I mentioned in my last post that a young Hawaiian had begun teaching kenpo at Sensei Montero’s judo and jujitsu dojo. This young man was Sensei Sam Brown.
Sensei Montero’s dojo was located in one of those small strip malls so characteristic of the 50s. It had large picture windows in front and a wall behind the reception desk, blocking view of most of the matted workout area.
It became obvious right from the start that Sensei Brown came from a vastly different environment than even I did, who lived on the Eastside of San Jose, the roughest part of town.
When Sensei Brown’s classes were in session, the front door was locked and the shades drawn over the windows. If someone was late for class or wanted in for whatever reason, they had to knock. And when they did, a designated senior student would position himself near the door in a stance before carefully opening it, ready to fight.
The serious manner in which Sensei Brown managed the security of the dojo and ran his classes, as well as the techniques he taught, reflected the seriousness of the environment from which he had come.
His classes were very intense and strict. He told us right from the start that he wanted to see blood at every workout… and he did… as well as broken legs, arms, toes, fingers, jaws, and collar bones. A fair amount of it was mine.
At some point, I convinced one of my best high school friends to train with us. He and I were at a party about a month later when someone sarcastically asked what he thought he could do if attacked after only a month of training. My friend said “Look, we get beat up by experts three times a week. What’s the average guy going to do to us?” And to a great degree, he was right. Part of the training was to learn to take a lot of abuse and keep fighting, a necessary skill in the real world.
It was painful but exciting stuff, especially for me, a small teenager from a tough neighborhood.
Sensei Brown focused primarily on teaching us to attack five of the body’s most vulnerable points – the groin, knees, solar plexus, throat, and eyes. We practiced attacking each of these in a variety of ways and from all angles so we could find them even in the dimmest of light.
Kyoshi Wagner mentioned in a Facebook post that he thought there would be an Ed Parker connection to this story. Until recently, I would have agreed, believing for many years that there was a strong one. I only learned earlier this year, after over 40 years of thinking otherwise, that the connection was far more distant that I had thought.
I had always thought Sensei Brown had been a student of the legendary Bill “Thunderbolt” Chow, teacher of Ed Parker, the Emperado Brothers, and many others. I was told this around the time I first met Sensei Brown. He never spoke about his former instructors, hinting at the time that he couldn’t for some reason. But as I knew nothing of the history of the martial arts at the time, I would have had no reason to even know who Professor Chow was unless someone had mentioned his name. I suspect it must have been Sensei Montero when he first introduced Sensei Brown. And he may have simply mentioned that his instructor had some connection with Professor Chow and I only caught part of it. So it was likely my mistake.
I discovered just this year that Sensei Brown had been a student of Professor Marino Tiwanak, who had been a student of Professor Adriano Emperado, a direct student of Professor Chow and one of the founders of Kajukenbo.
Among the general martial arts population, Professor Chow is one of the lesser known of our great American masters. But he and those he produced were well-practiced, highly skilled, street-oriented fighters, just as our traditional karate forefathers were in their day.
When Professors Chow, Emperado, and Tiwanak were developing and testing their techniques, there was a huge military presence in Hawaii. Saturday nights (especially on paydays) were reportedly huge open brawls between drunken soldiers and sailors and the locals.
The official line for their initial goal in developing their skills and fighting systems was to prepare themselves and the local young men to better defend themselves in these Saturday night main events. But from what I later gathered, both directly and indirectly, from Sensei Brown, there was also a good deal of vicious fighting between local groups, turf wars as have always occurred in poorer sections of most larger cities around the world and throughout time.
As is usually the case in such environments, training methods were far more intense and techniques developed and utilized far more practical than in safe environments, where one had the luxury of being more philosophical in their goals and approach. These men were in a combat zone, which made them relentless in their quest to develop better ways to deal with street situations and acquire an optimal level of skill in their execution, as their very lives could well depend on it.
Professor Chow had been the top student of a shadowy kenpo master named James Mitose, who had received his training in Japan. (There is a great deal of information about Sensei Mitose’s life, including some very negative stuff. If you’re interested, Google his name and you’ll probably learn more than you want to know about Sensei Mitose. It’s an unfortunate story about how great skill and potential can be so misspent.)
I had the great pleasure many years ago of meeting Professor Chow and watching him demonstrate kata. One of his students, Sensei Bill Chun, was an early friend of mine. Sensei Chun ran a very good kenpo school in Richmond, California, or thereabouts. It was at Sensei Chun’s tournament, probably in the mid to late 60s, that I met Professor Chow.
Professor Chow was a short (reportedly only 5’2”) but powerfully built man with his white hair cut in a crewcut. Having studied kenpo and known many kenpo and kajukenbo practitioners, I expected him to do a vastly different kata than the one he demonstrated.
Professor Chow performed Pinan Nidan (which we now call Heian Shodan). He did it in the manner that all great old Okinawan/Japanese masters did it – very slowly, with his full attention on each individual move, completely focused on generating as much power as he possibly could. And he could generate a LOT of power. It was not fluid and flowing like the kenpo kata I had learned or seen. Instead, it was very rigid and controlled, like a masterful Shotokan version of Heian Shodan. He was a truly great martial artist in anyone’s book.
I’ll stop here for now. Next time, I’ll focus on some of the unique kihon or basics Sensei Brown taught us, some of which, as I said before, was different than anything I learned or saw demonstrated by anyone else over my over 50 years in the martial arts. In relooking at my time at his dojo and training under his methods, I came to realize what a great instructor Sensei Brown was and the great effect he had on my mindset and martial arts
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