008 Surprise and Tragedy
Life in Fundamental Christianity is always punctuated by doubts about whether you are good enough. But I threw myself into my work as a graduate assistant in Bible college. I loved teaching. I loved studying graduate-level English. I loved my students. And I feared the dean of our school. He was a bully and a small tyrant, and I was still young enought to be afraid of men like him.
So my first year was a mixed bag. But I knew I wanted to continue in Billy Hong's school. I had no car to get there, no money, and my first year in graduate school was complicated when my father died. He was Italian Roman Catholic, and his last demand on me was that I give up my Protestantism and return to the Church. I declined, and he disinherited me and disowned me: a separation from his side of the family that would last for the rest of my life, all the way to the writing of this story.
The next summer I returned to Tae kwon do training, but instead of attending Mr. Hong's main school, I attended one of the branch schools, which was less expensive. I was working a 40 hour week for low pay, but it was more than I'd gotten as a grad assistant. And a woman black belt at the branch school gave me rides each week. But again, I missed the scheduled test.
As the hot August days drew to a close, my graduate school duties (and salary) resumed. I had to drop out of Tae kwon do again.
Just after my second year as an English teacher started, Mr. Hong won an amateur golf tournament. His prize was round trip tickets to Korea aboard the Korean airliner KAL 007.
As the days came closer for him to take the flight to Korea, Mr. Hong became more morose and withdrawn. He had declared that it would be better for one of his business friends to accompany him on his trip than his wife. She would stay in South Carolina with the children.
At a Friday night class a few days before his trip, Mr. Hong was impatient with his black belt students, angry with them, and disappointed that they lacked heart and spirit. He told all of the students below black belt to leave. And then he locked the doors, lined up his black belt students, and shouted at them, rebuking them as he had never done before for having poor spirit. One man later told me that Mr. Hong said this as he berated them:
"I am the teacher!" he shouted at them. "I do what I am told! Like a dog if my master tells me! That should be your attitude. If I say die, you should die!"
Then he called the senior black belt student, Bull Beringer, to come to the front of the room. Bull Beringer, a great bear-like man with a barrel chest, dwarfed Billy Hong. Beringer was about six foot four and was massive. He was a third degree black belt at the time.
"Bend over!" Mr. Hong shouted at him, and Beringer obeyed him. Mr. Hong took up an oak stick, swung it like a baseball bat, and struck Beringer so hard that he knocked him over. The blow was so severe against the top of Beringer' leg that Beringer could not stand up.
"Get up! Get up!" Mr. Hong shouted at him.
Legs shaking, Beringer at last got up.
"Do you want another?" Mr. Hong asked him.
"No sir," Mr. Beringer said.
"Then you get out. You take another or you get out!"
"Well, I don't want another one, but I don't want to leave," Bull Beringer said, and he bent over again to be hit. Mr. Hong only tapped him with the stick, and then he shouted at everybody to get out. The black belts hurriedly gathered up clothing and scurried out the door. But they stood on the steps outside, talking. One by one, each went back inside and humbly asked Mr. Hong if he had been the one who had disgraced or offended him.
"You don't understand. You don't understand," Mr. Hong said to one of them. But at last he was reconciled to them, and he went with them to the school's favorite eating place, Ryan's Steakhouse.
At the restaurant, Mr. Hong seemed more like his old self, laughing and talking, but he said suddenly to them, "Students at the school should always wear white. White uniform. For purity and integrity. No letters on the back."
Everybody nodded. He stayed with them a long time, telling stories. They finally broke up and everybody said good night.
News came the next week that flight KAL 007 had never landed. It had been shot down by Russian fighter pilots for trespassing into Russian air space.
Mr. Hong was a local celebrity, and so the news teams in Greenville traveled to the school to interview the black belts. They said little; they were still in shock. In the following week, a memorial service was held, and Mr. Hong's black belt, now faded to gray, was hung up in the school.
Everything I've related about the final days of Billy Hong is only hearsay. I wasn't there, and this is only what I have been told by those who were there. Details may vary, but everybody agrees that he was angry and upset his last night at the school, that he did strike his beloved and respected senior student, and that he specifically said that our colors must remain white.
People still debate over flight KAL 007. Was it really spying? The Russians said it was taking pictures of their air craft.
I think it was. I think Mr. Hong knew it was. He'd had ties with the CIA in his younger days, and he was an ardent foe of Communism. I could be wrong; it's only my opinion. At the time, what deeply impressed me was the tragedy to his wife and two young children and the question of what would happen to the tae kwon do school.
I was in my last year of graduate school, and there was no money for me to attend tae kwon do training, but I decided that once I had graduated, gotten a job, and paid off some things, that I would go back. I was still a white belt, and yet I felt the urgency of going and becoming a part of that school and trying to preserve what Mr. Hong had started. My doubts and reservations were gone. I honored my brown belt in Shotokan, but even if a school had offered to recognize it, I would have turned down the offer. I wanted to be at Hong's. I wanted to get my black belt from Hong's Tae Kwon Do School.
|
007 Toughening up
We trained in a long, shoe-box shaped room on a second floor over a bar. Two long front windows let in plenty of light as long as the day lasted. The rough floor, carpetted with worn blue carpetm boasted almost no padding. The reinforced glass doors stood open most of the time, our only ventilation. Only very rarely did Mr. Hong turn on the air conditioning.
The training hall, or dojang as some call it (but we just called it "the school"), was paneled with cheap brown paneling and hosted a tiny office and two small dressing rooms in back. There were no showers. During my first couple years there was no water fountain. Mr. Hong brought a water dispenser to each class. When we lined up during the break, it was always "ladies first."
I thought I knew what is was to train hard. In Shotokan, I had punched and kicked my way through fatigue and the protests of burning calves and aching arms. In the summers I had sweated until the water dripped off my cotton uniform.
But even my most serious and ardent training in Shotokan had not prepared me for training in military style tae kwon do. Imagine an aerobics class where every time you lift your foot it should be at head or at least chest level. And furthermore, every time you raise your foot that high, you must focus all your power in a sudden constriction of muscle and breath.
I learned to explode forward as I kicked. But there were differences even in the kicking theories between Japanese and Korean styles. Mr. Hong told me again and again to get my hips over when I side kicked, and I didn't know what he meant. Finally, he grabbed me by the hips and flipped me so that I pivoted as I kicked.
"Like a mule! Like a mule!" he exclaimed
Then I understood. A mule puts its head down, points its butt at its target, draws up both hind legs into itself and then shoots them straight out to kick, all in a split second. In tae kwon do, we keep our heads up, but everything else is the same: draw the foot high and tight, knee to the chest and heel to the backside. Then turn with the hip as the target finder, point the butt at the target, and kick out with the heel. At the end of the kick the heel, hip, and shoulder should all be in a straight line. That's how the power travels. The hip actually directs the entire body. In Japanese karate, we called side kicks by that name to indicate that they were directed off to the side. In tae kwon do, a side kick is thrown at whoever is in front of you or behind you, but you throw it by pivoting yourself sideways to the target.
Before and after class, Mr. Hong greeted each student by name, enquired after our well being, sometimes told us funny stories. Once we had lined up by rank and bowed in, he became a tyrant.
The first week, I got sick in every class I attended. The pace was so fast and the air so thick with sweat and heat in the badly ventilated room that I nearly fainted in the middle of class. I later found out that the need to go out and sit on the balcony to get air was a common ritual for the new students. Mr. Hong never rebuked us for our weakness. Instead, he would come out on the balcony and very gently ask us if we would be all right.
But inside, he accepted no slacking off. He would throw out anybody who did not obey him. And yet, if a student did not understand what was being ordered, Mr. Hong would abruptly stop and very clearly explain it. I gradually learned that if I could not do a technique correctly but would still attempt it whole heartedly, he would be satisfied.
The words, "I can't," were always met by the command, "Try!"
I had weak legs, useless ankles, and was horrible at jumping. We practiced half a dozen different flying kicks or jump kicks, and I couldn't do a single one correctly. I could barely get off the ground. But I found that as long as I tried, he was satisfied.
"Go, Jeri! You try! You try!" he would shout as we worked with partners. And then he would move on to the next pair and make corrections, adjustments, and then count again.
The men did handstands, and---held up by a partner---did push ups in that position. We all practiced "jumpovers": 30 sideways jumps over our partner as he or she hunkered down on hands and knees. Side to side and back again, 30 times. I could not do 30 non-stop for years. But I always tried. He made me get through 30, no matter how many times I broke my own rhythm.
Everything hurt after class. Tae kwon do is an incredible mixture of stretching muscles to their limits while anaerobically stressing them to their limits. I suffered toe cramps, calf cramps, lower back weariness, and shoulder pain. And then there were the shin splints. After every class I would sleep for ten hours. And even at that, morning came far too soon.
Having studied karate for several years was actually a hindrance. I knew nothing of the total body commitment required to kick effectively in tae kwon do, and in Shotokan karate we had been taught not to over commit in attacks. I did excel as a new student in all of the hand techniques that were taught at Mr. Hong's school, but hand techniques are not nearly as important in tae kwon do as kicking is. Tae kwon do fight theory is based on the idea that the fighter will be staying out of range of the hands as much as possible. The tae kwon do fighter kicks--fast power kicks that use the muscles of the back, buttocks, and legs.
Almost all martial arts come to us from ancient patterns of attack and defense that the Japanese call kata and the Koreans call poom-se. In English, they are simply called forms. The first form is simply twenty-one steps of blocking and punching, with four knife hand blocks at the end. I learned the form and was ready to test for my first belt, but by then the summer was over. I had to start teaching at the college and could not afford tae kwon do classes on a graduate assistant's meager pay. Tae kwon do would have to wait for nine months as I got through school.
|
006 Fighting Alethea
In spite of having earned my first kyue (first degree brown belt) in Shotokan four years earlier, I wore a white belt when I started tae kwon do. I was surprised when Mr. Hong gently told me that he would not recognize my rank because the two styles were so different, but I agreed instantly to his decision and I put on the white belt. At least, I thought, I would advance through the lower ranks more rapidly than other new students.
But I had another surprise waiting for me on my first night. The one person I had feared all through college walked in the front door. She had a green belt around her waist.
I was there with my friend Karen, who had enrolled with me. "Hey," Karen said. "Isn't that Alethea Conner?" She turned big eyes to me.
"Yes," I said, and it just figured that Alethea outranked me even here.
Before college, I'd grown up under an abusive father. In many ways, I had to raise myself. My father disowned me when I converted from his faith to evangelical Christianity. So my decision to get away from my home and start a new life had been pretty easy to make.
Bible college was a place with lots of rules, lots of innocent people, lots of discipline, and lots of stability. For me, it was the very place I needed to grow up. I was a loud person, often rude, and held most people in contempt. But in college, for the first time in my life, I was consistently and kindly confronted about my behaviors towards other people and made to change. And I wanted to change.
In spite of my faults, I was honest, and honesty went a long way at a Bible college. I was befriended by a class mate, Beryl Rimmer, whose father, Bert Rimmer, was the head of campus security. Beryl encouraged me to apply for a job, and I was quickly accepted. Women who worked on Security received the same South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SCLED) training as the men, but our jobs were much more limited. A woman always attended any ambulance call to the girls' dorms, and we did a lot of dispatch work. But we stayed in the front office, a glass building called the fishbowl. The men went out on patrol and ran the shifts. At the time I was hired, Beryl Rimmer had been working for two years on Security, and another girl, Kelly, had been on for a year. We all liked each other and got along well. Our job title was Assistant Gate House Watch, or AGHW.
I loved the Security department and must confess that sometimes I could be accused of going to college just so I could work on Security. Every day I was busy going to classes, and then I would go to work, where I was part of a close-knit team. I was making friends for the first time in my life, and I felt that I mattered, that things ran more smoothly because I was there.
My idyllic life was knocked slightly askew when I met the wife of Sergeant Conner, the second in command of our department. I was introduced to Alethea Conner at a Red Cross meeting, and the woman simply turned and walked away from me. I thought there must have been some mistake in my perception of her rudeness, so at the first coffee break, I went up to her and spoke to her, asking her some polite thing or other. She turned away without answering.
At this time in my life I had managed to alienate so many people because of my own rudeness, loudness, or obnoxiousness, that I assumed that somehow I had offended her. I tried a third time, later on, and was once again rebuffed. Really at a loss, I went to Beryl Rimmer and confessed my sin. I wasn't actually sure what I had said or done, but I was sure that Beryl would tell me the truth and help me mend matters with the Sergeant's wife.
I was so sure that it was my fault that Beryl asked me to give her a detailed account of everything I had said to Mrs. Conner, and I did. When I had finished, Beryl just rolled her eyes. She threw a look at her father's office in the back of the fishbowl. The door was closed. She said, "Kelly can tell you more. Alethea Conner was really rude to me only once, and then she found out that my dad is Bert Rimmer, her husband's boss. So she's not so bad with me. But she's been just awful to Kelly."
The next day I asked Kelly about it. Kelly was a PE major, with bright, incredibly dark eyes, her face and figure just faintly chubby enough to remind one of a teddy bear. She was pretty with a fresh, country girl prettiness, and was very earnest in her bearing with people. To my surprise, she just wilted up as soon as I mentioned Alethea Conner.
"What did you hear?" Kelly asked. "Did she say anything about me?"
I told her what had happened at the Red Cross meeting. When I was finished she nodded, but she didn't tell me anything. She was clearly afraid of Alethea Conner.
One of the men heard us talking, and later on he told me the full story. Mrs. Conner had been picking on Kelly ever since Kelly had started the job. She'd leveled several complaints against her and was openly rude to her.
In fact, one day, Mrs. Conner had come to the fishbowl to sort out the way Kelly did her work. Mr. Rimmer had walked in to find Kelly in tears, Alethea storming at her, and the young man on duty unable to do anything to fix the situation. Rimmer ordered Alethea out. Later, Mr. Rimmer told both the Conners point-blank that if Alethea Conner ever walked into the fishbowl again, her husband would be fired from Security.
Obviously, the smart thing to do was avoid Alethea Conner. School was an authoritarian place: students obeyed faculty and staff members and treated them with deference. The system worked really well most of the time, and to be honest, I would have to say in ten years of working on that campus in one capacity or another, Alethea Conner was one of only two people I ever saw abuse that authority. But she got away with it. For a while, anyway. She stayed out of the fishbowl, but she made it her job to be unkind to the AGHWs at every other opportunity.
Kelly and Beryl graduated. I became senior AGHW, and Kelly's younger sister Rhonda and another girl Darla were promoted to the uniform ranks. Rhonda had her first run-in with Alethea Conner early in her career and was reduced to tears. Darla, far more down to earth, was just flabbergasted by Mrs. Conner. "That woman sure has some problem!" Darla exclaimed to me, right in front of everybody on shift. "I think she needs Schizophrenia medication!"
The years went on. If we saw Alethea Conner in public, she put us down, ordered us away from herself, was rude, and watched each of us girls with severity. At times she leveled complaints against us. She even went over Mr. Rimmer's head to his boss. Fortunately, Rimmer's boss had less patience with her than Rimmer did. But every one of us girls learned to be afraid of her. We knew that if she could bring us down, she would.
Graduating ended my problems with her. I had been accepted as a graduate assistant at the college and was already doing grad work that summer. In the fall, I would be teaching Freshman English.
So when Alethea walked through the door of Hong's Tae Kwon Do School and saw me, I just nodded and smiled. In the course of class, Alethea and I were put with each other as partners, and as we worked she seemed friendly enough. As we went back and forth, practicing kicks, I called her "Alethea." She instantly snapped right back at me, "That's Mrs. Conner to you, Jeri."
It stopped me cold. For crying out loud--I was on English faculty and this woman worked in the campus print shop. But I nodded and simply didn't speak again to her.
The class dismissed, and afterwards as I was stalking to the girl's room, still mad, Alethea came up to me and said, "I hope you aren't angry about what I said, but I believe you need to respect me."
I turned on her, incredibly surprised, and said, "Respect you? I don't respect you! I've never respected you! You're nothing but a bully, and you always have been! I despise you!"
And I turned to go into the girls' room.
"I make people respect me," she said. "And I won't respect you until you earn my respect."
"I don't care if you respect me or not!" I went into the dressing room.
I already knew what was really going to happen. Sooner or later, Alethea and I were going to spar with each other. It didn't matter that she outranked me. It didn't matter that she probably was in better athletic shape than I was at the time. I'm six feet tall. Alethea tops out at five foot five or five foot six. And I'd fought--really fought--as a kid before I became a Christian. She had no idea what I could do to her if I chose. And that was my choice. My adversary of three years, whom I had never wronged but who had wronged me at every opportunity, was at my mercy. And she was so stupid she didn't even know she was at my mercy. She was so proud and arrogant and full of herself she didn't even know that it was in her best interest to make peace with me as quickly as possible.
I thought about it all through the next day, and into the evening. And on the second day I thought about it some more. And then it was time to go back to the training hall. I knew we were going to spar. Girls always got put together first And when Mr. Hong taught, everybody sparred from the first week of enrollment. I brought along my old shin pads. This was back in the days when shin pads were not made well--at least not for women. My shin pads pulled up over the foot like a sock but were too big and flopped around on my shins. One result of their loose fit was that if I smacked anything fast and light with my shin, the shin pad, even though it was made of foam, would clap loudly against my shin. It didn't hurt me. It just had very good reverb.
Alethea was there and she nodded to me, determined to keep me in my place and yet treat me with the courtesy demanded of us in the training hall. I worked with Karen that night in the partners session, but once the sparring began, I was put with Alethea. I had my shin pads on.
We bowed on command. There were several pairs sparring, and so nobody looked at us, and for a long moment, I was at a complete loss.
I still wasn't sure what to do. A hoard of Sunday School teachers stood in my mind, like some heavenly host, telling me that revenge is always wrong. Another part of me told me that I had the power to end Alethea's career as a bully. I still didn't know what to do. A powerful motive urged me not to hurt her and not to humiliate her. Another powerful resentment urged me to pound her into mud, because I could.
Alethea made the decision for me. She round kicked to my chin. Enlightenment came: I could easily make it sound like I was pounding her and yet not ever really hurt her at all. I could make it so that she could never touch me, and I could frustrate the daylights out of her. The shin pads won. I knew exactly what to do.
Kicking with the shins was frowned upon at the tae kwon do school, but new students needed so much correction and guidance that shin kicks were low on the list of things to prevent.
I skirted out of the way of Alethea's forward motion, picked up my right leg, and smacked the shin pad into her ribs as she went by. Clap! She was startled and came right back at me, her hands ridiculously low.
I picked up my foot, heel out, and lightly thrust it into the front of her hip, against the bone; I pushed. It sent her flying back but did not hurt her. Indeed, it was really a push and not a kick. She was mad by then, and she knew exactly what I was doing and why. She rushed right at me, hands down, and I lightly but loudly peppered her with the shin pads, always moving back, moving away, not hurting her, but making the shin pads clap against her. Clap, clap, clap! It sounded like I was beating the crap out of her, and I was glad. I wanted it to sound that way. Everybody in the whole room could hear it. Clap, clap clap!
Alethea was frantic, and I remained silent. But she never got a kick off, and I don't think I ever even bothered to block her. I certainly never used my hands, and I never went to her face or head because I did not want to hurt her. I just peppered her as she came in, and she kept coming. Finally, the associate instructor came up and stopped us. "Here Alethea," he said to her. "Let me show you how to fight."
It was the most telling blow against her. He meant it to be kind, but to her arrogance and superiority it must have been more crippling than the worst insult. I settled down into a stance and refrained from leering at her. In fact, I met her eye with no expression, and she knew perfectly well that no matter what he told her, or how he instructed her, the minute he stepped out of the way, I was going to do it again. But after he finished instructing her, he clapped his hands and ended the match. We moved to different partners.
After class, Alethea snatched her things and went straight out. In the girls room, Karen was practically rolling on the floor laughing. All the way back home, Karen was laughing, and I was laughing.
Over that weekend, Alethea made the rounds with phone calls, seeking support, but at last there was none. I had, she insisted, targeted her breasts and struck her hard, several times, in the breast. Mr. Rimmer called me up to get my side of the story. I told him the truth. Yes, it was unavoidable the way she had charged in with her hands down that the shin pads had hit her chest, but not one of my kicks had been hard--just loud. I told Rimmer that if I had wanted to hurt Alethea, I would have knocked her out easily with a solid kick to the head, and she knew it. Rimmer knew it too.
He told Alethea that as far as he knew, I was participating with her in a class in which we both knew the possible consequences, and so it was not a matter for either Security or the school administration to handle. If Alethea and I had a problem, we would need to work it out.
I did sweat it a little bit, but everybody that Alethea appealed to made the same decision. If you do tae kwon do, you have to abide by the consequences of tae kwon do.
On Monday morning, Rimmer called me up to his office. When I got there, he said, "Alethea wants you to meet with her."
It was a stunning declaration, and I did not expect it, and I made an instant decision. "No," I told him. He was surprised. I was suddenly surprised at how very angry I was. "For three years that woman bullied me and made me feel like she could do anything she wanted to me. And she's not sorry now; she's just caught, and she's scared. I'm not going to her. When she comes to me, apologizing for what she's done, then we'll talk. Otherwise, I have nothing to say."
Rimmer tried to say something about the benefits of compromise, but I told him, "There's no compromise with this. What she did was wrong. And now it's come back to her. You can tell her that. We aren't talking because there is no agreement to reach. She picked on Beryl, Kelly, Rhonda, Darla, and me. And I am now putting a stop to it."
That ended the meeting. Alethea was duly told all I had said. She never apologized and she never came to me to talk. The next time we were in class together to spar, I said to her, very calmly, "You will ask me to teach you how to fight, or I will fight you like I did last time."
Her mouth tightened up. We bowed on command, and I said, "Okay Alethea, we'll fight like we did last time. Get ready."
And then, stammering from her lips, came the words: "Will you--teach me--how to fight?"
I smiled at her. "Sure, Alethea," I said. "The first thing you need to know is how to keep your hands up."
It would be great to say that Alethea and I became friends after that, but it would be dishonest. She stayed long enough to get her next belt. We sparred on the test, and I went easy with her and let her throw some kicks.
I called her Alethea and she never objected again. In some odd way, I think I actually did win her respect by seeming so remorseless to her. Where three years of kindness, meekness, and obedience had failed, three days of firm resolve, determination, and the appearance of being ready to hurt her succeeded. She never earned my respect, but she has earned my pity.
I still don't know the rightness of what I did. I never hurt her, though I let her troubled mind believe that I would hurt her. After the first sparring match, I tried to go on without grinding her face into the floor. I never forced her to apologize for the years of unkindness. In fact, I never forced her to apologize for anything. I just never let her get away with continued nonsense.
But now I do realize that in refusing to go to Alethea, I took away from her the vital moment of truth when she might have changed forever. The most amazing thing about Alethea Conner is that she thought she had every right to treat us badly. Nobody had ever told her otherwise. And I could have but did not. I do regret that. I was changed because people were willing to confront me. I had no right to refuse to confront her.
Years later, I was riding to church with a friend named Judy, and we talked about the incident. Judy, several years older than I, had been a senior English faculty member when all this had happened.
"I really regret it that I refused to meet her more than halfway," I said.
She nodded. "And fighting her didn't even feel good, did it?" she asked.
I was stunned at the question. "It felt great!" I told her with complete honesty. "It was one of the best moments of my life!"
My honesty really annoyed Judy. She snapped her mouth closed and glared at the road as she drove. I just stared at her. I do regret not helping Alethea after I had taught her the truth of her frailty. But fighting her was great. In fact, it was terrific.
|
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.
|
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.
|
003 Charlie Opens the Door
Mr. Hong enrolled in college in Anderson, South Carolina. Barely able to speak English when he started school, often mistaken by fellow students and instructors for being Chinese or Japanese, he charmed and won over the people around him. Billy Hong had always been optimistic about the American spirit, and was confident in his own ability to break down racial and language barriers and become a part of his adopted country.
Shortly after arriving, he was befriended by a private detective who had served in the Japanese occupation and earned his first degree black belt in Judo while overseas. When Billy Hong demonstrated his skills to this man's small martial arts school, the students were whole heartedly converted to tae kwon do.
And so Mr. Hong took over the small school that sat on Paris Mountain in Greenville. He had already opened a school in Anderson.
Initially, Mr. Hong retained the mindset of the Korean men who had fought so hard to establish tae kwon do as a martial art. He did not allow women in the school, and he turned away anybody who looked unable to "get tough," as he called it. To "get tough" meant surviving the rigorous training until you had learned to sail right through it; until your will could direct your body, unhampered by fear and self limitation.
Classes at the Paris Mountain school began with the students running barefoot up the mountain. They had a paved road, but it was a steep ascent. And, of course, running in their white uniforms, they were a noticeable group as they huffed along. Their barefoot jog took them through fragrant copses of pine trees, past a scenic outlook that revealed the green, verdant valley below, through a neighborhood where tow-headed children gaped at them, open-mouthed, and up to the dusty summit. It was about a half mile up the ascent and then another half mile down.
After the mandatory jog to warm up, class began in the narrow, sunny training hall. Students lined up by rank, sweating, perhaps limping after the run, the cuffs of their snow white uniforms dusty, their feet blackened. The first half of the training session was broken into two parts: basics and partners. In basics, Mr. Hong directed drill work. He shouted the kick to be performed and then shouted the count: "One! Two! Three!" Other martial arts teachers use the native language of their style, but Hong taught in English.
The class kicked at his command, the lines moving down the hardwood floor in unison, every kick high, every kick full force. And full speed. At his command, they turned and came back the other way. He interspersed the kicking sets with sets of hand techniques, but as they warmed up more, and sweat streaked the floor and dripped down the cotton sleeves of their uniforms, he ordered them to do combinations: front kick-side kick; or side kick-back kick. They did a two-kick combination to each count. The un-air conditioned room steamed up. Oxygen in the air became more rare, crowding with the carbon dioxide of the students puffing and panting.
Mr. Hong liked this air quality. He believed that receiving only half the oxygen that a fighter needed would help a student "get tough." So, once he saw the faces of his class going slightly gray, he started them on jump kick and flying kick drills.
After the basics session, he lined up each high ranking student with a lower rank student and once again progressed them through single-kick drills, in which the high ranked student kicked first: one set of ten kicks on each leg. The low ranked student took his turn next.
When the partners session was complete, the students were allowed five minutes to get water from the big jug that Mr. Hong brought to each class.
The second half of the class was also broken into two sessions: one steps, which are a type of pre-arranged sparring; and free sparring. Mr. Hong euphemistically called the free sparring "light contact." I suppose, in comparing it to the type of fighting he had done in international competition, it was light contact. But knockouts were not uncommon, and by the time they were black belts, many students had broken their ribs at least once. After the free sparring session, the students were sent out on another barefoot run. Sometimes, Mr. Hong followed them, wielding his big oak stick to encourage laggers to get up the hillside faster. Automobile drivers, wending their way up Paris Mountain's beautiful winding roads, were often tempted to admire the scenery. The sight of a little Korean man chasing a group of big, sweating Americans with a stick and shouting at them captured the notice of more than one passerby.
Having grown up as a war orphan and refugee, Mr. Hong knew a lot about the darker parts of life. He had developed excellent poker skills as a young man and could find ways to gamble over anything. When he had lived at the training hall in Seoul, some of his peers, unknown to the senior instructors, would go to bars late at night to "practice." That meant picking fights at the bar and trying to goad others into attacking them. Even as a young man, while laughing at the stories that his friends told him of their encounters, Billy Hong had shunned this practice.
But he understood the arrogance that martial arts training can instill into a person, and so he stipulated that his students be the shining clean examples that were the ideal of the virtues of tae kwon do. He discovered that if it's a clean, sober, industrious young man that you want to recruit, then the Southern Baptist Church is the ideal recruiting ground. Mr. Hong's classes were heavily populated with deacon's kids, seminary students, and lay preachers.
But one thing Hong had not counted on was his own growing popularity. Pretty soon, women wanted to join the school. He put this matter under consideration. Women in Korea were already a part of tae kwon do, but they could complicate a class, especially the type of class he wanted to run. Old wives tales still flourished in Korean training at that time, and Mr. Hong worried about disfiguring women with broken noses or loosened teeth or ruining their fertility with hard training or powerful punches. But Hong soon had a new issue confronting him when Charlie Mann showed up in the doorway.
Charlie Mann worked in the head stone business and made a good living at it. He was in his mid fifties, a big strapping man, and had become fat. On a visit to the doctor, Charlie was told, "lose the weight, get some exercise, or you'll be dead in a few years."
Dissatisfied with jogging, swimming, and conventional exercise programs, Charlie decided that he wanted to learn from this meteoric Korean teacher.
But Charlie's confidence in Mr. Hong was not appreciated by its recipient. At sight of this bald, fat, middle-aged man on his doorstep, Mr. Hong became indignant. He had never even considered that somebody like Charlie would want to take lessons from him.
"No! No! You old man! You too fat! You go take American Karate down the hill!" he told Charlie.
Completely unruffled, Charlie asked what the charges were for the class and if Mr. Hong had a uniform to fit him.
"Class cost too much. Only young man!" Billy Hong told him. "Cost a lot of money!"
Charlie pulled out a massive wad of bills and started to thumb through them. This irritated Mr. Hong even more. He could have managed a defiant or angry applicant, but he had never met the bland, cheerful, thick-headed type before.
Charlie passed him a sheaf of bills. "Is that enough to get me started, sir?"
Billy Hong even fell back on his best strategy: pretending not to understand English. He chattered at Charlie in machine-gun Korean. Then he walked away, shaking his head and saying no between the volleys of Korean phrases, but Charlie followed him, still asking and explaining. Finally, Mr. Hong gave up. He could not get Charlie to leave, and having him hang around would be worse.
So he took the money, found a uniform for Charlie, and immediately set out to drive him away from the school from the inside.
"You very fat!" he shouted at Charlie. "No more barbecue and no more beer!"
Charlie nodded, but those sacrifices were small compared to what Mr. Hong next put him through.
Motorists touring scenic Paris Mountain were now treated to the sight of the group of young men in bare feet and white uniforms running up the road as before, but now the group was followed at some distance by a single, heavy man with a bald head, who huffed and puffed along while the little Korean man chased him and hit him across the backside again and again with the stick.
In class, Mr. Hong assigned Charlie extra push ups and sit ups. When the water break came, he would tell Charlie not to get any water. He would then pick up a 35-lb. barbell and put it in Charlie's hands. "You still too fat, Charlie; you run the mountain with this and then come back inside."
Charlie's house was out in the country, and his telephone was on the old party line system, where several houses shared the line and every phone on the same line would ring if any of the member numbers were dialed. In the mornings after a class at Hong's the night before, Charlie would wake up, too sore to move, and would dial his own number on the bedside phone. When the telephone downstairs in the kitchen rang, his wife would pick it up.
"I can't get out of the bed, Elvira!" he exclaimed. "Come pull me out of the bed! And bring me coffee!"
And it was true. Charlie's wife had to help him get out of the bed and get to the shower for the first several weeks.
But Charlie never quit. And he never resented Billy Hong's methods. He remained steadfastly bland, cheerful, and willing. After the first month, Billy Hong relented slightly. By the time another month had gone by, the young instructor accepted Charlie and eased up on the pressure.
And, certainly, Charlie's weight disappeared and his health improved. He was a white belt for a long time, but there did come a point when his strapping great size came into play as an asset. He was Billy Hong's first truly massive student: over six feet tall and wide across the shoulders and chest. He had worked hard all his life and was an accomplished craftsman, so his shoulders and arms were well developed. As he developed his martial skills, he showed Billy Hong the usability of tae kwon do for big and powerful people.
As Charlie progressed towards black belt, it became increasingly difficult for the higher ranked students to win against him in free sparring. He learned to take punches in the stomach and was as hard as nails.
When Charlie tested for black belt several years after his initiation into the school, at the age of 60, Mr. Hong admitted to Charlie that he had been wrong about the ability of older people to adapt and to learn. Charlie, he said, had showed him a great truth about people and about tae kwon do itself. Though still strictly seeking only those who were ready to "get tough," Mr. Hong learned to look further than outward appearance.
Charlie, now retired from tae kwon do, has remained a favorite at the school and soon passed into being one of the legends at Hong's. When he was past sixty he could still fight and defeat black belt men half his age. His good will and earnestness in training probably affected Mr. Hong in several ways. Soon after Charlie was a black belt, the school moved from Paris Mountain to a larger building on Laurens Road in Greenville, one of the busiest streets in town. And it opened its doors to women.
|
