Originally Posted by
Bob Ashmore
But that was a LONG time ago.
I started out training Karate when I was eight years old. I took classes at the local community center. I couldn't, not even to save my life, tell you what style of Karate it was. I only remember the teachers first name so that doesn't help any. Not that it matters. I took those classes for a couple of years, eventually earning a "brown belt" but not really learning much in the way of fighting. It was all kata, really, with only enough basic punches, blocks and kicks thrown in to keep us kids interested.
I only stopped going when the teacher stopped teaching at the community center as I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I didn't do anything else until I was 13 or so, when a good friend of mine started training in Tae Kwon Do. He seemed to be having a lot of fun so I convinced my father to pay for some classes there. Again, I don't know if there was a particular "style" name for what I learned. I wasn't really all that interested in that kind of thing at the time. Master Yu was very nice but I rarely saw him, I trained with several American teachers in his system, eventually reaching a blue belt status in his system, which did not correlate to the systems I see now so I can't really compare it to anything meaningful. Master Yu was ex Korean military and taught the TKD as he learned it from them, not the "sport" kind. For the record I have no beef with sport TKD at all and neither did he. We sparred regularly with the group down the street and we all had a lot of respect for each other. Military TKD was what he knew so that's what he taught us, along with a healthy respect for ALL styles of martial arts. He tolerated absolutely ZERO disrespect towards anyone, actually.
I trained TKD with Master Yu until I was 17 which is when he retired and the school closed down. Most folks went to the group down the street after that but I couldn't afford to do so.
Shortly before Master Yu retired I participated in a tournament where I got my ass handed to me by a guy who came in all by himself and was using what he called "Tai Chi Chuan". I'd never heard of it before, don't know his name, don't know which style he used and it doesn't matter. All I know is he stomped me flatter than a pancake and did it faster than anyone I'd ever been up against.
I wanted to learn what he knew, however I couldn't find out anything about Tai Chi Chuan.
This was long before the internet and I was a poor boy with few resources.
The library had some books that mentioned that art but nothing about it, just that it existed and some very faint details about its origins.
So I let my training languish for a number of years.
Flash forward to 1985, so about six years later, I was standing in line at a grocery store. I was bored and so I was reading the fliers posted on the cork board.
Imagine my surprise to see a flier that said, "Tai Chi Chuan taught in the Tradtional Manner: Wu's Tai Chi Chuan Academy is now taking students".
That was it. Nothing else but a line of those cut outs at the bottom where you pulled the phone number off to take with you.
I did and called the number as soon as I got home.
One training session with Sifu Britt and I was hooked. After I meet Si Kung Eddie Wu and trained with him at my first seminar I was even more hooked.
That was a LONG time, a whole bunch of personal insight and another whole style of TCC ago for me.
However, my only real motivation to pick up TCC didn't have anything to do with "internal vs. external" (let's get ready to RUMBLE!!!!!) at all.
My motivation was much more simple than that:
The guy kicked my ass in record time. I wanted to learn how to do what he did to me so I could do that to other people.
Simple as that. No philosophical meaning or deep rooted desire to learn to fire magic chi balls out of my arse.
Which is good, because I never did learn how to do that.
Hope this helps the original poster in some way.
Bob Ashmore