The Empty Report: When Vietnamese Martial Arts Is Measured by the Wrong Ruler

In my desk drawer in Hanoi sits a twelve-page document. Every page carries a proper heading: Striking and Technical-Tactical Analysis; Athlete Condition and Career-Longevity Analysis; Event and Organizational Analysis; Business-Model Analysis. Turn each page, and in every cell the same line repeats: insufficient information to assess.

The document reached me on a late-October afternoon, after an analytics team finished its processing run for an article about martial arts. The note attached to it was one sentence: the input source was empty. I read it twice. Not because it was good. Because it was the most honest report I have held in sixteen years in this trade.

An analysis that dares to say twelve times that it knows nothing. The way it does not know is more instructive than any number-stuffed report I have ever read.

The Trap of Completeness

My work is bound to sports documentaries, but the foundation lies elsewhere. At twenty-three, a rookie editor at an online sports channel in Hanoi, I published a quick news item about Vietnam's athletics team at the 29th SEA Games in Kuala Lumpur. I wrote that Tran Thu Ha's 200m semifinal time was 11.72 seconds, second in her heat. In fact she ran 11.92 and finished fifth. A fanpage with 210,000 followers exposed the error; the post was shared 1,400 times alongside laughter. I pulled it and wrote a two-page incident report.

What I remember is not the shame. It is the moment I realised I had filled a blank with a number simply because the item needed one. The bulletin had to be complete. The columns had to be closed. Nobody wants to read a line saying the writer could not verify.

Those twelve pages did the exact opposite. They stayed blank. They said they did not know. And in doing so, they forced the reader to face a question Vietnamese sports media rarely asks: when there is no data, are we keeping silent, or inventing a fact?

Martial Arts Is Not One Block

Among the blank pages, one detail stopped me longest. The domain-label field read a single English word: martial_arts. But when asked to classify further — modern combat sports, traditional martial arts and forms, or sanda — that field was empty. Nobody determined it.

To outsiders this sounds like paperwork. To practitioners, it is the point of collapse.

Modern combat sports — boxing, MMA, sanda, muay — are measured by wins and losses, by finish rate, by strikes landed per minute. Performance and forms — wushu taolu, traditional routines — are measured by technical points, by degree of difficulty, by judges' scoring. The two systems share no logic. Apply a boxing win-loss table to a taolu routine and the result is always zero. Not because the athlete is weak. Because the ruler is in the wrong place.

In Vietnam this confusion is real, and it lives in how we speak. "Vietnamese martial arts" is an umbrella phrase, and inside it at least three worlds coexist. There are athletes who train to step onto a fighting surface, where every second is a touch and every touch can end a career. There are athletes who train to perform forms, where value lies in precision and difficulty, scored by people sitting outside the ring. And there are those who train traditional martial arts in northern and southern schools, where there is no panel of judges at all, only teacher and student.

Three groups, three units of measurement, three media structures. Lay a single analytical model over all three and you are no longer analysing. You are stamping.

The 31st SEA Games, hosted by Vietnam in 2026, is one example. On the same newspaper page we read about a combat athlete winning a medal and about a forms athlete earning the highest score. The two stories sit side by side, under one headline, yet share not one unit of measurement. An ordinary reader has no way of knowing the two cannot be compared. The writer has a duty to say so. A fighter winning by finish in the fourth minute and an athlete performing a thirty-second routine both deserve coverage — but in two different languages.

My trade is finding the piece the whole stadium forgot. The first piece is always the question: which kind of martial art are we talking about?

The Ruler of Taolu and the Ruler of MMA

Take a concrete example. A wushu taolu athlete steps onto the mat and performs a thirty-second routine. The crowd applauds. A news report writes: the athlete scored no points. That is a meaningless sentence. Taolu has no concept of scoring in the combat sense. The value of a routine lies in the difficulty of its movements, in the balance on landing after a jump, in the decisiveness of each arm path. Judges deduct for faults, they do not add for "winning". Conversely, an MMA fighter steps into the cage and lands a finish in the fourth minute. Score him on the taolu scale and he loses the entire performance portion. What MMA calls a "finish" is a value that does not exist in forms.

I once made a similar mistake facing data. I remember the time I handled the stats table for a match at a major tournament. I sat in the edit room, screen split in two, one side the ready-made data table, the other the footage I had downloaded. The table said the weaker side held 29 percent of possession. I did not believe it. I switched the table off and counted by hand. Every time the ball changed hands, I marked my notebook. Two hundred phases. Then three hundred. I stopped at the three hundred and seventh.

I counted every phase of the ball myself, and suddenly saw a whole world. It turned out that 29 percent was correct — but it told the wrong story. The weaker side held little of the ball, yet they blocked thirty-eight phases, their goalkeeper made eight saves, including a penalty in the sixty-fourth minute. The data table had no cell for "a save made out of fear". I had to add it myself. The four-minute-thirty film built from that hand-counted table drew 96,000 views, four times the channel's average.

The lesson is not in the number. It is this: when the data table has no cell for what you need, the answer is not to invent a number. The answer is to count by hand, or to say you do not have it.

After that film, I proposed a twenty-eight-episode series, three minutes each, dissecting one phase of play. A direction the channel had never taken. That was also how I learned that an analytical format only stands when the person making it accepts counting every beat, instead of copying a ready-made table.

Numbers as Floor, Emotion as Owner

If there is one belief I still hold, it is this: numbers are the floor, not the roof. They keep us from lying, but they do not speak for what we feel.

When COVID-19 halted the V-League after round two in 2026, I had the right to propose content. I launched a series simulating the whole season on a video game. Six episodes, averaging 12,300 views each — against a normal 120,000. A failure. Instead of quietly accepting it, I argued directly with the content director: if viewers will not watch a simulation, let us invite them to the debate table. A six-episode talk show was born, gathering coaches, tactical analysts and even esports players, reaching 45,000 to 60,000 views per episode.

I stopped the show after six episodes because I had already rushed off to a new project. That is my weakness. But it was the guest network of that show that introduced me to a documentary producer.

An empty summer, a series that died young, but I found the echo. Without those six failed episodes, I would not have had the conversation that led to the next turning point.

Emptiness Is Not Neutrality

Back to the twelve-page document. One sentence in the conclusion made me stop my pen: its correct status was "unknown", not "neutral".

This is the thing analytics forgets most easily. When there is no information, the writer's natural reflex is to treat all possibilities as equal. No form data, so we say any team could win. No injury data, so we say the athlete's condition is unclear. We drape ignorance in a polite coat called "balance".

The unknown is heavier than that. It is like a fixture list whose calendar page we have not yet seen. We cannot say every match is equal; we can only say we have not held the calendar. What we lack is data, not equilibrium.

For a sports writer, this is an ethical line. With no source, we leave it blank. If we cannot verify, we state clearly it is an estimate, with context. The most honest way to record a match is sometimes a white page.

But there is a flip side. Honest emptiness must not become an excuse to stop digging. In that document, three defects were identified at the input stage: no information extraction, no entity extraction, no subject-class determination. All three sit at the very first step. Which means the problem was not that there was nothing to analyse, but that the preparation stage was left blank.

Telling the two apart matters. A page blank because we have not dug differs entirely from a page blank because we have dug it all out and there truly is nothing. Blur them and we are either laziness in the coat of caution, or caution mistaken for laziness.

Argument is the road I use to find what I have not yet thought. This time, the argument in my head was: is that blank a correct refusal, or an abandonment?

Takeaway

Imagine a report on Vietnamese martial arts demanding all three dimensions at once: the touch count of a combat athlete, the difficulty score of a routine, and the breathing rhythm of a traditional practitioner. No data table holds all three. No analytical frame embraces all three. A writer can only choose the right ruler for each subject, then tell the truth when the ruler has no numbers.

I keep that document not because it tells a story of failure. But because it taught me something every full data table tries to hide: sometimes saying nothing at all is the most precise statement.