005 Tae Kwon Do Chung Do Kwan
It was 1982 when I walked through the narrow, badly framed door of Hong's Tae Kwon Do School for the first time. I was 22.Already experienced in the ways of the dojo from my high school years in Shotokan karate, I bowed as I entered and removed my shoes. My eyes instantly settled on the short, slim Korean man with thinning hair and sparkling black eyes. He saw me and flashed a smile that was like lightning. It made me automatically smile back, and he approached me. He introduced himself as Billy Hong and asked if he could help me.
Mr. Hong interviewed applicants and decided who could be a student and who could not. I later learned that he sometimes turned people away or sent them down to the American karate school. He wanted respectable, determined students in his school. He asked me about my background and my education. I told him that I had been born and raised in Philadelphia, that I had studied karate for three years, and that I had just graduated from the local Bible college.
At the reference to being a college graduate and a strict, conservative Christian, he was delighted. As he led me inside, he explained to me that students of his school were forbidden from smoking, from using drugs, from having affairs, and from drinking in bars. He invited me to watch the class.
I was amazed to see such high stances. In my old Shotokan karate school I had been taught again and again that Korean kicks were useless and the stances too high to deliver any real power. My Shotokan teacher had taught that tae kwon do was sloppy. But as I watched the class for forty minutes, I was impressed by the pace of the workout. The drill work was intense Mr. Hong shouted the count, his voice sharp like a bark. High, hard kicks were thrown full speed and full strength, again and again. Just when I thought that he surely would let the class rest, he sent them down the floor in swift kicking combinations that propelled the lines of students forward in the crowded room. then they turned and came back. The merciless sun glared through the front windows. The two open doors admitted a hot breeze through the narrow doorways. The air conditioner stood silent and dormant. I later learned that Mr. Hong thought air conditioning unhealthy.
Sweat flowed freely. It dripped from the faces of the students, down their hair, off their uniform cuffs. I could see it streaking the threadbare, ancient blue carpet. After forty minutes, he paired them up and made them drill again; then he called a halt and let the students get water. He approached me to ask if I had questions. I hesitantly told him what I had been told about tae kwon do. Instead of becoming defensive, his dark eyes sparkled with recognition and he said, "You ever see tae kwon do before this?"
"In Philadelphia, yes," I told him meekly. "I went to a tae kwon do tournament and beat many black belt women when I was a brown belt in Shotokan."
He nodded to the students. "This like the tae kwon do you see up there?" he asked.
It was not what I had seen in Philadelphia. Mr. Hong's students threw fast power kicks. The body started from any position and then swiftly snapped into an alignment of foot, knee, hip, shoulder, head as the kick was delivered: a sudden, powerful twist that focused energy through the striking surface of the foot. Even as a newcomer I could see that it was an agile, skillful way of kicking. "No sir," I told him. "I've never seen anything like this. But does it really work?"
I didn't realize that even in 1982 Mr. Hong was on the horns of a dilemma. The tae kwon do he knew and loved from the 1950's and 60's was not the same franchised stuff that was being peddled all over the country. I was too inexperienced with tae kwon do to realize that there are many branches of it and that many teachers of good technique have turned their schools into mere businesses, "belt factories" as they are called. And Mr. Hong was not the type of person to belittle his countrymen.
But at Hong’s, in the days before the WTF regulated things so much, we had few belts: white, green, blue, and three degrees of brown. A person tested only every 4 – 6 months. Nobody had stripes on their belts, and Mr Hong himself wore a frayed black belt worn to gray. We did the ancient forms: pyongan 1-5, the chulggi forms, Yul-gok, Hwarang, and Barsai.
Furthermore, “self-defense” was very much like grappling, and above the lowest degree of brown, most self defense began on the ground. After first degree black belt, women were tested extensively on ground fighting, more so than the men.
Unlike the Moo Duk Kwan schools I had seen in Philadelphia and Washington DC, this was Chung Do Kwan: hard, military, effective, and very straight-line.
"I teach very strong tae kwon do," he told me. I was wearing a skirt, and he glanced at my legs. "You have to work hard to kick like this. Jump rope. Take a long time. But very effective if you need it."
I still had private reservations, but I already admired him tremendously, and I knew that in this school I would be both respected and challenged. And so I signed the papers that night and enrolled.
<< Home