The Accidental Karateka

1955. Buddy Holly. Milton Berle Show. The first Corvette.

America was a far simpler place. It was in this setting that I discovered karate, the martial art that would change and become the major focus of my life. It occurred purely by accident – two accidents in fact. The first was an accident accident, of the vehicular type. The second was an accident of the happenstance type.

The car accident, fortunately, wasn’t my own – especially since I was only 12 or 13 at the time. The car was driven by a Japanese, Hiro Nishi, who was a student at nearby San Jose State College. My father ran an auto bodyshop on the Eastside of San Jose, where Hiro’s Plymouth was towed after he cut a corner too sharply and clipped off the post holding up the turn signal light.

I noticed a gi and black belt in the back seat and asked Hiro if he did judo, as that was the only martial art I – or pretty much anyone else in the country – had heard of at the time. He said he did karate, which meant nothing to me. But as it wasn’t judo, I quickly lost interest, no matter how grandly he tried to build it up.

I mentioned the encounter to my school teacher the next day. He had studied judo in Japan so I thought he would be interested in some misguided guy thinking he studied an art better than judo. My teacher, however, was one of the few around who knew what karate was. He told me spellbinding stories about men who could break stacks of boards and crush bricks and kill a man with their bare hands.

I lived on the Eastside of San Jose, the roughest part of town, and was very small for my age so karate looked like the answer to my dreams. To give you an idea of my size at the time, when I entered James Lick High School (also the high school of Bob Wall, who would later star in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon) a few months later and tried out for the football team, I was only 5’2” tall and weighed a mere 88 pounds, the size of a small girl. The coach nicknamed me “Olds 88”, because of my weight, after the Olds (Oldsmobile) 88, a fast car at the time.

When Hiro came by to pick up his car, I asked if he would teach me this amazing art. He agreed, although he never actually taught me in a conventional sense. I was mainly his punching bag, a moving target for him to practice his techniques on. But I was fine with that because it allowed me to pick up techniques as I struggled to adapt to his fighting style.

Hiro returned to Japan a couple of years later and there was no other karate instructor in the area, or pretty much the rest of the country. So I enrolled at Pacific Judo Academy. There, I studied judo and jujitsu under a great teacher, Bill Montero Sr. Sensei Montero had been a student of the legendary Professor Henry Okazaki, who also turned out Professor Wally Jay, Professor Sig Kufferath, and Professor Willy Cahill.

I enjoyed the training, especially in jujitsu, but quickly discovered I had too little weight spread over too short a frame. One day I was paired with a heavyset guy, who was not only twice my weight but was an intermediate judoka. (I was still a bare beginner.) We were working on a new (for me) beginning throw. I couldn’t move him, which gave him great pleasure. Sensei Montero saw what was happening, asked me to step away, demonstrated the throw in great detail, then slammed my partner HARD into the mat. He then told him to never treat a beginner in that manner again.

Sensei moved on and I had a much more cooperative partner. But I had learned my lesson. I wasn’t genetically designed for judo.

Fortunately, a young friend of Sensei Montero’s demonstrated kenpo at the dojo one night. He had just moved to the mainland from Hawaii and looking to teach his art.

In my next post, I will talk about this man, who stands out to this day as a very different type of instructor and one who taught me things I never learned from anyone else, including a unique way to create a crushing punch… and later threatened to bomb my first dojo.