My martial arts journey started around age eleven, while sitting in the living room of my uncle’s house as the adults played cards and had highballs. My older brother Mark and I were flipping channels (no remote back in 1977) and found the pilot movie for the TV series “Kung Fu”.
Trust me, it was NOT David Carradine’s martial arts skills, but the Shaolin monks during the training and temple scenes as well as the wisdom of the blind Abbott, Master Po. The grace, power, and ferocity of their movements had me watching in awe, and I knew I had to learn martial arts. I was never bullied as a kid but found myself in a couple of scraps and situations playing pick up games of football or dealing with a couple of older neighborhood kids that left me feeling uneasy and lacking confidence in my fighting skills.
After the card game finished and we went home, I was already making plans to go to the public library to hunt for anything martial arts related. For the younger generations reading this, you cannot relate to the lack of information available when everything is literally at our fingertips today. If your library didn’t have anything on a topic, and it wasn’t in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, you were just out of luck.
Luckily I found a book that would become my main source of information for years, . I read and studied every movement shown and mimicked them over and over until I had them down. I stretched, punched, kicked, and blocked for hours on end, and on Saturday afternoons it was sitting in front of the TV for Kung Fu theatre without fail!
Learning Through Books
From age 11 to 18 I would learn all I could about Karate from books I found in the Buffalo and Erie County Library System. When I read through all of those I saved my allowance and bought a couple of my own. I built a pretty good foundation in the stances, punches, blocks, and kicks of Karate, and in 1979 I came across Sugar Ray Leonard and really got into boxing.
I would constantly make trips to the local drug store to buy the latest Karate Illustrated, Black Belt, and Ring magazines. I bought a jump rope and speed bag, and taught myself to use both, practicing constantly in the basement or garage until my Mom would yell to knock it off due to the noise.
My First Taste of A Dojang
In the seventies and eighties, there were very few martial arts schools around. I grew up in Tonawanda, NY and the only school I knew of in the entire Western New York area was Jong Park Tae Kwon Do in North Tonawanda. One of my friends had gone there on weekends to take classes, and invited me once.
I had already been reading books on Karate and Judo from the library and really took a liking to Karate. When the class started, we lined up, bowed in, and did warmups and stretches. Then we began doing all of the basics. I was surprised to see that I had learned everything correctly from the books I studied! The instructor came and made some adjustments to my kicking form, but going to that class showed me that I was on the right track and motivated me even more to continue my studies.
That class however turned me off to Tae Kwon Do for life as even back then it was mostly kick oriented and all about tournament fighting. While I loved the ability to kick someone, especially in the head, I wasn’t a fan of it being all about kicking. I also saw no use for all of the flashy kicks. Yeah, they were cool to watch, but even at 11-12 years old I saw little practicality.
An Unplanned Test of my Skills
Occasionally my friends and I would dig out our boxing gloves and spar in someone’s back yard, with the winner staying in the ring and taking on challengers until they lost or until the challengers were no more. In 8th grade I went to a Halloween party dressed in my older brothers Tae Kwon Do uniform and sparring gloves, and my friend went as a boxer, borrowing my boxing gloves. It was a BIG mistake, but in a way a plus as well. Bored because everyone there was just drinking, my friend and I went to a quiet part of the yard and started lightly sparring, punches only, no kicks.
Before long people were watching, and when my friend got tired, one of the guys put on the gloves and challenged me. This continued for what felt like hours as I sparred and beat one after another. Many had been drinking, and a couple of them were guys that I didn’t really get along with. I gave it everything I had and my goal was to show that if tested, I could hold my own. The last guy was one of the neighborhood bullies who was bigger and I’m pretty sure older than me. He was yelling that he wanted to fight me next, and made his way to the front of those standing there.
We knew who each other was, and I mostly avoided him to this point, but now I was standing face to face with him. Thankfully he too had been drinking, and I was sober, faster, and had at least some training, even if it was through books. I ended up getting the best of him to the point he became furious and took off the gloves wanting to go bare fisted. This is when everything was broken up and my friend and I left while the getting was good.
Apparently, people talked because after that night I was pretty much left alone through high school. I continued to study everything I could get my hands on and practice between school and sports. Then Chuck Norris hit the screens with his movie “Good Guys Wear Black”, and I learned about the art of Tang Soo Do Korean Karate, and I knew that was the art I wanted to learn. Just before my senior year I joined the Army on the Delayed Entry Program, graduated, and went to South Korea.
That’s where my journey would officially begin….