Dec. 12, 2008

Grandmaster Park was my Taekwon-Do instructor for many years. I trained in three gyms in Canada over the decades, and Park’s was the most memorable. Black belts from the around the world visited, mainly because they knew that he was a pioneer in the art and an extremely talented athlete (a sparring champion). If you google Park or look up his name in the index of my book, A Killing Art, you’ll find that he pioneered Tae Kwon Do in Germany, the Netherlands and Canada and went on to great things.

Choi Hong-Hi, who invented the name “Tae Kwon Do,” moved from South Korea to Canada in 1972 partly because Park lived here. They had a falling out in the late 1970s, when, among other things, Choi accused him of cooperating with the Korean Central Intelligence Agency to plot Choi’s kidnapping. Park denied the rumours about the KCIA.

The two men didn’t reunite until 2001, at a black-belt seminar in Toronto, Canada. It was quite a reunion – heartfelt and intense. Park recruited me to help with that seminar, which is when I began interviewing for the book. Scenes from the surreal seminar are in chapter 1.

I was always impressed by Grandmaster Park’s talent. One evening, before a black-belt class taught by one of his former world champions, Alfonso Gabbidon, Park's son, Arnold, showed old film footage of Park and his men during demonstrations in the 1970s. Their power and speed, especially Park’s jumping techniques, were jaw-dropping. I think a couple of these film clips, which had deteriorated over the years, are on YouTube. I’ll look for them, and if they’re not there, I’ll try to find and post them on the video part of this site: akillingart.com/video. Arnold Park says there's a DVD called "ITF Pioneers" floating around the internet.

Park could leap from a standing position into a jumping kick -- attacking at head level. He was always telling us that we shouldn't telegraph our techniques, including the difficult jumping techniques:

In 1976, with a jumping front kick, Grandmaster Park Jong-Soo broke boards held nine feet in the air: