Tae Kwon Do Times — January 2018

much about the martial arts because at that time

there was not any martial arts in the movies.

As I said, he dominated the fi ght, and it sort

of gave me an impetus to say, “Hey, you know,

maybe I should learn to do that.” Because I was

sort of small and I wasn’t a very large fellow as I

grew up. As a matter of fact, when I started my

senior year, I was about 5 11’, but I only weighed

about 130 pounds. I found that as a way to sort

of develop some respect for myself and in the way

of handling myself and taking care of myself.

Training

I was stationed at Denver, Colorado, and I got

to meet somebody who was a secondary black

belt in a sister art of Tae Kwon Do. He then

transferred over to Tae Kwon Do. I met him

and from that point on I found out that Tae

Kwon Do was a kind of art

that I wanted to train in.

I found that Tae Kwon

Do was what I would

consider as a simplistic art.

Th e techniques that are

taught are very useful from

day one. Th ey aren’t very

complicated, and it takes

the body in its natural form

and as you would be able

to use it as a weapon.

I found at that time a

way of utilizing my body

in a diff erent method by

which it allowed me to do

things that gave me some

confi dence and some skills with my body and

my ability to perform the diff erent techniques.

I continued training on my own as much as

I could. Every place I went in the military,

I continued training and /or teaching.

Vietnam

I trained in an art [in Vietnam] called the

Vulvonam. It is a hybrid art. But when I was

there, I trained in Tae Kwon Do and I had the

opportunity to train with the Korean ROK

division up at their training headquarters. Th ey

were really combative troops, so their training was

very intense. Th ey did Tae Kwon Do probably in

its most extreme state of mind, to put it that way.

Te a c h i n g

When I teach my classes, I break them down

into two segments, and what I try to explain

to the people is each segment has to link to the

other to make them all eff ective. And so what

we do is when we start the class, it will have a

stretching callisthenic phase of the class that

starts off to get the body warmed up, gets blood

fl owing and then we go into what we call our

cardinal techniques or our basic techniques. We

take that and we put it into a patterned diagram

where the student can learn and remember

the movements that they are training at.

60 January 2018 / taekwondotimes.com