Looking back half a century ago, it’s easy to see how God had guided me that night at New Mexico State University at the start of my sophomore year in engineering. I walked directly past a Quonset Hut where Master Hayashi was teaching a class of 30 college students the wacky, wild, and fascinating Martial Art of Japanese Shotokan Karate.
I’d grown up in a small and very wild west town near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where boys learned to fight as naturally as they learned their ABCs. This western culture was big on guns, shootouts, and just a few decades before I was born, the hanging of cattle rustlers. At the first Rodeo dance I attended at 15, the bartender had no qualms about serving me and the other teens whiskey at the bar. When the obligatory fight broke out halfway through the dance, with about 20 grown men whacking the hell out of each other, the band broke out a hearty riff of the Double Eagle Polka that got the other hundred couples up and dancing again.
Now watching the karate lesson, I thought, “Gee, these students dressed in exotic white costumes with different colored belts might teach me a thing or two to improve my score in street fighting." I was nineteen and had fought twenty fist fights, winning eighteen of them, and painfully losing two. Yes, I had been a first rate Cub Scout and Boy Scout; learned to study hard and make good grades; had starred in a couple of high school plays, and been a letterman in football and wrestling, but that didn’t stop me from getting called out to fight regularly in a town rife with racial tensions.
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| BLACK BELT |
So ten years after I saw the white-robed students, I had earned a Ph.D. in Clinical and Counseling Psychology, complete with ten years of karate training and one Black Belt hanging on my waist during the workouts I loved to pursue. And I no longer dreamt of being beaten to a pulp in back alleys. The couple of fights I did get into were when someone tried to rob me. But now I could charge in with a spinning back wheel kick to the head or punches to the solar plexus. These fights lasted all of ten seconds before the other guys were seeing stars and I was thanking the Lord for showing me how to defend myself.
The Martial Arts Hall of Fame
Much loved and revered people
with whom I have personally trained:
CHUCK NORRIS won his first World Middleweight Karate Championship in 1968. I was cheering him on, having started my training in karate the year his earned his Black Belt in Korea, earning my brown belt as he won his first of six world titles in a row.
Chuck is a rare human being, indeed. That Oklahoma down-to-earth, gentlemanly honesty, and basic love and respect for people has made him a beloved world hero. That's certainly how my little girl felt when I took her to meet Chuck at a major fight in the Los Angeles Palladium a couple of decades later.
Mr. Norris was sitting in a front row seat of a packed-out house, and Kim and I were in the back. I asked an usher if he would take her down to have Chuck autograph a photo we'd bought of him. And I was deeply touched to see Chuck get up from his seat, wade through a dozen people, and kneel down not only to sign her picture, but give her a glorious hug.
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| CHUCK NORRIS |
I ended up having personal training with both Chuck and his national fighting team partner and co-star in a couple of movies, Bob Barrow. I got a Black Belt in their Tang Su Do system. I also mastered the Chuck Norris Blitz, where we would take turns launching 25 foot charges against an opponent: blistering flurries of spontaneous kicks and punches which they had to defend with counter moves. I could never have survived had we not been heavily protected by bulletproof vests, thigh and shin guards, face gear, and gloves! Even so, a full contact punch could knock me back three feet, or occasionally knock me out.
JOE LEWIS was the first World Kick Boxing Champion at the same time that he won the Heavy Weight Karate Championship of the World. I loved working out with Joe. He was funny, always smiling and slapping me on the back, and full of good will for everybody—save for the opponents he faced in the rings, upon whom he would release Holy Hell until he knocked them out or sent them to the hospital. Still, he would try to shake their hand at the end, if they were conscious enough to shake hands.
Unknown to most people is that fact that Joe met Bruce Lee shortly after Lee’s Enter the Dragon movie became a smash hit. At first Joe was reluctant to respond to Bruce’s overture to work out together. “I thought his Chinese Kung Fu and cat calls was sissy-slapping crap,” Joe had said. But after they met Joe changed his mind. They worked out a full year together, and Joe revised much of his thinking under the influence of Bruce Lee’s creative thinking and spectacular kinesthetics. I was a grateful beneficiary, because Joe passed on to me much of what he and Bruce had put together in their collaborative synthesis of East meets West in Martial Arts. I still thank them both for what they gave me, these generous, caring men with hearts and souls of solid gold.
One day I said to Joe, “Hey, you got a reputation for the toughest chokehold on earth. Is there any way—safely—that you could teach it to me?” He grinned, those pearly teeth gleaming. “Sure Dan.” That’s the last thing I remember. I had been standing in front of him, but in a flash movement he was behind me, with arms squeezing my neck like a python falling onto a deer out of a tree. I woke up a few minutes later, cradled gently in his arms, his legs twined around mine to keep me pinned down, and the back of my head on his chest to keep it from hitting the floor. “Are you back with us, Dan?” he said, in the friendliest way. I arose slowly, wobbled around for a minute, and said, “Thanks, Joe, that was pretty good, I guess.” “You bet, Dan,” he said, slapping me on the back.
ED PARKER was Elvis Presley’s Karate instructor, and the Founder of American Kempo Karate. A big man with a glorious smile and hearty laugh, Ed’s hand was the same size as Muhammad Ali’s. When shaking both men’s hands, it was like a mouse shaking hands with a lion. My little hand simply disappeared in the vast horizons of their hands. No wonder they could each knock someone cold with a short five inch jab!
(The other man who swallowed my hand like a Great White shark gobbling up a goldfish was Reggie White, All Star NFL tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers).
Ed gave me counsel one day, words that emblazoned on my heart forever: “Dan, don’t take Karate too seriously. Don’t get grim with tunnel vision, because you’ll stumble over your own ego. No. Just do it ‘cause you love it, and love people because they need it.” His eyes really did sparkle and there was a dimple in his cheek as he winked and wished me the best.
BILL WALLACE, known as “Superfoot,” was the Light Weight Champion of the World for a long time. No one could touch him, nor could they stop his foot from whacking them upside the jaw or temple at sixty miles an hour.
Bill asked me to take my stance before him. I did so, and emitted my toughest macho man look. He laughed and shook his head. “I’m sorry Dan, but that’s my favorite stance for guys to take. I just start salivating right away, because I’m thinking which of ten different knockout kicks I’m going to send Special Delivery to them.”
With that he threw a lightning kick to my left jaw so fast that I never saw it, but I did feel a little puff of wind of my cheek when he stopped it a fraction of a millimeter from my skin. Then he sent the same kick high above my head (he had the flexibility to kick 180 degree straight up) and brought it down on my crown as an axe kick. Again, the kick was too fast to see but I did feel a pull of wind on the top of my head. A few seconds later he reversed course, and brought the completion of the triple kick down onto my jaw bone. As if to have a little fun, he ticked my cheek with his toe. Then in a flash he was back in is original stance, looking as though nothing had happened, when in actually, my whole world had been turned upside down!
I learned lots from Bill. But a quality of the soul went deepest inside me. This man had humility, and a loving respect for everyone he ever met or fought. Bill Wallace is the epitome of good sportsmanship, and for the millions who knew and loved him, I say, “Thanks, Bill. You are the stuff out of which humble greatness is made!”
BENNY 'THE JET' URQUIDEZ is the friendliest, kindest, soft-spoken guy I’ve ever trained with. For a world class knockout artist who struck terror in the hearts of all who fought him, Benny nevertheless reached out in love and kindness to the whole world, as he had done to the 84 year grandmother he had just started training before his session with me.
I learned so much from this very small (5’ 6” 145 pound) huge-hearted guy! “Dan, don’t just punch the bag. Make love to it. Go up, down, side, straddle, sway, duck, swoop, hit. Make it interesting!” And he did just that. For me. Thanks, Benny. You’re the best of the best!
GRANDMASTER HEE IL CHO: Whoa! When I entered his gym there was tranquil stillness in the air, punctuated by staccato “Ke-ayes!” Everyone bowed, worked out in perfect formation, standing at attention under the hawk eyes of their Grandmaster, who has trained and performed at the most superior level of achievement, so as to become a living icon of an invincible Martial Artist. Studying this style taught me how to deliver tornado-like spinning back-kicks to the head, solar plexus and the knee that whacks out an opponent in a fraction of a section. I mastered 30 of Cho’s Tae Kwon Do street fighting combinations (block-strike-kick), as well as the unique twenty minute, very rigorous high energy workout he performed almost every day of his life. Thanks, Grandmaster!
Thousands of disciples worldwide, who absolutely adore him, shower him with good cheer and many gifts at his every birthday. I say, “Go Cho!”
There’s one crucial point about which I disagree with Grandmaster Cho: His lifelong emphasis with students to turn their hands into functional clubs by pounding the bones of the hand into iron pipes or bricks to stimulate calcification of the bone, developing a large ride of bone mass, especially on the front two knuckles and on the side of the hand, where one can deliver a knife hand strike. I believe this centuries-old and traditional martial arts training needs to pass away because it runs counter to holistic human health and pain free aging (where you don’t take four ibuprofen per hour to cope with the arthritic hand and foot pain caused by over calcification of bone through pounding objects throughout the years).
Yes, I did have to break the obligatory number of pieces of wood and brick in my day, in order to earn the three different Black Belts that I hold. But I never did it through deforming my bones. I did it in the moment of certification tests by using supersonic punches and kicks. Strikes that capitalized on Einstein’s theory of Relativity and famous equation: E=MC squared. In other words I used Chi energy to at thunderous speed to send a shockwave into the molecular structure of the wood or brick, that snapped it in two at its core. And that was that.
As a psychologist, theologian, and philosopher, I say we need our hands, wrists, and joints to be flexible so that we can caress the cheeks of children, feel the petals of a rose, play a musical instrument, or type on the computer. We turn our knuckles into clubs at the expense of God’s purposes for the human hand.
What is my workout like these days?
- work out katas with fierce discipline
- dance, listen to Argentine Tango and Hip Hop music through my Bose Headset
- take a break to read a good GQ article in the middle of a two-hour workout
- doing Grand Rounds around the gym to see how my compadres are coming along…”Hey Joe, how’d the kidney stone procedure turn out?” “Hi Mary, congrats on your daughter’s graduation with her BA last week!” “Oh, Carlos, is that gout still acting up on you?”
So as a psychologist, theologian, and philosopher, I say we need the rhythm of both discipline and freedom in Martial Arts, and in Life:
Discipline to learn AND Freedom to play
ENJOY!
Peace. Joy. Love.
Dr. Dan
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| Dr. Dan Montgomery |
