Mr.
Jones was being prepped to take over the YMCA school and had done
most of the teaching. It was a while before Mr. Kelley came to a
class. But Mr. Jines had kept us filled with stories about how mean
and hard corps he was. When he first came to class we saw there
was some truth to the stories, but he was not that extreme. Like
Mr. Jones, he was tough but benevolent tough, like Drill Sargeant
in the Army.
The class was small, mostly teenagers and
few younger kids and some adults would occassionally join. But Karate
training then was much more intense than it is now and not many
stayed more than a month. Some stayed for a few months but very
few stuck it out to make Shodan. Today it seems that Karate is more
of a game for children to play when back then it was still a brutal
martial art that was evolving into a sport.
There were only a few other schools in
town that I knew of. Olympic Karate had several commercial schools.
Tony Madamba was teaching at the Mc Coy Navy Base Annex by the Airport.
Bill Knoblock had few students and there were other schools that
were around but I did not know those teachers. I only saw them at
the few tournaments we went to. Bill Liquori suddenly comes to mind
as a local teacher of Goju Ryu.
There was a regular tournament held each
year at Rollins College that everyone went to. We also went to the
Olympic Karate tournament at the Altamonte Mall and there was a
tournament at the PAL that we went too. But we did not focus on
this point tournament style of fighting.
Our main focus was street self-defense
physical fitness and character and spritual development. Not sprit
in a religious sense, but in building an indomitable spirit to persevere
through any situation. There were no lectures on the issue like
one would see in the movies, where the old master sits his students
down and gives a lecture. Each class was an exercise in what I would
later learn that the Japanese call shugyo. There were no
lectures on character either. But it was expected that each student
would behave properly and do well in school. Character is one place
where these two Sensei led by example. NEXT
>
|
