Killing Art

Alex Gillis

Description

The eagerly anticipated updated return of a bestselling martial arts classic. A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae K

Sujets

• Martial arts

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 09 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770906952
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

CONTENTS
PEOPLE
ABOUT KOREAN NAMES
introduction FUNNY OR PHONY?
one THOUGH TEN MILLION OPPONENTS MIGHT RISE AGAINST HIM
two A SUPERPOWER ON EVERY BORDER
three SUPERNAM
four TAE KWON DO IS NAMED IN A KOREAN GEISHA HOUSE
five ENTER THE DRAGON AND HIS DICTATOR
six THE VIETNAM WAR POPULARIZES TAE KWON DO
seven THE ACES, CULTS, AND SPIES IN TAE KWON DO
eight KAFKA WOULD HAVE CRIED: THE EAST BERLIN INCIDENT
nine AS IF IN A BRUCE LEE MOVIE
ten EXILES AND HEROES
eleven FROM SPOOKY KUKKI TO WTF
twelve WHAAA!
thirteen OLYMPIC MANIA AND NORTH KOREAN MAYHEM
fourteen THE OLYMPIC SUMMER OF LOVE
fifteen “NEED A MEDAL? COME WITH MONEY.”
sixteen CHEATING IN THE OLYMPIC
seventeen LIKE A CULT
eighteen THE LITTLE GIANT DIES AND TAE KWON DO FALLS APART
nineteen WTF LEADERS GO TO PRISON AND TKD FACES OBLIVION
twenty CULTS AND CRIMINALS VS. C. K. CHOI
twenty-one REPRIEVE
ENDNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTERVIEWS
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT


PEOPLE
I love Tae Kwon Do and martial arts, mainly because of the empowerment and enlightenment that comes from facing violence and fear. I began writing A Killing Art in 2001 to figure out how Tae Kwon Do grew out of a history of violence and corruption to become an empowering and popular martial art. Since the first edition was published in 2008, nearly a thousand readers have contacted me with opinions about the book, most of them positive. For this second edition I have updated every chapter as well as added new chapters. The book is leaner and faster, with more names, scenes, and stories, especially about the brave martial arts leaders who stood up to dictators, bullies, thieves, and cheaters in Tae Kwon Do.
The book is heavily referenced so that readers can discover where Tae Kwon Do’s incredible and astounding stories came from. I would like to thank many people for telling me the truth, especially Chang Keun (C. K.) Choi, Jung-Hwa Choi, and a handful of martial arts masters and grandmasters, such as Bob Hardin, Jhoon Rhee, Joe Cariati, and Joon-Pyo Choi. Rhee in particular set me straight on much of Kim Un-yong’s and Tae Kwon Do’s history in the 1960s and 1970s, in spite of Rhee’s involvement with violent espionage missions and a cult that bankrolled Tae Kwon Do events. Jung-Hwa Choi was open about the art’s history from the 1980s to the present. Former South Korean general Sun-Ha Lim, a friend of Choi Hong-Hi’s from the 1940s, told me about Choi and his country during the Second World War and the Korean War. The work of historian Bruce Cumings provided a context for Tae Kwon Do’s role in North and South Korea.
Some grandmasters bravely recounted what others were reluctant to share: Nam Tae-hi, Kong Young-il, and Jong-Soo Park (my former instructor). And thank you to the martial arts instructors in my nearly thirty-five years of training: Yoon Yeo-bong from the World Taekwondo Federation (the WTF, perhaps the most unfortunate acronym in sports history) and Park Jung-Taek, Phap Lu, Alfonso Gabbidon, Park Jong-Soo, and Lenny Di Vecchia, whose intense martial arts instruction inspired me to write the first edition of this book.
I would never have finished A Killing Art without my black belt friends — Floyd Belle, Martin Crawford, Marc Thériault, Tourage Mahdi, Duane Cato, Karen Chen, and others — who meet with me every Saturday to practise Tae Kwon Do without politics or talk, an increasingly rare situation in the world of black belts. A martial artist once telephoned a famous grandmaster, Duk-Sung Son, for an interview, but Son said, “No, no more talking. I’m going to train now,” and hung up. 1 My training with Floyd, Martin, Marc, and others countered the darker parts of this book. Many times I’d finish a difficult interview or chapter and trudge to the gym, hoping to find them there — for more training and less talk.
For editing or research support, thank you to Hendrik Rubbeling, Thomas Kuklinski-Rhee, Manuel Adrogué, Loren Lind, Mark Dixie, Susan Folkins, Jane Ngan, Katie Gare, Diane Gillis, Renée Sapp, Laurie Gillis, and Hana Kim, who was the Korea Studies Librarian at the East Asian Library at the University of Toronto. John Koh was an excellent translator and interpreter who offered insights along the way. Thank you also to the Ontario Arts Council for grants and to Nancy Foran, Crissy Calhoun, Troy Cunningham, Michael Holmes, David Caron, and Jack David at ECW Press, and to my agent, Hilary McMahon.
Alex Gillis Akillingart.com @GillisTKD


ABOUT KOREAN NAMES
Tae Kwon Do is usually spelled “Taekwondo” for the Olympic sport (run by the World Taekwondo Federation) but “Taekwon-Do” for the traditional style (the International Taekwon-Do Federation). Instructors from both styles sometimes use Tae Kwon Do, and there has been so much overlap between the different Tae Kwon Do federations, and their offshoots, that I have stuck with the dictionary spelling of Tae Kwon Do throughout the book, except in titles and quotations from documents.
Most Koreans have three names and write their family names first, but some switch the order, and others change the spelling. Names can be confusing when you read different sources. Kim Un-yong, for example, can be written “Un-yong Kim.” A hyphen connects the first names, with the second word of the first name often beginning with a lower case letter (Un-yong), but many Koreans begin both with an upper case letter, with or without a hyphen (Un Yong and Un-Yong). I settled on using either what the person in question uses or on the Korean standard, which is last name first (Kim Un-yong).
To make things more confusing, Korean names can be spelled in different ways. Un-yong, for example, can be spelled “Un-young” or “Woon-yong” — and those are all correct spellings! On top of this, many otherwise good sources spell names incorrectly. I have provided the various spellings in the index but have used only one consistently throughout the book.
Whenever possible, I used McCune-Reischauer spelling for Korean words.


INTRODUCTION
FUNNY OR PHONY?
Tae Kwon Do is about self-defence, but if you enter the backrooms of its history, you’ll discover a killing art — and an empowering art. I learned this the hard way on April 20, 2001, the Year of the Snake. I walked into the Novotel Hotel in Toronto, Canada, to wait for the “Father of Tae Kwon Do,” General Choi Hong-Hi, who was leading a three-day seminar for black belts. I was naive then and revered the eighty-two-year-old as well as the other founding members of Tae Kwon Do, including a man named Kim Un-yong. I felt intimidated walking into the seminar, partly because Choi was a taskmaster. He had become a major general in the South Korean army at the age of thirty-three, and even though he had retired from the military in 1962, he was still known as “the General.” He and his men had sacrificed their bodies, careers, and families to perfect a martial art now practised by an estimated seventy million people in nearly every country in the world.
I can picture the first day of his 2001 seminar as if it were today: I wait in the Amsterdam Room of the hotel with 100 black belts from the U.S., Canada, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Honduras. Standing among the bowing, whispering martial artists, I feel like I’m waiting within a palace of the Chosŏn dynasty in the 1300s. I imagine ancient warriors waiting for dynastic rulers, the floors heated in the old style (invisible and underground), and Korean geisha girls ready to sing the p‘ansori verses that praise Confucian values and sagacious leaders.
The General and his men are extremely late, however. He is upstairs, talking and arguing with his son and the masters and grandmasters who will help during the seminar. These men once fought, parted, and threatened to kill one another over politics, but the masters and grandmasters know they owe their fortunes and reputations to the General, and everyone is trying to reconcile past threats with present ambitions. Few young people in Olympic Tae Kwon Do know about Choi, who more than anyone deserves the label “founder” in this martial art. Other founders — and there are many (some of them in this room) — erased him from the popular record long ago.
The General takes lineage and loyalty as seriously as others take love and death. He has charted his family tree back eighteen generations to the Chosŏn dynasty, when, in the mid-fifteenth century, a king ordered a military noble, Choi’s ancestor, to move to a northern part of the Korean peninsula to protect several towns. The Chos ŏn aristocrats, who reigned for 500 years, structured society around the Three Relationships and the Five Injunctions, summarizing the world with lists and blood. 2 The General and his men seem plucked from that ancient time. They are working on the Fifth Injunction — Let Faithfulness Unite Friends — temporarily abandoning the other four injunctions (Honour Your Ruler, Honour Your Father, Honour Your Elder Brother, and Assign Man and Wife Different Duties).
For an outsider, especially a non-Korean, it is difficult to understand the cultures and conflicts of these men — conflicts that have lasted decades, which might as well be centuries. Stories from the Chosŏn era are full of dynastic leaders with godlike powers, and for fifty years, the General has quoted poet Po-Eun’s call to loyalty from that time: “I would not serve a second master though I might be crucified a hundred times.” 3
We are expecting a good seminar and no crucifixions, but the General is late, the floor is cold, and the women have mastered head kicks rather than geisha songs. The seminar will be the General’s last in Canada; he is more than eighty years old and is rounding up his former enemies and old warriors for a new mission that I find