09/07/2026
Mangisursuro Michael G. Inay
1944 - 2000
Founder of Inayan Eskrima
There are masters who teach a style. And there are founders who build a world so others can find their way home.
Suro Mike Inay was the second.
If you never had the honor of standing across from him, you have to understand what it was like. He didn't just move — he flowed. One moment calm, smiling, his voice filling the room with a story, the next — a blur of Kadena de Mano, Serrada, Largo — so fast your eyes couldn't track it, but so controlled you never felt threatened. Only awakened.
He was the bridge we all needed.
A private student of two giants — Max Sarmiento and Angel Cabales — it was Mike Inay who went to Grandmaster Cabales and said, we need to preserve this. We need an organization. It was his idea that led to the first Cabales Serrada Association, his hands that helped write its first ranking structure. Then in 1979, in his own home he and Max Sarmiento co-founded the West Coast Eskrima Society to unite the Filipino masters in America. Look at that list of names who answered his call — Giron, Inosanto, Bustillo, Tacosa, Revillar, Tenio, Sarmiento, Elliott. They came because when Mike Inay spoke about Eskrima, you believed it had a future.
And he gave it one.
He built Inayan Eskrima as a System of several styles each with its own basics, intermediates, advanced concepts, each viable on its own, each speaking to a different kind of fighter. He put a learning structure over them. A ranking system that respected the old ways but made sense for the new world. He called them all "Inayan" not out of ego, but to avoid controversy and confusion.
He took Eskrima into police academies across America, onto the Law Enforcement Television Network, and into seminars in England, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Scotland, Australia. He developed the Spontaneous Knife Defense program when law enforcement asked for help. He taught the knife not as a weapon of violence, but as an alternative when a fi***rm wasn't warranted or safe.
And then -
Mike Inay died in 2000.
He died doing exactly what he was put on this earth to do. Stick in hand. Students in front of him. Breath giving out while giving knowledge out. There is no better death for a warrior-teacher.
So if you train today — if you flow Largo, if you trap with Kadena, if you find that perfect angle in Serrada — know this: you are not just practicing a technique. You are keeping a promise he made in Stockton decades ago: that this art would not die. That it would be preserved. Propagated. Promoted.
And because of you, because of every school that carries his direct teaching forward, it lives.
Pugay, Mangisursuro Mike Inay. We feel you every time the sticks crack.
We will not let go.
