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.
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