When I was twelve years old, I wanted to do karate. Actually, another boy to whom I’d already lost a fight was taking karate, and I didn’t want him to have the jump on me that much more. My parents, however, thought it was low class, and refused. I kept nagging. Finally, my father took me down to the basement, picked up a length of two by four, maybe eighteen inches long and said, “If you can break this with your bare hand, I’ll let you do karate.” Honestly, I don’t know if Oyama Masutatsu, the ‘God Hand’ himself, could have broken a piece of dry wood that short, unsecured. Surely, my father thought, I’d try it once or twice, and give up and leave him alone.
He didn’t know his son. I didn’t know anything about tameshiwari. Two people operating on ignorance.
We had a big basement. I’d put the wood between two chairs, and get to the other end of the basement, run full-speed and ‘karate chop’ the wood, and then would drop on a pile of newspapers, and huddle there until my hand stopped throbbing. Then I’d get up and do it again.
After two or three days, my hand stopped functioning. I could hold a knife to cut the meat, pinning it with the fork in my left hand, but I couldn’t shift the fork to my right and manipulate it to get the food in my mouth (for those uninformed, America etiquette requires that you pin food with the fork in the left, then shift it to the right hand to eat). So I using my fork with my left hand. Our table was small and I kept bumping my father. He was getting more and more pissed off, telling me to stop it (my left elbow was knocking his right elbow arm, so the food was either missing his mouth or he was sticking himself with the fork tines).
I said, “I have to eat this way!”
He says, “Why!”
Me – “Because I’m eating continental style!”
So my pop grabs my right hand and turns it over. My mother gasps. Swollen, red with massive blue-purple bruises. I get a barrage of questions:
“When did this happen?”
“What did you do?”
“Did you get your hand slammed in a car door?”
“Who did this to you?”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Sid, we need to get this x-rayed.”
So I shout, “I’m just doing what you told me to do?” Which he’d forgotten about. I explain that I was still working on breaking the two by four, because I really wanted to do karate.
So you know what’s supposed to happen now. The young man, honored for his dedication, for his willingness to sacrifice well-being, endure pain, honor his father’s command, all for a dream – well, he’s going to get rewarded with a trip to Tiger Kim’s Acme Water-Dragon Karate Tae Kwon Do school. Right? Uh-uh. “What’s the matter with you. Are you crazy? You can’t break a board like that. Anyway, I don’t care if you break it, you are not going to do karate. Finish your meal. You have homework, right? Stop wasting time on this nonsense.” So the dream was deferred a few years, but after a broken nose and dislocated jaw, (two punches, no guard), my father reconsidered, and I started on my way.
Everybody was Kung-fu Fighting; Those Kicks were Fast as Lightning
So I’m in college. And I started training at George HX’s Kung fu Wu-shu Academy. Nation of Islam led. Somehow I made myself at home, so much so that one of the Nation of Islam guys mistakenly called me “brother,” stopped, swallowed hard, and corrected himself, “Ah, I mean ‘man.'”
Kung fu! had just hit the television. I was at Yale University, my father’s unachieved dream for himself, and he was in despair. He’d demand to know what I intended to do with my life, “So what do you want to be? You are going to Yale University on a scholarship! I hear other parents bragging that their son is going to be a nuclear physicist, studying finance, medical school, even a concert pianist. And you? All you talk about is this martial arts stuff. What’s the point of it?” And I’d say, “Dad, just watch Kung fu! It’ll all make sense.” Poor guy – imagining his son wandering the West in pajamas, uttering aphorisms and kicking ass – and as a former Special Intelligence Services man who’d actually ‘seen’ some stuff, knowing I’d get shot the first time I tried.
I hardly went to classes. Instead, I’d be leaving the dorm with my kung fu! pajama’s (black with the white frog buttons) ostentatiously slung over my shoulder by its black sateen™ sash. There was always a group of my friends, most of whom played football or wrestled, throwing a Frisbee, and I’d walk through them and they’d give me shit. And one day, one of them yells, “Hey Kung fu!!” and slings the Frisbee at my face from about twelve feet away, and I did a perfect reverse spinning back kick and it hit the sole of my foot and shot right back into his hands. Jaws dropped. Dead silence. Like Kwai Chang Kane, I just walked on. (There is no way I could have ever repeated that action in a thousand years. I’d never even tried a spinning back kick at that point of my three month career.)
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