Who the hell knew Ireland had a martial arts tradition?

I sure didn’t until I went on one of the wildest rides I’ve ever been on, all courtesy of a graffiti-dream Caddy that I didn’t even sit in, because it never left the hotel parking lot.

Mississauga, Ontario, is about a half an hour away from Toronto, and it has to be where all the cheap business rent is. When I went there late last year on business, I thought the highlight of the trip would be turning my born and bred Southern colleague onto maple sugar candy. When I saw the Caddy in the parking lot on a lunch break, everything changed.

“Like it?” a grinning elder statesman wearing a tweed cap asked as he walked towards me. I turned around and started talking to Doc, the car’s owner. There was no way he was part of the business trip I was on.

“My friend and I are here for the martial arts convention at the hotel tonight,” said Doc. “Our gym does Irish Stick Fighting. The bouts start at seven in the basement rooms. You should come by!”

When adventure calls, you have to go.

For the rest of the day my mind raced with questions: What martial art is it based on? How heavy are the sticks? Who does it? Why did I—my father’s family is half Irish, and I grew up in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Worcester, MA, a working-class city about an hour west of Boston—never have something as nuts as Irish Stick Fighting come up at least once in conversation? And how the on Earth did Mississauga become a hotbed of this activity?

Later that night when I saw two big guys dressed like hockey goalies, sticks in hand, going at each other at full force for five-second bouts Rock’em-Sock’em-Robot-Style, I knew I’d get my answers.

“Hey, you made it!” said Doc’s friend Gerry. “Let me get Doc!”

Bouts over, Doc, Gerry, and a group of assorted gym mates and Irish Stick Fighters escorted me to the hotel bar and graciously told me all about this unknown corner of my Irish heritage.

“A lot of people don’t know stick fighting exists,” explained Gerry, who knew the most about this crazy art form. He explained that under British Rule, the Irish were banned from having edged weapons, and soon after that, shillelaghs—the stout, spiky, wooden sticks used to ‘settle arguments”—were banned, too.

While weapons were out, walking sticks were still in. Shillelaghs got a little longer.

“Even the British couldn’t ban a walking stick, so the Irish learned to fight with—and decorate—them!” explained Gerry. “The style was passed down from father to son, and stayed in families.” He started laughing, “But, the Irish being Irish, the clans started fighting each other!”

“You’ve heard of ‘Having a Donnybrook?’, haven’t you?” asked Dave, the doctor in the group. “Well, that was a fair where an organized stick fight was to take place, Things got out of hand, and about 200 people died. That’s where the expression comes from—an organized Irish Stick Fight.”

Turns out that just about every Irish family has a style of stick fighting. “Our gym’s derivation is from the Doyle family,” said Doc. “It’s what we all practice. A man named Glenn Doyle started the whole thing—wrote the rules, all of it. When Glenn’s dad died, from his deathbed he told Glenn he could teach it to people outside the family.”

And so began the spread of Irish Stick Fighting to others outside the clan. Similar to boxing or martial arts, you learn how to use your weapon with as much force as you can while protecting yourself at all times. Imagine holding a shillelagh parallel to the ground and jabbing as hard as you can at your opponent, scoring points with each clean hit. As the guys talked about their love of the sport my family and hometown made much more sense. I could instantly see my dad and all my uncles—and half my high school—shillelaghs in hand, practicing this ancient Irish art to settle arguments just as old.