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Kenpo -- It's a Way of Life!

By Glenn J. King

As a young guy in my 20’s, I was a pure fighter. I attended every East Coast tournament I could. I guess I must have been part Klingon, since I craved the thrill of battle. Broken fingers, jammed toes, scratched corneas, they were all battle scars. I won all my tournaments, I only took second once. At the time, I thought this was the martial arts: train hard and kick some butt. Now I am 41 and those injuries have come back to haunt me. I have broken every bone on my left side, including my neck, and dislocated my jaw. I have dislocated my right shoulder. (I had to get married to have someone who would scratch my back when I needed it.) I have a bone spur in my left hip and have gone through three knee operations. The Doc says one more operation and they replace my knee and hip. My toes are so damaged from doing incorrect ball kicks years ago that I avoid throwing them fearing the resultant pain. Basically, I am pretty banged up and have already picked out my motorized wheelchair. (Get some nice rims on it, a bucket seat and a sound system and I will be set.) I see a lot of young kids out there following the same path and would only like to say, take care of your body because you only have one. Not all of the injuries come from fighting, some are sports and some are military combat related but the results are the same. Anyway, even with all this I will never stop taking Kenpo (and daily doses of Tylenol, glucosamine, vitamins, etc). Kenpo and the martial arts have been instrumental in forming my positive outlook on life.

When I was attending Rutgers University, there was this guy whom we called the Penguin. He waddled quite a lot when he walked. He was a nice guy and we would speak when passing each other. There was an open tournament in Newark, NJ, that I attended as a spectator and as you know black belt fights are generally held last. Lo and behold, if the Penguin did not waddle on stage and cut a swath through the black belts. He was beauty in motion, offensively and defensively he was one of the best fighters I have ever seen and he took the 1^st place fighting trophy. I talked to him afterwards and it was the first time I had ever heard of Kenpo. The one thought that kept going through my mind was I was glad I had never called him the Penguin to his face, and do you know, from that day I have never talked about anyone either. You never know how someone has trained or what they know. I also knew I would find and study Kenpo one day.

Over the years I could never find a school so took several different styles. Do Hap Sool, Isshen Ryu, Aikido, but kept my eye out for a Kenpo school. In 1993, I found one in Sacramento and began studying. In 1994, I met Phil McCullaugh at a Street Fair in Fairfield. During the conversation we talked about Kenpo and found out that he was attending Bob Liles’ school, and we were both white belts. I asked him to do a few techniques and was both amazed and appalled at the difference in the techniques, and they were the same technique! That same week, I came over to the Liles school to watch a class. In 30 minutes I decided to quite the other school and join Mr. Liles’ school. Unfortunately, it took two years to get into a starting white belt class. I was quite patient since I knew what I had found in this school. I have been in the school ever since (except for the one-year break I took when I took a job with Wal-Mart in South Carolina).

I left the corporate world as a Regional Manager for Clorox in March 2001 to support my import company full time and to launch a clothing line. One of my major revenue sources is selling at fairs, expos, and conventions, and these take place during the summer. In March 2002, my class was close to testing for purple belt and since Mr. Liles knew I would be traveling most of the summer, he decided to let me test alone. For any of you that have ever tested alone in front of a Board and fellow schoolmates, it is a fate nearly akin to the Death of a Thousand Cuts: Any mistake is immediately visible with all eyes upon you. Yes, I did make a few and had to repeat a form three times until the Board was satisfied. Being a banged up 41-year-old, I was in significant pain and completely out of breath halfway through the test. (I had been smoking since I was 16 and had recently quit. However, 25 years’ damage is not reversed in a few weeks’ time.) I had also dropped from 209 to 179 lbs in 3 months preparing for the test. Mr. Liles had warned me it would not be a cakewalk. When I finally finished the test -- near collapse, I am not embarrassed to admit -- I do not recall performing the back 12 techniques, I was in a fugue state. At that point, I was operating solely under adrenaline and body memory. The military and survival skills that got me through combat in South America and Africa came through, my body kept going because it remembered what it had to do. I really could not focus again until the belt ceremony. I really do not think many of those who watched that test knew the internal battle I was going through. Training, rote and repetitive so your moves are purely reflexive, that is the key to success. It may get boring at times and some days you may not want to go to class, but would it not be better to know that when you need to call upon your training in an emergency, it will answer with explosive force!

Many people would wonder why a purple belt was so important to me versus a higher belt. Well, being in the military and moving every year or two, in all the schools I went to I never got higher than an orange belt. When I left and went to Wal-Mart, I was an orange belt. I returned to the school in 1999 and until April 2002 was an orange belt (through no fault of the school’s, there were no orange belts or purple belts to train with so I had to wait for the white belts to catch up and then joined their class). Basically, I was an orange belt for 12 long years. I had begun to think I was cursed, would die an orange belt and would be given my purple belt posthumously. I hated the color orange and would not even eat an orange fearing it would give me bad karma. I do not think I will ever receive the satisfaction I have now for any other belt. If I pass tomorrow, I have done what I set out to do, get my purple belt. I would like to thank Bob Liles, Renee Neal, and Charlie Mantell for all the help they gave me on accomplishing this goal. (Oh yeah, maybe later I will tell you how Kenpo saved my life in a knife fight as a white belt. As they say, however, that is another story.)

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