“YOU ARE NOT FUCKING CATTLE!” The sensei screamed. “START AGAIN!”
No one dares to groan or object. We’re lined up facing a matted wall in an all-purpose gymnasium, and we’re punching said wall. We go down the line, count, then punch. WHAP! Together, as a unit. Each of us counts to ten. There are fifteen of us.
If someone counts and punches AT THE SAME TIME, then the rhythm of the punching is off, and we are instructed (screamed at) to start again from the beginning of the line. And someone near the end of the line keeps fucking up the count.
I’m not sure who it is, but I suspect it’s the guy in the fancy Tae Kwon Do pants.
We’ve already punched the wall hundreds of times. My knuckles are bleeding. I was eleven years old, and my brother nine. We’re the only adolescents in the class.
The senseis treat us the exact same as the adults.
“YOU ARE NOT FUCKING ANIMALS. USE YOUR MIND AND BODY!”
This was what one got when one signed up for Shorin-ryu karate.
There are many branches to the Shorin-Ryu karate tree, with differing takes and approaches, but this was the closest karate class we could find at this time in Iowa.
We drove thirty miles one way two or three times a week to train like this. Our father had signed us all up. He was thirty-six or thirty-seven. We would train there for two and a half years or so until the senseis moved away.
It was my first direct exposure to martial arts.
It was brutal training. Hundreds of knuckle pushups on a hard concrete floor. Hundreds of situps. We ran hundreds of laps around the gym.
This style believed in being top physical condition. In toughness.
As an example, we often did arm-toughening exercises, taking turns with everyone else in class. The drill was basically slamming your forearm against someone else’s forearm, again and again. Bruising and toughening them.
Probably… not the BEST martial arts study for two skinny adolescent boys in hindsight, in terms of brutality, but we loved it.
Karate comes from Okinawa, an island off of Japan. It is both Japanese and, well, its own culture and place. Karate means “empty hand,” and it comes from China. As a matter of fact, some claim that karate means “Chinese hand,” but I’ll let the readers decide for themselves. It was imported from China, but it evolved into something far different from Chinese gong fu.
It was a very linear, no-nonsense style, no round kicks, no hook punches, everything was a straight line to the target. The philosophy was to land one blow that ended it. Very little in the way of combinations, like in current boxing or kickboxing.
Someone strikes us, we block, take them out. The end.
A rough, simplistic and disciplined style that was meant to be hard. For the first year, we weren’t even white belts. We weren’t allowed to wear gis, the uniform, we had to train in sweats. We had to “earn” our white belts, which we eventually did. I still have the card with my rank upon it somewhere. It was a proud day.
Class began with warmups, which meant running, pushups and situps, then punching in a horse stance, kicking from a front stance, again and again.
Then more pushups, wall punching that had to be synchronized, more conditioning. After that, we practiced kata, choreographed forms. Then, more conditioning.
We never sparred, not at that level, I think one had to be a black belt.
In spite of that, we often got punched or kicked. When I say often, I mean very nearly every class. When we practiced blocking, for example, if we didn’t execute the block correctly, we were hit. It was considered the only way to learn true effectiveness.
I would use some of what I learned in one or two scraps later on in life. Keeping one’s wits about you after being stuck is a key thing to learn. Getting punched can cause shock and, even if the blow wasn’t harmful, can cause one to freeze up.
After getting hit so many times in class, I learned to take it and react as necessary. For me, that’s the key takeaway from the training of my youth.
There’s a video of a speech I gave in seventh grade somewhere (in a trunk of school junk, of course), for English class, and my knuckles are scabbed and swollen, which they seemed to always been then. And though I was on the eve of entering a particularly harsh period of life due to my then-neurodivergence, karate had already changed me in substantial ways.
I believe punching walls for hours gave me a mental toughness I hadn’t had before.
It ended after two years or so, I would move onto high school sports, but that first stint in karate most certainly influenced many of the choices I would make later.
Dad began that journey for us. He was a big fan of Chuck Norris, an OG fan, from Chuck’s first film, GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK and onward. He loved him some serious Chuck Norris action (he particularly enjoyed A FORCE OF ONE) and the irony of it was, of course, the art form Chuck taught wasn’t even karate (he just called it karate, more on that later) but at that time and era there wasn’t a lot of information available to those who wanted to know.
Dad even built a makiwari post in the backyard that we spent a lot of time punching.
It stayed there until we sold the house many years later.
Looking back with wiser eyes, I can see the limitations of such a style, especially for two boys likely too young for that type of training. It was old school, but in hindsight, building up callouses on one’s knuckle to toughen them up is more likely to lead to arthritis as one ages than it is to be useful in a fight.
But the mental aspect, on the other (empty) hand, was always useful.
I am proud to have it as my first martial arts adventure.
And eleven year-old me will never forget the sensei screaming at us:
“YOU ARE NOT FUCKING CATTLE!”
My knuckles are no longer bloody, but I still carry those scars inside.