In another essay, I described how the support and encouragement of others made it possible for me to succeed in taekwondo. One interesting little vignette was left out of that story, for the excellent reason that it’s not relevant to the main message. But it is fun, so here it goes.
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I never used martial arts in anger. That’s in part because my main job, higher education administration, didn’t offer many opportunities. Though there were some occasions…
More important, the whole emphasis of the discipline, the heart of the instruction, is that you are learning skills that you’re not expected to use outside of the training area, the dojang. The Master teaches that the confidence and self-control you learn in karate is the best foundation for preventing fights. I think he’s right.
However, sometimes you just can’t reason with a door. That’s what happened to me in Italy.
My wife and I were on the last day of a two-week trip, about to drop our rental car at the Rome airport. It was late afternoon and, not wanting to hit the city’s rush hour traffic without some refreshment, we stopped at a broken down strip mall for a soft drink and a visit to the restroom.
As usually happens, my wife went first and emerged after a while with drinks. She told me that the restroom was off by itself, in an isolated area behind of the mall’s street-facing buildings. I found it easily, went in, pulled the door closed and…uh,oh. I could hear some metal fall and a quick look at the lock told me that the piece that connected the handle with the lock mechanism had fallen inside. The handle turned freely, then it also fell out.
I tried pushing the door. I tried rattling it. Then I tried yelling. After five minutes or so of this, I realized I wasn’t likely to be heard soon. Also, it occurred to me that whoever did hear me wasn’t going to be able to help on their own. They’d have to go find someone—maybe not easy and certainly not quick.
I studied the door.
Despite the shabby surroundings, the door was made of new looking steel and didn’t have any obvious flaws. There were some big dents, though, and I decided to risk adding one more. I kicked.
The door didn’t budge, but I could see that I had made a much bigger dent than my predecessors. Satisfying in a way, but the ultimate objective wasn’t achieved.
I tried some more yelling and some more kicking. Nothing.
Finally, I remembered the back kick. In sparring, the martial arts back kick begins with you facing your opponent. You then duck, spin on a pivot leg, and send your free foot zooming toward the target. If you do it right, you not only have the power of the biggest muscles in your body, you also have the momentum that comes from bringing your entire weight into the strike.
With a little help from the wall (it was a small space), I executed a very nice kick and got a very pleasant sound of rendering metal in response. As pieces of the hasp or whatever it’s called hit the ground on the outside, I had the same sense of flow as when I watched shattered pieces of board fly through the air after successfully breaking a board in a martial arts test.
The only flaw in the whole experience was there was no one there to watch.
Not counting the black belt test, the encounter with the Italian Door was the highlight of my martial arts experience.
I’ve kept up with my taekwondo exercises and added aerobic exercises and regular encounters with weights. One tangible result of all this is that I can stand on one foot to untie and remove shoes, even with a pride of TSA agents glaring at me with the impassive intensity of Korean martial arts masters.
More important than that, though, is the fact that the fitness and balance the martial arts provide comes with a generous helping of stress reduction. At age 71, know I wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t done taekwondo.
