Blasphemous Polyhedral Weapons Table

[JLV]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

Tae Kwon Do exploded in popularity in the 1970s and East Texas was no exception. There were no credentialed Chinese martial arts schools in my area. A Shotokan school opened in 1981, a generic kickboxing school had been around since the early 1970s and in 1982, an Isshin Ryu school opened.

I was fortunate. For some reason, Margaret King-Wun Chang moved to El Paso in the late 70's and set up a studio to teach Wu style T'ai Chi. She was apparently about the third highest rated master of the art in Hong Kong, back in the day. She kept threatening to send me and another student (we both eventually became instructors in her school) to Hong Kong to "meet" the Grand Master... Fortunately I soon joined the USAF and was able to avoid that event! (Meeting the Grand Master meant doing something called "entering the door" -- which meant you had to outfight the Grand Master in order to get into the room. Neither of us was thrilled with THAT idea, since we knew we were nowhere near as good as Margaret was! ;-) ).

I picked up about a year's worth of Wing Tsun from a visiting master who showed up one day and claimed hospitality with Margaret. Within a week or two, he set up his own little studio and started teaching -- mostly in the park next door. He taught a couple of us on the side; sticky hands, the forms, the one-inch punch, the whole bit. Surprisingly there was a lot of transference between T'ai Chi and Wing Tsun -- both were really "soft" arts, and had a tremendous amount in common. Wing Tsun, of course, was designed originally back in the 30's as a way to quickly learn enough techniques to defeat Japanese martial artists (who were busy invading China at the time), so by the time you finished six months of Wing Tsun, you were "supposed to" be able to beat a black belt Karateka. Never had the chance to find out for myself, though...