Movies at the time showed martial artists as possessing magical powers. They could leap over high walls, rip hearts out of bodies, and the like. I was searching for something I could do to garner attention for my dojos but wanted to keep it within the realm of the possible.
At the time, three reportedly true stories circulated in karate circles about martial artists. The first was the ability to wrestle and/or kill a tiger with their bare hands. (If I remember right, this was something Gogen “The Cat” Yamaguchi once reportedly performed.) The second was the ability to catch a bullet in their teeth. (There was a German guy on TV who did this. There was, of course, a trick to it, which was later revealed.) And the third was the ability to catch an arrow in midflight. (I first heard of it in one of Sensei Oyama’s books.) Of the three, the latter seemed the least foolhardy.
Early one overcast morning, my brother and I met one of our Santa Cruz students on a sheltered beach. My brother planned to shoot arrows at me, mainly to see if it was do-able. I had always had good speed and reflexes but this was totally new territory.
My brother, Bob, paced off around 40 feet. While my student filmed everything on old 8mm film, Bob shot a series of arrows. I stood back and just watched the first couple of shots to see if the speed was within a realistic range. It seemed to be. With each shot, I moved closer to the catch spot we had marked in the sand.
On around the fifth shot, I was standing just outside the catch point and managed to touch the arrow’s shaft with my fingers as it flew past. I stepped into the catch point and deflected the next couple of shots. But I found I had a problem, I couldn’t get my hand to close fast enough. Arrows would leave the bow and slip through my hand before I could get it closed. I had them within my grasp but couldn’t quite grasp them. I was so close I felt it could be done. I don’t remember how I overcame the hand closure problem but managed to catch the tenth arrow.
People were starting to gather nearby so we left. I was afraid someone would get hurt, as there wasn’t anything behind me to stop the arrows.
In the early 70s, while I was an undergraduate student at Stanford, one of my advisors in the film department heard about the arrow thing from one of my students. (My advisor, Bill Zarchy, had trained some in the martial arts and come by my dojo.) He acquired the use of a high speed camera for a few days and asked if I would let him film me at Felt Lake behind Stanford. I agreed. So Bill filmed arrow catches at 500 frames per second. (Regular cameras at the time shot at 18 frames per second so this was at extremely high speed.)
Leslie Miner, a producer at KQED, the San Francisco branch of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), saw the clip and asked if she could interview me. From the interview and outtakes from the footage Bill had shot at Felt Lake, she produced a short feature entitled “The Arrow Catcher,” which ran many times on PBS over the years.
One of the people who saw it was Ray Anders, who was an LA stunt coordinator. Ray contacted me. He said the arrow catch was among the five most dramatic stunts he had ever seen and wanted to book me for a show he was working. Ray soon became one of the industry’s most successful and opened many doors for me. I’ll talk next time about appearing on my first TV show and almost losing an eye.
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