Every year, heck every month I come to my fellow students and try to get them to bring in more students to the organization. I say ‘lets do it” and we advertise and try to draw people into our weird little world of martial arts training. Often I get a tone of help, but every once and a while I get resistance and some who are even upset about being asked to try and get a few extra students. It does help me both ways! Those that try their buts off to get new students are those that probably “Get it”, those that resist…well It lets me know that they don’t.
What I mean by this is those that try understand that Karate is much more than just kicking and punching, its communion with fellows that are like minded, its physical challenge and its learning a new art. Is it a perfect art that will kill anyone that attacks you, no! But it’s a type of art that can lead to some very important personal discovery, it can help you thru hard times and it can even give you a bit of purpose when you don’t have any.
When I was a kid, the thing that got me into Karate was my Dad….so strange to actually say that seeing as he banned me from ever trying it! See, my father and uncle had both trained in the “old days”. My uncle got to his brown belt and I think my dad thru in the towel around green. But they trained in the old days, the REALLY OLD DAYS…back when men were the only real gender in the clubs, back when girls and children did not don a gi and try to defend themselves. The Students were often hobbled and hurt because the instructors drove them so hard and the sparring was so hard that injury was daily. My uncle broke both his arms in a tournament and finally bowed out when his knee was taken out and he tore three of the four major ligaments in it.
So, what made me join after all the horror stories…..two names…Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris! Both men are responsible for me donning the white pajamas..and at one point a pair of black ones when I studied kung fu. I started off with a club I saw as I was on a bus going to a comic store with my brother….I was six. Every week end I had rented a VHS….Thats the “before DVDS” for young folk…and watched Bruce Lee in his five movies, heck I probably wore out the movies ad Adies video in their Martial arts section. Back in the day we were allowed to rent one movie a week end and my Brother Al would always walk me to the video store to get them, and I always came back with Martial arts movies…to my mothers dismay!
Those movies got me in the door, but I started at what I can only call the wrong Dojo. The instructor was good, but his bad habits spewed out of his office onto the Dojo floor and when he did show up for class he stunk of cigarettes and booze. We did not do the Dojo Kun, we bowed in and the instructor…when he taught…would say a few words then the kids class started and it was fun, but it was not what I saw in the movies. I even stayed to watch the adult class to see if we could look forwards to some good training down the road, and even their training did not look like Bruce and Chuck…no spirit in training!
After six months and a yellow belt I thru in the towel and moved on. I took to hitting a punching bag in the garage, strange for a six to seven year old but I was driven. Between that and play fighting with my cousins that was about as involved as I got in Karate for a full year! Then I watched a movie with a not so well known Japanese star, Sho Koshugi! The man played a Ninja but his Karate was very good. I watched and before you know it…and six of his movies later…I got the bug back! I was going Home and noticed this little red and white sign on the third floor of a building whose back faced the bus route. It was in an area My mother would NEVER let me go alone and it was known as tough area with lots of hookers and issues at night…and it was not much better during the day!
With my brothers help I convinced my mom to let me go check it out. I went with a friend and my brother then next week end, I was actually around eight years old at the time, but Winnipeg…heck the world…was much safer back then. We went up the three flights of marble stairs and as we got closer to the door on that Saturday morning I could hear the adult class in full swing. It kind of scared the heck out of me! The smell was something I will never forget as well. See community club Dojos don’t feel like Dojos to me, they lack the ambiance, the smell, the feel of sweat in the very air. Things that would be seen as detractors now…well those things were what got me hooked completely!
I got to the large and impressive door, oak I think and it said in simple letters “JKA of Manitoba” and under that “international Shotokan Karate Association of Manitoba headquarters” with a funny picture of a tiger or something under that. Very plane and if you did not look close you would miss it on the way up the stairs. I pushed open the door and the hot air blasted out, like it was trying to escape the training itself. The smell was stronger now, kind of musky, like sweat and hard work mixed together in a soft but present alert to you, telling you this was a place to take seriously!
After that first day and watching the adult class as they did things that would make the movies I had been watching jealous, I was hooked. I started in the kids class and trained under a few different seniors, from the instructors son and daughter to a brown belt that had been training in the club with his father. Kids classes were fun, but they had a very serious side to them. And for the first time I was taught the Dojo Kun by a rather serious Sensei Tammy. The whole experience began to gel for me. The true training was available here. And we got it in buckets full. In fact one of my jobs at green belt was getting buckets of water for cleaning the sweat off the floor after work outs. It was a different world. No dry cloth to easily tidy the floor….wet ones stick! The training was harder, hell cleaning up after the training was hard, but it was what I wanted.
Karate is, for a part, about making a life decision to find a place that you can work hard and see results that mean a lot…only to yourself. It’s a personal time, a time to experience and learn about yourself and the first few years from others. Karate is making it a life. Those that get it, they get it, those that don’t may think they do…but they wont ever get it. I learned more in the first few years of Karate about myself than I had in school or any other activity. It was a true experience. I learned how to over come being the shy kid in the corner that had a speech and learning issue and the kid that had a father as a teacher and shared his name…one that drew a great deal of attention for several reasons. I out grew the kid that was a latch key kid for the first ten years of his life and had an older brother raise him. I out grew all of that and simply learned to be. I also outgrew a huge temper that got me in trouble a lot early on.
My temper would have gotten worse if Karate was imply kicky punchy stuff. All thru elementary school I had been the shy kid with the hair trigger temper who, when provoked, would fight anyone and often did. In grade three I beat up a kid in grade seven because he hit my brother, I beat up a few friends for staring arguments and going to the “your mamma” type insults and I even went after a school teacher who got in my way when I was upset after being hit in the face by a soccer ball! Suffice it to say it is also a good thing I was almost always the shortest kid in class! If Karate had been about just making me a better puncher and kicker, I probably would be in Jail right now because my temper was that bad!
Karate taught me, thru the Dojo kun and hard work in the class as well as getting “punished” in class for stepping out of rank and order, how to control my temper and what was right and what was not right. But it also taught me much more about myself and who I am, and how to deal with loss. It was my family at Karate that surrounded me and helped me when my brother Died.
Al had basically raised me and seen me grow in Karate and to be a adult. I had been teaching at my own club after training at the head quarters, it was a grey Saturday and I had just been up to see him the night before. He had renal cancer and pretty much every other kind of weird cancer you could think of for the last four years. Actually the type of cancer he had is hard to spell and it is caused normally by working in toxic environments….which he had! He passed away just before 1 pm and I was just getting ready to walk in the door of my club and teach. The receptionist caught me as I walked in the door and I knew something was wrong…She had tears in her eyes and simply said “call your Sensei”. I had a student volunteer to come pick me up before I even knew he had passed away. They brought me to my sisters, were my family had gathered, and then had others take my classes for a week while we finalized everything. It was not because they had to…its what family does.
Karate is about the people you meet, train with and whom you share your life with, as much as it is about those that help you grow as a person. I have trained with politicians, doctors, sports stars, big business people, mechanics and guys who ask “would you like fries with that” and no matter what, when you don the white pajamas and tie a belt around your waist it is not about power, stature or success outside the club, its about what you bring to the table that day! You don’t worry about gender, education, or anything aside from what you can do that day with that group of people. What you are about to share and what you are about to benefit from.
So, I have been training for all of my adult life and most of my childhood, I have waded thru the pools of politics that infect Karate, put up with hardship and MORONS thinking they are gods and missing the point of Karate, I have been pushed to the limits often and I have been discourage and disappointed in people that I have trained with and met along the way. So, why do I still train? Well, as often as you can hear me saying politics are choking the life out of Karate and some people take far to much advantage of status in Karate…the reason I still train is simple….family. Karate has become like a family to me. I have a best friend that trains in Karate now, I have many good people I have met in Karate and my instructor is like my father….so its like family.
I still train for a few reasons, but it can be boiled down to two major events in my life and two great men. The two major events were my brothers passing away and my daughters being born! When Al died my whole Karate family circled the wagons and protected and helped me thru a rough time. The Dingmans (my instructor and his ex-wife) helped me thru the roughest time of my life. And when Emma was born the look of Joy on my Sensei’s face told me he felt like a grandfather to her. It changed something in me yet again. It reinforced my feeling about my Karate family and kept me going.
The two men are My instructor Sensei Dingman and another man that brought me back to feeling good about running an organization here in Winnipeg, Saeki Sensei of Ottawa. I was about ready to toss in the towel before we rejoined his group. I was discouraged by politics and the fact that some seniors in the world of Karate feel like they deserve special treatment, money and other things simply because they have been around for long enough. Saeki Sensei reversed this and basically told me that my thought of Karate by the students for the students is the way we must go. Those two men are bright shining lights in the often dark world of Karate!
What got me interested in Karate was Martial arts movies, what kept me going was the feeling of family in the Dojo and the feeling of kinship with others in Karate. What inspires me to teach and share is what I get back. In my life of Karate I have seen far to many people leave or pass on to the next life. It saddens me to think of the many faces that have paced thru the club and simply faded out of site. But stories about little girls bringing helicopters to the city….ask me later…and kids asking if a pig eating bacon is cannibalism….again, ask me later….all add to the reasons I do what I do. Yelling at kids for wearing all their underwear into the lake at once, people trying their best to do something and failing in a completely new and funny way, training on docs in the summer, in the lake, in a dojo that feels so muggy you can not breath, running 5K for a warm up before a class with Sensei Tammy, summer camps, Koyo Camps, Meeting masters, Meeting new students, Learning a new Kata…taught by a world champion…all of these are why I keep doing what it is that I am doing!
I hope you sit down and think for a minute about why you started Karate, major events….good and bad…that effected your Karate and also the things that keep you going. Karate is not just about kicking and punching, winning and losing, politics and power….its about people and the lives we choose to share while wearing white PJ’s and a colorful belt! That’s My Karate!
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