013 The Waffle House Scuffle
The actual role of teaching fell to Warren Elseman, the school's most senior resident black belt, a tall, imposing man of good looks and a mercurial temper. Wisely, he maintained the exact same high standards of Mr. Hong, but he did not push his authority to the same limits.Years earlier, as a first degree black belt, Elseman had been an avid competitor in the local tae kwon do tournaments. In the early days, these tournaments were conducted without protective padding other than mouthpieces and cups. Many fights were won by knockout.
Warren had just won first place at one of these old style tournaments, and he and his fiancee, Donna, had stopped at the Waffle House in Simpsonville afterwards. Because Waffle Houses are made of glass, people driving by could see Bill and Donna inside. Simpsonville was a small town where everybody knew everybody else, and so Warren's many friends came in and out to congratulate him on some great fights.
With all the coming and going, Warren and Donna were there for a couple hours, and most of the talk at their table was martial arts talk--rather loud as everybody was excited and happy. One man in the restaurant didn't like the talk and the carrying on. So he followed Warren and Donna to the cash register and said something to Donna that he shouldn't have said. Warren got angry, but Donna asked him not to fight, so he ignored the man, and then the man said it again.
As Warren took the change from the cashier he negotiated the balance between keeping Donna happy and not allowing that kind of language towards his fiancée'. He looked at the man and said, "If you want a fight, all you have to do is follow me outside."
"I got a knife in my boot that'll cut you down to size," the man called after him as he walked away with Donna.
"You heard me," Warren said. "If you want trouble, just come outside. Otherwise, go back to your table." And he went outside, stepping around a small motorcycle that somebody had parked up on the sidewalk that led to the front door.
He never looked back until the door behind him crashed open. Warren is about six foot two and very powerful, with very fluid hips and strong legs. All in a motion he turned and threw a military style round kick, driving it through with the hips and striking the man dead on the chin--just as the man was reaching for his boot.
It flung the man back into the glass wall of the Waffle House--scaring the daylights out of the people in the restaurant. As Warren explained it, he didn't get mad until after he hit the guy with the kick, and then he just got madder and madder.
Without really noticing it, Warren skirted around the motorcycle on the sidewalk, grabbed the guy's shirt front, and punched him. Then he punched him again and realized he'd better stop. So he grabbed the shirt front with two hands and swept back in a strong stride backwards to throw the man down--never seeing the motorcycle behind him.
Warren stepped back so hard and fast that his shoulders went right over backwards when he hit that motorcycle. Nobody knows why, but that thing must have been anchored. It stayed upright as Warren did a back flip right over it. His feet went straight up above his head and came down on the other side, and he landed face down right on the hard black top of the parking lot.
The first thing he heard was Donna's frantic, " Warren! Warren! Are you all right?"
He sat right up, blood streaming down his face, and exclaimed, "Hey! That guy's got a knife! Where is he?" He had a strip of skin hanging loose from his nose, and two other shorter strips were peeled down his forehead--one over each eyebrow in a straight line pointed down.
Then Donna started laughing. Between his own daze and the blood in his eyes, Warren didn't even see the other guy for a moment. The man had been flung over the motorcycle with him but had landed further away. With Warren grabbing the shirt front, the shirt had been pulled halfway up the man's arms and over his head. The guy got up on his knees with the shirt up over his head and partway up his arms. It forced his arms up over his head in the same position that a man has when he's trying to get into a sweater that is about half a size too small for him. He was so dazed and groggy he didn't even know where he was or why it had gotten so dark.
Before the guy could come back to his senses and reach for his knife again, Warren scrambled over to him, jerked the shirt down with one pull, and cocked back his fist. After being kicked in the face, punched, and then thrown over a motorcycle onto asphalt, the guy looked even worse than Warren did.
"I--I got a gun in my car--" he began, but it was clear that all the fight was knocked out of him. Warren thrust his face forward and yelled, "Do you want me to hit you again?"
"No," the man said.
"Then go back into the Waffle House!"
And the man did.
The next day, Elseman had two parallel racing stripes that ran from his hairline to his eyebrows, and another large stripe down his nose. He and Donna were regular church attenders, a practice that Mr. Hong approved of very strongly, but he decided not to show up that day.
At nine o'clock, there was a knock at the door. Surprised at having a visitor on a Sunday morning, he opened the door to see Billy Hong standing there. Hong had never been to his apartment before. The short, Korean man greeted him with a big smile. "Hullo Elseman! You miss church today?"
Warren invited him in. Only then did Billy Hong seem to notice the marks on his face. "You take a fall? You hurt yourself?"
He had no idea (and never learned) how Billy Hong found out so quickly about the fight. But they sat down and he told Mr. Hong the full story, a story that Mr. Hong enjoyed thoroughly. Bullying or picking a fight would get a person expelled, but enthusiastically repelling an attack would win approval from our late teacher.
Warren and Donna, who also studied tae kwon do, told that story with great enjoyment. It's a wonderful example of how anything can happen in a fight. But it also showed that Warren Elseman had one very necessary characteristic of a good teacher. He could laugh at himself.
Warren Elseman must have felt some nervousness as he stood before the class as the new head instructor. But outwardly he assumed the role with both gravity and a certain ease. After bowing in, the class stayed in formation and drilled on kicks. We moved as a single unit as Elseman barked the count. "Side kick!" he would shout. "One! Two! One! Two!"
He glared at slackers. Keeping up with the count was everything. We surged forward, turned when he commanded us, and followed the count back down the room. After a few sets of single kicks to warm up, we did combinations, and then jump kicks. The kicking sets would be interspersed with sets of hand techniques, to give us a chance to get our breath.
This twenty minute intro to class would put many aerobics teachers on the floor. For my first entire year at the school, I could not get through this session without cheating at times. I'd miss a count every now and then or slack off from going full force. By the end of the drill work, I would be exhausted, my legs quivering. Aerobically, I was not very fit. Nausea still plagued me in class at times---always during the drill work. I concentrated just on keeping up. Technical perfection was only my second priority.
After the drill work, the black belt students ran to form a line from the top of the long room to the bottom. They stood next to each other, and the instructor assigned a lower ranked student to each black belt. We would rush into place across from our chosen partner. Usually, the teacher assigned people of similar sizes, but often women were placed with women no matter how disparate their heights. This annoyed me then, and it annoys me now. I'm six feet tall, and the next tallest woman in class is usually about five foot six.
Still, I was determined to obey, and I knew that the women were all better than I, and so I never complained.
In the partners session, the instructor shouted the kick to be performed and then counted a set of eight or ten. The high ranked person kicked first. The low ranked person held still and served as a target. Of course, no contact was made, never intentionally. After the high ranked person had completed a set on the right and a set on the left, the low ranked person took his or her turn and did the same thing. But as we kicked, we received comments from our senior partner. This part of class benefited new students the most. It was also tremendously demanding, but there were more chances to catch the breath between sets. The partners session lasted about twenty to thirty minutes.
After a short water break, we would do our assigned forms. And then we lined up with our partners again and performed one-step sparring, in which one partner punched and the other practiced blocking and counter attacking. This was meant to be done full speed, with snap and focus, but without contact on the blows. The higher ranks also practiced take downs and foot sweeps in this session.
And then, finally, came free sparring. We slid in mouth pieces, and the women might put on shin pads, and then we went full speed at what Mr. Hong had always called "light contact."
One night one of the black belts got thrown back by a kick so hard that he hit the flimsily paneled wall to the men's room, butt first. His backside cut cleanly through the paneling, and he got stuck in the wall. The men pulled him out. For several weeks the wall had a sideways figure eight shape smashed in it, until the paneling was replaced.
Our school was on the second floor, with a balcony. When Mr. Hong had been alive, he had been so infuriated with a young black belt named Tony who was fighting with diminished fervor that Mr. Hong said he would spar the young man himself. To teach him a lesson, Mr. Hong kicked him so hard on the hip that Tony flew right out the door and hit the rail of the balcony. Mr. Hong had only meant to knock him into the wall. Tony overbalanced on the rail and nearly went over. Poor Mr. Hong rushed after him, but Tony had caught himself. It was the only time anybody ever saw Mr. Hong hug anybody. He pulled Tony back into the training hall, apologizing, and more shaken than Tony himself at what he had nearly done. Later, they laughed about it together, but when I heard that story I realized why Mr. Hong always closed and locked the reinforced glass doors before he would let us free spar.
Under Warren Elseman, I advanced through green belt to blue belt, but I was not doing well. I was an ardent student, but I was not a promising student. My height and fighting know-how made it impossible for any of the women to defeat me, but I was realistic enough to know that in terms of technique I was tremendously inferior to my peers.
I was working at tae kwon do, but not making much progress. There were kicks that were so strenuous that I could not even do them. Chambered kicks, which are pulled up tight to the chest before being shot out, were difficult but not impossible for me. But we also did kicks, such as the back spinning kick, in which the leg was picked up straight and flung around like a log by the hips. I couldn't do this kick at all, though I always tried.
It came down to a problem of fitness. With having to concentrate so hard in class on getting enough air into my lungs, I was unable to really develop my skills. Class was one long struggle to catch my breath. Also, I was putting on weight. Now that graduate school was finished and I was working at a desk for eight hours a day, going to lunch with friends, not moving much except at tae kwon do class, I was putting on the pounds and adding to my own burden even more.
I tested for my fourth degree brown belt, the lowest rank of brown belt, and when I passed with a low score, I made my decision. I had to take an aerobics class to systematically build up my oxygen efficiency and to keep my weight down. I also swore off all fast food. These were clumsy steps towards fitness, but now, in retrospect, I think that I had developed a key asset in martial arts training: I could step back, look at myself critically, and assess what needed to be done. I could make a plan and follow it.
After one year in tae kwon do, I knew I was not gifted. Big, slow, not especially coordinated, with weak and heavy legs. But I had been reading Ken Cooper's books on fitness, and my old college had actually had a very cutting edge physical fitness program that instilled a knowledge of fitness into me. I realized that proficiency in any athletic endeavor had to be gradually achieved. And so I settled down for a long term plan to improve. I wanted to be a black belt, and I wanted that black belt to come from Hong's Tae Kwon Do school.
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