010 Gambling, Strike Breaking, Teaching
Billy Hong lived with old friends from the military when he first arrived in South Carolina. He enrolled in Anderson College, studying business courses. And, as soon as he could, he started teaching Tae Kwon Do. His first students were college men.At that time, the early to mid-1960's, karate was barely known in South Carolina, and Tae Kwon Do had never been heard of. Men familiar with the martial arts had learned it during the US occupation of Japan. Judo was the prevailing martial art, and even that was only sparsely taught.
But Hong's enthusiasm for his art and his incredible feats of strength, skill, and speed won him a small following that eventually grew.
Jack Moon, who lived on Paris Mountain back then, had a small judo dojo right on his own property. He was a hard core, non-nonsense teacher even then. A few years older than Billy Hong, he was intent on building his private investigation business. Eventually, he would become one of the top names in preventing and investigating industrial espionage. In the early days, he made his living the best way he could as any private detective did. He investigated infidelity cases, and he could be counted upon to hire strike breakers for the big textile firms around South Carolina.
He heard of Billy Hong and asked him to come to the small dojo on Paris Mountain. After a demonstration of Billy Hong's explosive martial arts, Jack Moon converted the dojo to Tae Kwon Do.
In addition, Moon invited Billy Hong to board with him. In Japan, it was not unknown for martial artists to all rent space together, as reflected in CW Nicole's memoir, Moving Zen, one of the first narratives about life in the martial arts to be published in the USA. Jack Moon rented rooms to another martial artist, a squarely built Japanese student named Ukio who worked as a bouncer and suffered from nervous stress. Ukio could do a lot of damage on the dojo floor, but he hated arguing and disorder. Life with Jack Moon, especially once Billy Hong moved in, turned his world upside down.
In class, Billy Hong never objected to anybody's fighting method. He believed that Tae Kwon Do had to be real. So fighters in the small school on Paris Mountain had to be prepared to meet Jack Moon's or Ukio's grasp. "If he got hold of you, you were pretty much finished," Danny Kidd once remarked of Ukio. For though his mentor was the more colorful of the two, Ukio always was the greater technical expert in getting in through the kicks of Tae Kwon Do and bring a person to the ground. He could submit just about anybody, but he couldn't get hold of Billy Hong.
These days, most styles of Tae Kwon Do have lost their arts of "getting in" and "getting out," but Billy Hong could close distance as expertly as any judoka. The difference was that he used the advantage to get behind his opponent. Early in his martial arts career, he had learned that to fight the Japanese styles, any Japanese style, a fighter had to move sideways and not be where his opponent expected him to be. he had to be where his opponent did not expect him, and that would always be just behind his opponent.
In the sports Tae Kwon Do culture, launching kicks has become so important, and the kicks themselves so central that the finer points of "angling," have been neglected. Too many Tae Kwon Do matches are simply two people ramming each other with spectacular kicks, head on.
Jack Moon hired Billy and Ukio for strike breaking. Unlike his former colleagues in Korea, Billy Hong never felt or expressed any need to go out and pick fights. But anybody who knew him knew full well that if you told him the strikers were pro-Communist, he would go break up strikes. He would launch himself into any mob, completely unafraid, armed with a piece of two-by-four or a baseball bat. And he was skillful enough to hurt without killing.
They lived a wild life, training in the dojo, breaking strikes, and--of course--gambling. One of Billy's later students told me that he knew more about gambling than any natural-born US citizen. Billy Hong could bet on anything, and it took him only a fraction of a second to figure out how to bet on outcomes and fix the odds. He was a man of his word, and when he lost, he paid up promptly, with no hard feelings. But he'd learned gambling as a child with the US army, and he had perfected it in the back streets of Seoul. For him, it was one more skill to acquire. And setting a stake was what gave it meaning and zest. He was good at it, and he got better.
Later in his life, Billy Hong disliked talking about his early days as a strike breaker. I suppose that he realized he had been a convenient tool and his fervent politics had been used to manipulate him. But when he first came to the USA, his outlook was entirely conditioned by his own upbringing and experience.
He was not a womanizer, and from the start, he saved his money for two things: to have a school of his own and to make a stable enough life for himself so that he could marry a Korean woman. The goal to have a wife and family remained a guiding star for him, as he had lived a lonely and wandering life. To gain this end, he lived a fairly simple life. He continued to attend college, and he discovered an unending supply of sturdy and durable students around college campuses. He started a class for Clemson University students (a class that continues to this day) that met several times a week.
The Clemson football team loved to pick at Billy Hong. He was five foot five, with 19 inch biceps and a 19 inch neck, his head shaved down to a military style crew cut (not unusual in the mid-1960's), and he was expert in a foreign fighting style that surely could not compete with American boxing or wrestling. Billy Hong once cleared out a Pete's drive-in when a member of the football team wouldn’t leave him alone.
"Billy Hong gotta headache," Billy told him as the much larger young man tapped at him and kept saying "Come on Billy, show me some of that stuff!" (tap tap) "Show me what you can do!"
"Billy Hong not fight today. Got bad headache!"
"Come on Billy, show me your stuff!" (tap tap)
He danced in too close, and Billy grabbed him by the collar in front and head butted him right on the nose with a forehead that had gone through roofing tiles. It knocked the young man out, and he flopped right onto the smaller Billy Hong, his nose bleeding profusely. Disgusted, Billy hoisted him up and threw him on top of the cigarette machine. He looked up to see the patrons clearing out the side doors.
Meanwhile, the carefree, adventure-packed life on Paris Mountain continued. Jack Moon, a self-made man in his own right, had the character to respect Billy Hong. And Billy Hong had the loyalty to be a true friend to his benefactor, Jack Moon. It was Jack Moon who helped him get through the incredible amount of paper work and endless trips to government offices that finally procured him his permanent visa status. This process took months, and without ever hesitating, Moon guided him through the complexities, spoke on his behalf, and scolded reluctant government officials who could not see why the USA needed one more martial arts expert as a permanent resident.
But both men were self-directed, enterprising, bold and daring men. And that meant egos clashed in the house on Paris Mountain. Arguments might be over anything from dirty dishes in the sink to delayed wages from the last job. It started with yelling and ended with them throwing things at each other and at the walls. And Ukio, the burly judo expert, would sit off to the side and say, "I hate it when they fight!"
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