One of Vic's locations on the desert was teaching the officers and enlisted men and their families at an Air Force Base.  In 1988 the government announced the closing of that base.  The people in the classes panicked.  How were they going to complete their training? Where would they go for Kenpo when they were transferred? Some of his students became very upset so Vic tried to think of a way in which they might continue their training.  More specifically, they really wanted to continue under his instruction.

Remembering my filmmaking and video background he came to me and asked if I would help put something on video tape for the people at the Air Force Base.  I said "No".  He said when he told them he was going to video the techniques for them they became very excited.  I still said "No".  This started something that went on for almost a year.  I tried to explain to Vic the intricacies of putting an entire system of Karate on video.  He said he didn't want to put the whole system on tape, just the techniques they didn't know yet.  I told him, that wouldn't be good enough.  A percentage of those people would inevitably have learned some of their basics incorrectly.  Some would have forgotten certain elements they'll need to progress properly.  Either way, they needed a reference guide of all the basics, broken down and explained in detail.  Vic says, great! Let's do that.  My answer again was no.  I couldn't see going through all the work I knew it would entail to put all of that on tape for a few dozen people.  It just didn't make sense.

The bigger and more important issue was that I didn't really believe it possible to teach anything that complex by video. Oh sure, you could certainly show things and if a student was dedicated enough they might be able to learn something from it.  It was the same problem I had when Ed Parker and I did our training films. Only at that time the problem was even worse because you couldn't even speak to the student.  I even tried experimenting with audio tape and phono records but nothing was feasible cost-wise at that time.  Vic still wanted to do it.  Everybody else was putting out tapes.  That argument didn't hold water with me.  I've never particularly cared about what everybody else was doing.  If I didn't think it could be done properly, I wasn't about to do it at all.

"No".  The word only contains two letters.  It's meaning is very straight forward.  "No", means "No".  How is it then that Vic just couldn't seem to grasp the meaning of the word? He'd ask, I'd say "No".  He'd ask again and again I'd say "No" again.  Then he'd ask, "Why not" and I'd do the same thirty minutes I did last time on the subject .  This went on for months. Seemed like years.  Then one day, for what felt like the millionth time, we were on the topic again.  I don't know where it came from but I remembered an incident that happened years earlier. One of my students came up to me before class and said, "I heard something about Chuck Norris you'll get a kick out of".  First, let me explain our relationship.  Chuck Norris' school and ours (Ed Parker and myself) were located not far apart.  We were friendly competitors.  I've always liked Chuck and have a great deal of respect and admiration for him.  I can only surmise that my student didn't know how friendly the competition was.  He said, "I heard Norris wants to add rank to his black belt so he sent an eight millimeter film to his instructors in Korea".  Then he said laughingly, "What do you think about that?"  It took less than a full second for me to answer.  I asked, "What's the matter with it?"  My student looked stunned. I said, it sounded like a good plan to me.  If his instructors told him what they wanted to see and Chuck shot a good clear movie of it, I couldn't see anything wrong with it at all.  His instructors are professionals and Chuck surely wouldn't attempt to fake anything on the film.  They would know what they wanted to see and if they did they'd promote him.  Anyway, it sure beat a trip to Korea, which he could ill afford at the time.

I have never substantiated that story.  I don't know if Chuck ever really sent that film or not.  It doesn't matter as far as this story is concerned.  What matters is the fact that it brought forth an idea at the time I thought of it.  I told Vic the story then added, "You know something, there's been enough camcorders sold by now to do something very similar."  Heck, anyone should be able to get a hold of one or someone who has one. You give a ghetto kid a day and I bet he can score someone who has one, or somebody on a ranch in the middle of nowhere.  Push comes to shove you can rent them.  And in the worst case scenario, if it were important enough to you, you could buy one.

The point is that camcorders were finally available enough to the average household that a complete correspondence was at last possible.  It was an exhilarating revelation.  From there the ideas just came pouring out.  It was like the dam broke.  It was one thing after another.  It got exciting.  I got excited.  It was the first time in over twenty years I became that ebullient over anything in the Art.  Kenpo had become an addiction.  It was something I could never seem to get away from for long but as far as exciting was concerned.  It had been a long time.  That's how the Training Videos were conceived.  Now came the job of formulating the idea into a cohesive system of teaching.  Back in the eighties, you'll recall, we cut the system by quite a bit.  Now it was time to complete the job.

Chuck Sullivan flying', Ed Parker defending, circa 1961

The wonderfully intriguing and horribly irritating thing about video is that you don't have to repeat anything.  In fact you can't repeat anything.  If you do you're destroying the concept altogether. Once is enough.  The student can rewind and watch as many or as few times as needed.  This presented a problem.  Neither of us were used to teaching in that manner.  Usually, you work off the class.  You teach the moves and then make the necessary corrections. You keep repeating that process until most of the class is doing what your teaching properly.  Unfortunately, the slowest are generally left behind and have to catch up on their own.  Video of course eliminates that.

The first thing we had to do was to realize that we had to change our teaching approach and then practice on video until we had a workable procedure and then develop it until we were comfortable with it.  Not an easy task for someone who had been teaching something the same way for over thirty years.  Surprisingly, it didn't take as long as we thought it would.  The next step wasn't quite as easy.  Here's where we had to take over fifty years of training and teaching experience and reformulate the concepts but include all the principles.  Let's examine those two words for a moment.

A CONCEPT is an idea, a thought or central notion.  As related to Kenpo, let's say that the concept of increasing your speed when striking with the hands would be to recock the striking hand while the other hand is striking so that no time is lost between movements.  Actually, that concept works with almost all combinations.  However it isn't a concept that is common to all styles of Karate, that's one of the things that makes Kenpo unique.

A PRINCIPLE. is a fundamental truth, law, doctrine or motivating force.  As applied to Kenpo it could be the law that if your weight isn't distributed evenly over your supporting leg you cannot maintain a one legged stance. It's a physical fact. That's why we always recock our kicks so we have perfect balance on our supporting leg and don't have to drop toward an opponent because the kicking leg pulls our body weight forward.

Once we had defined the concepts and principles as they related to Kenpo we knew what we had to do.

We had come to the conclusion through experience, the average person would never put the time into learning the entire system as we had.  And let's face it, most of the people who take up the Art are just that, your average person.  Most new students never stay long enough to take anything into the future with them to make it work.  It's a shame but that's the cold hard truth of the matter.

Some people thought Ed Parker added all the techniques he did for financial gain, to keep his students with him longer.  I don't believe that for a second. I truly believe he kept creating new techniques simply because so many of his Black belts insisted upon it.  They wanted more, so he gave them more.  The problem came when those techniques were passed on to the new students.  The system became a monster.

Digging back into time I remembered something the Old Man said way, way back.  He said, "Id rather have ten techniques I can fight with than a hundred techniques that fight me".  That became the Karate Connection's quest.

We had to analyze somewhere over three hundred techniques, that we had been teaching over the years and get rid of the excess baggage. We had to eliminate the repetitious and weaker techniques. Others we could reformulate into techniques that still contained the original concepts and principles.  Some we were able to use as they were but no matter what we did, we knew that above all we had to retain the full essence of Kenpo, otherwise it would mean nothing.

We created a chart that went from wall to wall and two years later everything we wanted to teach was on that chart.  Being able to see the entire system at once was the only method that was workable.  Every time we wanted to see if a principle or concept had been covered we didn't have to read through reams of pages. Of course after a time we became so familiarized with that chart we could go directly to what we were looking for.

The idea of putting all the techniques together in what we refer to as the "Master Form" just came naturally.  The Kenpo forms have always been an easy way to remember your techniques.  The added advantage of the Master form is that you are doing your entire system in under three minutes.  There are 480, three minute segments in every twenty four hour period.  Who among us can't afford just one of them a day? We designed the form so that it doesn't take a great deal of space so that's no excuse for not doing it.... Sorry, I didn't mean to preach.

After the master plan was complete all we had to do was shoot it.  Right? Riiight! The next part of the process is the nearest and dearest to my heart.  I love seeing Kenpo work. We have always done everything possible to make our training as realistic as it can get. We wear shoes because if you always train without them it could chance things on the street when you have them on.  A change in timing, a change in contact with the surface your working on, anything that takes your concentration away from creating target opportunities is out of the question.

During the time of the original Karate Connection School we instituted training techniques and devices that made what we were teaching work.  We fought in our street clothes - in the dark - on an asphalt driveway - between the dojo and the building next door. We fought cold - no warm up - because that's the way it happens on the street. You learn to warm up as you get down. We changed the way other Kenpo schools ran the technique line. We stopped throwing a punch at the man in front of us and doing the technique on the man behind.  Doing it that way only lets you work with one attacker a night.  It also forces you to stand around wasting a lot of time and cools you down between techniques. Experience proved, it was much better to take on everyone in the line so you get to work with all sizes, shapes and speeds of attackers instead of just one.  That way, the time you spend in the line awaiting your next turn makes sense, because you need it to catch your breath for your next time up.

Sometimes we would bring furniture onto the mats and freestyle around it to get used to obstacles. We started the semi-circle without verbal commands for spontaneity.  I wanted to instill a hundred and eighty degrees of awareness into my students.  Then there were the speed and control drills.

Our next step was to integrate all the drills into the video series.  A pleasure indeed.  The drills are not only what makes the system work they're also what makes it fun.  Nothing feels better than to have a perfect run through the escape technique line or the semicircle.  When your reaction time, accuracy, speed, power and control is in top form.  It's exhilarating!

Eventually, it really was finished.  Now all we had to do was shoot it.  After months of planning and assembling the people we needed, we scheduled the shoot for a long holiday weekend.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who gave so freely of their time and effort. Without them the series would never have gotten off the ground.  But that first weekend, that's all that happened.  It got off the ground. We put in three fifteen hour days shooting the first tape, the Orange belt tape.

I knew when some of the segments were being shot I was going to want to do them over again. You can tell when things just aren't flowing the way you'd like them to.  As it happened, we not only reshoot those segments, we ended up shooting all of the others as well.  Every time we would reshoot a portion it would look so much better, it would make all the other original footage look bad by comparison, so we ended up reshooting the entire two hour tape except for the montage at the beginning.  That's the only part we liked well enough to keep.

What was presumed to be a long weekend shoot turned into weeks of intensive work.  I guess my earlier success with the commercials made me a little self assured.  Actually, I was more than a little naive.  I won't bore you with the rest of the video process, just suffice to say that it was a long, arduous, tedious, demanding, exacting.....labor of love.

I'm glad we got all this on tape when we did.  If I had tried to do this too soon I wouldn't have had the background and if I had waited many more years I might not have had the physical agility to personally perform the material I wanted to teach.

THE KARATE CONNECTION

It was 1980 that things looked up again.  Vic LeRoux, who had been a student of mine from the time he was fourteen years old and later a co-worker and fellow instructor at Mr. Parker's West L.A. school, came to me and said he'd like to get the "Old Gang" back together and open a dojo on his side of town.  I told him he'd never get the "Old Gang" back together but chances are he'd create a "New Gang."  He asked me to be the Head Instructor It felt good to have a steady teaching thing again, instead of just an occasional get together with old friends.  And I was right about the Old and New Gangs.  But the New Gang of the Karate Connection School is now the Old Gang and the Old Gang from the Crenshaw school is now the Over The Hill Gang.  If that's too hard to follow, don't worry about it.  It just means we're all getting' old.

When Vic was about to open the Karate Connection I asked him exactly what it was he intended to teach.  He said, "The whole thing, all the techniques I taught at the West L.A. school".  I told him it was too much.  Then I asked him if he had ever taught anyone all of that material.  He said, "Practically none, nobody ever stayed long enough".  I asked if that didn't give him some sort of clue, maybe something was wrong.  I told him how, in the early days there weren't but a handful of techniques, so we concentrated on the basics.  I mean we really concentrated on the basics.  And the guys of that time were some of the finest practitioners of the Art I've ever had the pleasure to work with and learn from.  They were focused, the system was lean and the Old Man wouldn't allow anyone to advance without impeccable basics.

Kenpo techniques have always been, and still remain, the most fascinating part of the Art.  It isn't hard to understand why techniques won favor over strong hard basics and it was my observation that the instructors doing the actual teaching, wanted still more.  Their appetites seemed insatiable.  The basics were still there but they seemed to be gotten through as quickly as possible in order to get to those "Fabulous Kenpo Techniques".   As the demand for techniques grew so did Mr. Parker's ability to create them.  He once told me that with the number of basic moves he had to work with, the number of combinations was virtually limitless.  The only problem is, not all the combinations are worth putting together.  Some things just don't blend and flow.  It's always been my personal philosophy, if it doesn't work don't do it!

I told Vic, if I was going to act as Head Instructor we were going to have to go back to basics and cut down the number of techniques taught up to black belt.  My feeling was and still is, when a student got his or her black belt they could go and learn all the techniques they wanted, from where ever they might choose.  But we weren't going to turn out Black belts who didn't have the strongest basics we could give them.  The sum total of the Art is in the basics.  There's never been a great practitioner in any style or system who didn't have great basics.  Can't be done.

Vic's main concern was that if we cut the amount of techniques from what the Old Man had set up for each belt, he wouldn't want us as an affiliate school.  I told him, there's no way he wouldn't want us as an affiliate school no matter what we do, just as long as we turn out Black belts he can be proud of.  We're using his basics, aren't we? We're using his concepts and principals, aren't we?

We wanted to be independent and affiliated at the same time and we achieved just that.  In fact we wore his club patch on the left side of the chest and our club patch on the right.

Mr. Parker acted as head judge and referee at our inter-dojo tournaments and participated in our promotion ceremonies. He awarded all the 1st degree black belts and all subsequent degrees in Black belt.  It was at the Karate Connection School in Hawthorne California that Vic and I received our last promotions from Mr. Parker on Oct. 27, 1981.

Toward the mid eighties Vic decided to pursue other business opportunities and closed the school.   I continued to teach a small select group until it was announced that Mr. Parker was himself teaching at his West L.A. school. It was such a pleasure to see him back on the mats again.  From then on, we all attended his classes.

By this time Vic had come back to full time teaching and had a couple of schools in the high desert about a hundred and fifty miles from L.A.  He immediately rescheduled his classes so that he could make the Old Man's workouts.  Ed Parker drew black belts to himself like bees to flowers.  We had the opportunity to meet and workout with some great people from all over the world.  Each year around the time of the International Karate Championships in Long Beach they would flock to his studio. Sometimes the mats would be so full of high ranked black belts it was difficult to move but it was always fun.

The Association

The Association is another story. I've been asked by people outside the Art, many times over the years, how one gets promoted to decrees in black belt. It was a constant embarrassment to have to say that it was up to the head of the system and that there was no clearly delineated method of promotion. The promotions came, if and when, the head of the system said they came. It always felt lame. I usually passed it off by saying, degrees in black belt actually denoted little more than your time in rank. By looking at a Black belt's belt and seeing a lot of red stripes or how ever other systems rank their black belts, you could usually tell how long the person had been engaged in the Art.

I had never heard of a set of bylaws, rules, policy or whatever, for any organization.  I could never quite understand that. Why not? Why had that never been done? Why wouldn't anyone put in writing, what was expected for rank? Why was nothing ever written as to how you became qualified to be an instructor? Perhaps they were afraid of making it too tough or maybe too easy.  Possibly they were afraid they would have to justify their own rank and wouldn't be able to live up to their own expectations of others.

No accusations or assumptions here, merely questions.

We probably had more enjoyment creating the bylaws than any other element of what has transpired thus far with the Karate Connection.  It was simple.  It was easy.  All we had to do is ask questions of ourselves and all our Black belt friends.  How would you like to have seen this done? How would you have liked to have seen that handled? Is this fair? Is that justified? Why should you be required to do something? Why can't you do something else? All we had to do was, "Do onto the bylaws, as we would have the bylaws do onto us".

The more we thought about it the more we wanted to create an entity that wouldn't self destruct upon our demise. We wanted something that would perpetuate itself beyond us. We wanted something we could hand off to the next generation of Kenpo Practitioners and something they could pass on as well.

Once you yourself have learned the Master form and have been awarded your black belt by a panel of your peers, you are then deemed capable of judging a performance of that form by anyone else, either above or below you in rank. Once you yourself have been through the entire process and judged proficient you should know what to look for in others. A Black belt member may be asked to judge tests by students of any level, up to and including Black belt and render a written or video evaluation of said performances. This is one of our ways of determining the quality of his or her judgment, prior to invitation for placement on the INTERNATIONAL KARATE CONNECTION ASSOCIATION Board of Black belts. When it becomes necessary for Vic LeRoux or myself to step aside we will have qualified people to carry on the work we've started.

There are already people in the Association I would not hesitate to turn the organization over to. Since creating the Karate Connection we have become acquainted with some of the finest, most dedicated Martial Artists, I have ever had the privilege of knowing. They of course will be bound by the same bylaws we all are. Vic and I laid the foundation but in time it will be up to others to carry it on and build upon it. We don't plan on going anywhere for quite a while. It's too much fun working with our new students but when we must, the line of succession will already be in place. There will always be an or-organization for you to get your rank through and for your students to get their rank.

This history has been a bare bones attempt to try to tell you where we came from and how we got to where we are. If we were to tell all the stories about al I the people we've been involved with in the Martial Arts, it would become a book of considerable length. Some of the best chapters would be yet to come, because of those we have yet to meet.