I cannot even remotely do justice to it all, AND I heard this word-of-mouth almost two decades after the fact, so, have a salt cellar.

John Clements is a western martial artist. He likes to hit things with swords. So do people in the SCA! Yay! So roughly in the late 1980s/early 1990s, he was in the SCA hitting people with swords.

But there were all these DOWNERS in the SCA saying things like, "We have to wear protective padding!" and "You're not allowed to soak your wooden sword in diluted concrete!" and "You can't hit using more than a 45-degree swing with a broadsword because you will BREAK SOMEBODY'S COLLARBONE" and "we will assume that in real life these swords are hellishly sharp, so when you feel yourself get hit with the sword tip, that counts as 'getting hit'."

THAT WAS NOT FOR JOHN CLEMENTS! And jeez, these SCA people were so goddamn mean to him! All he did was hit some lady so hard with a rapier her metal neck protector was permanently dented two inches out of shape, and the anal-retentive bastards said he wasn't allowed to enter tournaments anymore!!!

So he took his toys and went home to the Historical Armed Combat Association (pronounced "hack-a!"), and played with them! He wrote a fencing manual or two that decided that actually paying attention to historical sources was a drag. Mr. Clements, you see, truly is a physically gifted athlete with excellent reflexes, so he just took what worked for him, more or less, and wrote it down, even if almost no one else could actually use his system.

HACA then turned into the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts, which gives SCA fencers gigantic hives because he gets his students to bout with each other using heavy wooden weapons or blunt metal replicas, which can do serious damage, and minimal armour. Because he is all about Toughness and Manliness and This Is How It Really Was, and if you break a collarbone in practice, well, that's HISTORICAL.