publications and in Wikipedia articles about the fighters and instructors involved. Losing that material outright would have broken a set of long-standing citations pointing at genuinely useful source material, so rather than let it disappear, this archive restores a selection of the magazine’s most-referenced pieces.
Restoration here means locating an archived copy of each article, generally through the Wayback Machine, and republishing the text largely as it first appeared. Formatting artefacts left over from the old site’s layout have been cleaned up, but the wording, structure and quotes are unchanged from the original. Where the old web address could be kept exactly as it was, it has been; a handful of pages needed a single redirect from the legacy address because of naming conventions the current platform doesn’t support. Each entry below includes a short line on what the piece covers, so readers can tell at a glance whether it’s the one a citation or search result was pointing them to.
From the magazine
- Tony Bowden: The Shihan who never gave up: profile of the Kyokushin karate instructor and multiple-time full-contact champion, on four decades spent in what practitioners call “the hardest karate.”
- The Man Behind Bloodsport?: Peter Ralston discusses winning China’s full-contact world tournament in 1978, one of the earliest results of its kind for a Western competitor.
- Paul Zadro: International Man of Mastery: a profile of the Sydney-based martial arts veteran and head instructor at the International Martial Arts Centre, covering his background across several disciplines.
- Carmen Marton: Australia’s Taekwondo Queen: an interview with Australia’s first taekwondo world champion, covering her path into the sport and what the title meant at the time.
- Sister Act: Carmen and Caroline Marton talk about training together and their bid to both compete at the London Olympics in the same discipline.
- Human Tornado: Okinawan karate master Taira Sensei on returning karateka to the combative roots of kata, rather than treating it purely as a scored performance.
- 5 minutes with Greg Van Borssum: a short interview with the stuntman and fight choreographer about his work on Mad Max: Fury Road, filmed in Africa.
- 5 minutes with Andrew ‘Drew’ Johnston: a conversation about adapting martial arts training for people dealing with injury or illness, rather than able-bodied competitors.
- Warrior of Two Worlds: Dr Rony Kluger discusses combining traditional Okinawan karate with the more modern, combative approach of Krav Maga.
- Who is Sensei Frank Nowak?: the founder of Zanshin Shotokan is remembered by student and colleague Ron Richmond, covering his teaching style and legacy.
- Fighting to Act: actor and taekwondo black belt Bren Foster talks about the overlap between martial arts training and choreographed fighting for film and television.
- 5 Traits of the Mentally Tough: a training-philosophy piece on what tends to separate fighters who make it to a professional level from talented amateurs who plateau.
- Some Handy Advice: a short self-defence piece on why an untrained closed-fist strike can do more harm to the person throwing it than to an attacker.
Further restorations are added to this page as archived copies of other Blitz articles are located and verified. Not every piece from the original magazine survived in an archived form, so this list will always be a subset of what was originally published rather than a complete reprint of the site. Readers looking for the current site’s own coverage of New Zealand martial arts, rather than this historical material, will find it under the main martial arts section.