004 The First Tournament
By the late 1960's, Billy Hong had schools in Anderson and Greenville and was teaching self defense to the local police departments. His black belt students ran a tae kwon do class at Clemson University, and a fledgling school had started in Brevard, North Carolina.The first women students who lasted at Hong's took longer than the men to get their black belts. But, even as Charlie Mann had done, their willingness to keep obeying instruction and to train without thanks or special note until they met his standards impressed Mr. Hong. Eventually, the training time for a woman to get to black belt became roughly the same as that for a man, depending on ability. But Mr. Hong allowed women to wear shin pads and he would not let them practice taking punches to the stomach, not even light punches. This, he believed, could cause infertility. And so the women were excused from this exercise, although he did occasionally let them practice punching their male counterparts for practice.
Once the school had moved onto a main thoroughfare in Greenville, it became the major player of the martial arts schools in town. It's now a familiar thing to hear of martial arts teachers breaking bricks with their bare hands or of setting up a stack of bricks and breaking only the middle brick, or the brick on the bottom of the stack. But when Billy Hong first demonstrated these skills, nobody had ever heard of such feats of focus and power. He somersaulted through the air to break boards, leaped over rows of chairs (or kneeling students), and demonstrated his incredible speed by tossing a board into the air and then breaking it with a kick as it fell.
All this, and yet he was likable, easy to talk to, and possessed an enormous sense of humor. He loved children, and visits to his senior students for dinner followed a pattern. Mr. Hong would show up, dressed handsomely in a tie and jacket, present the student's wife with candy or flowers to thank her for inviting him, and then would remove tie and jacket and play Par-cheez-ee, Trouble, or Monopoly with the older children or blocks or Leggoes with the younger children. By the end of the night, he would be telling them stories, tossing them around, or carrying them on his back. Losing his own family as a boy remained the greatest tragedy of his life, and spending time with other families filled a gap for him.
Popularity came at a price, especially as he began to make inroads into the martial arts market in town. Students from other styles were joining at Hong's, even abandoning their ranking in other schools and willingly adopting the white belt in tae kwon do.
Don Greely, the instructor of the largest American karate school in town, openly disparaged Billy Hong and said that tae kwon do was all show and no substance. When false stories of fights that Billy Hong had lost began to circulate, they were attributed--rightly or wrongly-back to Greely.
Greely, a one-time professional fighter, was the exact sort of man that Billy Hong would not like. For one thing, Greely had taken the wife of one of his students (now a former student) and had moved in with her. His classes were often run by students who were not yet black belts, and his school often moved locations.
When Hong heard about the stories, he decided that there was only one course of action: he must fight and kill Don Greely. He decided to issue a challenge at once to a fight.
Fortunately, his senior students talked him out of this plan. At first he did not believe them when they told him that he would be arrested for murder if he killed Greely in a fight. But when the man who had sponsored him told him that his green card would be revoked if Mr. Hong were arrested for anything, Hong relented. He did not want to lose his green card and be sent away from his adopted country in disgrace. But it was disconcerting to realize that Americans did not comprehend a man's need to fight to the death every now and then over important issues.
One of the senior students came up with an alternative: the black belts at Greely's school could fight the black belts from Hong's in a school-to-school tournament, under rules, with judging by members of both sides.
Mr. Hong did not have nearly as many black belts as Greely did, and so he handed out black belts to his top brown belt students.
The tournament was held in a small gym, and it lasted for exactly one fight. Frazer Johnson, the best fighter from Hong's, met Greely's best fighter in a match that both sides agreed would be full contact, in accordance with the rules of the Professional Karate Association (PKA). Nobody from Hong's knew for sure what the rules of the PKA were, but they assumed that "full contact" meant you could hit as hard as you wanted, and that anything except the groin was legal. Technically, that's close to what the rules stipulate, but neither Greely nor his black belts had ever seen anything like military style tae kwon do. Aside from the flying side kick, they had never even seen the arsenal of aerial kicks that Hong students used in sparring. And they'd only seen the flying side kick in the movies, never in a real fight.
It took Frazer Johnson about thirty seconds to drop his opponent to the mat with a series of kicks and punches. Greely's people started yelling foul, and Frazer stopped. There were hard words, but no foul had been committed, and so the fight resumed. Frazer knocked him down again, and they ended up wrestling. At last Frazer got astride his opponent and started hitting him and yelling at him to say "uncle." Eager to document the defeat of Greely's best fighter, one of the men from Hong's rushed up to the ring and started snapping pictures. Greely ran out and called the police.
The police came, but when they saw Billy Hong they decided that it must have been a false alarm. They knew "Billy" as they called him, from the free self defense courses he taught them. Hong explained the tournament to them. Wisely, they told him that a promise to have a tournament still did not make a person absolutely exempt from charges of assault. The best thing, they said, would be for Greely to keep his mouth shut about Billy Hong and for the tournament to end before anybody was seriously hurt. But they said this to Greely, and the meaning was clear. They were worried about his students.
Mr. Hong was bitterly disappointed that the tournament and the vindication of his own school should be terminated so quickly. But the police stayed around and cheered him up a good bit. They liked him and understood his belief that he had a right to defend his name and his school. But they explained the law to him and suggested the alternative of letting time take its course. They gave him the southern dictate that cream always rises to the top. As long as he practiced his martial art with integrity, he would eventually prove himself the superior instructor and martial art. Billy Hong agreed, but he was bitterly disappointed that his opportunity to be vindicated had been taken from him by the very system that he trusted in. Even while his own black belts were exulting in the single match that had been won so quickly, he regretted that his school's glorious victory had been forfeited.
But time did take its course. After the brief tournament, the Hong's school inherited some of the higher ranking students from Greely, and as the months unrolled, the other rumors faded away, robbed of their credibility. The shots of Frazer Johnson getting astride Greely's top fighter had been preserved for posterity. Mr. Hong would not allow them to be hung up in the school, but they were passed around for years. Even as he did not like to discuss the tournament that had been cut short, delighted students whispered about it behind his back and passed around the snapshots.
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