Dec. 30, 2009, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

I don't want to ask this again, but I have to: Where is Taekwondo's official history book? Note the spelling here: "Taekwondo," not "Taekwon-Do." In finding sources for my own book, A Killing Art, I discovered that there were no referenced history books or websites about the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF), the group that runs Olympic Taekwondo. There are only bits and pieces of history, which are scattered on various sites like gossip at a martial arts tournament.

It's astounding that the WTF -- a massive, well-funded organization in more than 170 countries -- begins its online history in 1973 and doesn't distribute an official history book.

Would a generous WTF historian please provide guidance? Over the past seven years, whenever I've begged for history sources, WTF officials have pointed to A Modern History of Taekwondo, which was written in Korean by Won-Sik Kang and Kyong-Myong Lee, former WTF officials. The English translations of the book contain good details -- eye-popping details -- but no footnotes, references and bibliographies. (See Glen U's translation for example.) Using interviews and other documents, I had to check every fact in that tome.

I discovered that a memoir of Kim Un-Young's, the former WTF president who spent time in prison, contains very similar paragraphs as those in Kang and Lee's book, so, obviously, Kim was a source for A Modern History of Taekwondo. Who were the other sources?

These questions are important, and not only because WTF officials in the past highlighted the work of some pioneers while lowlighting the contributions of others. For instance, South Korean General Choi Hong-Hi made up the name "Tae Kwon Do" in the 1950s, and WTF officials later called him a "permanent troublemaker" while others elbowed him out of the bits of WTF history that do exist. In addition, the WTF marginalized many pioneers associated with Choi and North Korea -- the pioneers who refused to join the WTF in the 1970s, when South Korea's brutal dictatorship helped to guide the WTF.

The history questions are also important because the WTF still has a heck of time managing conflicts between its boisterous factions, conflicts that shake up millions of Taekwondo students and their fans. This is perhaps the most crucial reason to release an official history; there seem to be three major factions in the WTF, and knowing who's in what faction in various countries could explain what's going on when WTF trouble explodes, such as the trouble after cheating allegations during Taekwondo sparring at the 2008 Olympics. We could use some history here. After all, one of the WTF's mantras is Transparency. The other is Fairness. More on that later.