Venancio Bacon
Filipino eskrimador, one of the first members of the Doce Pares club and founder of the Balintawak Eskrima style and the Balintawak Street Self-Defense Club in Cebu.
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PhilippinesBiography
Venancio "Anciong" Bacon was a Filipino eskrimador, the founder of the Balintawak Eskrima style (Balintawak Arnis). We have not been able to verify the dates of his birth and death.
He was among the first members of the Doce Pares club, founded in 1932, and was one of its best fighters, second only to Doring Saavedra.
In the 1950s, together with Delfin López, Timoteo Marango and others, he founded the Balintawak Street Self-Defense Club, which trained in the backyard of a watchmaker's shop on Balintawak Street in the Colon district of Cebu; in 1952 Jose Causin became the club's first elected president. He created the style to preserve the combat character of arnis, which in his view other styles were weakening. He taught by an unconventional, unsystematized method, developed single-stick fighting techniques, stressed speed, timing and reflexes, and understood stick training as a path to empty-hand fighting. His students included Ted Buot, the only one permitted to teach directly at the shop, Jose Villasin, who under his guidance worked out a system of model strikes and defenses, Teofilo Velez and Joe Go, the creator of the unarmed Tat Kun Tao.
In the 1950s–1960s he was attacked in Labangon and killed the attacker by breaking his spine. The court ruled that his fighting skills constituted a "deadly weapon", and Bacon ended up in prison. In the mid-1970s he was released on parole and returned to Cebu; he no longer led the club, only took part in training with Villasin and Velez, and died shortly afterwards.