I was standing in a filthy sports hall at the back of the local leisure centre. A bony man with a shaved head handed me a green belt. ‘Well done, Master Zak,’ he said. Ten-year-old me bowed and walked towards the wall of parents. They had been stood there for three hours, watching other people’s children take turns punching the air, shouting a few mispronounced words of Korean. Someone played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ through a tinny speaker. One of the bug-eyed ‘instructors-in-training’ gave me a toothy grin and a thumbs up. I’m almost certain he worked there for free. Sitting in the back of the car on the way home, dobok still on, I realised that after four years of combat sports and a variety of colourful belts, I had learnt nothing about defending myself. I decided it was time to throw the towel in, to depart from the world of martial arts.
It’s not fair to say that combat sports and martial arts were entirely useless. They taught me a lot about stretching, about senseless violence and about pretending to meditate while being put off by the smell of 50 pairs of feet. But none of my instructors seemed qualified to be teaching young children how to fight. In fact, none of them seemed qualified to be around children at all. Every one I had was either a Steven Seagal impersonator or a divorced dad with an Asbo. The only talented instructor I had was the capoeira ‘bamba’ who taught me and a few equally unflexible friends how to cartwheel in a studio behind the Streatham Nando’s. Black and white photos of him as a child clutching trophies were plastered across the walls. Whenever one of us would say something like, ‘I don’t think I can backflip over that chair, forward flip onto that desk and land into a dance, I’m only eight,’ he would point at the photos and say, ‘Yes you can.’ My mum and I decided it was best I quit before I broke something.
All of these classes were dangerous in one way or another, taekwondo being the worst. Each week our instructor would split the children into groups of two and have us ‘spar’. This taught me nothing about combat sports. It just taught me how to take a beating. There were two other children, both older than me, who I often got paired with. I named them The Deer and The Bear. The Bear must have been 13. He was a unit. He never said anything. He would just bow and then punch the snot out of me. Then there was The Deer. The Deer was a lanky cretin who used high kicks to slap me around the face. I hated him more than The Bear because a part of me knew I could beat him.
One day, having suffered a particularly embarrassing loss (I ended up on the floor in a foetal position shouting ‘somebody stop him!’) I decided enough was enough. I knew I couldn’t beat him using taekwondo; I still didn’t know what taekwondo was. But I had to do something. I had to exact revenge. The sparring started as usual, with The Deer puckering his lips and flinging his freakishly long legs at my head. This time I was ready. After a few near misses, I caught his ankle with my left hand and without hesitation brought my fist crashing into his nose. I don’t remember much after that. I remember the instructor saying that I was out of order (apparently that isn’t ‘taekwondo’) and I remember The Deer walking away with a bloodied tissue pressed against his nose, his parents turning back at me and tutting. I also remember it being the proudest moment of my life thus far.
It’s not fair to say that combat sports and martial arts were entirely useless
In reality, I’m very thankful that my mum dragged me to various dojos and kickboxing studios. I’m also grateful that she, like so many parents, dutifully waited for hours on backless benches and in dimly lit receptions whilst I ran around gymnasiums kicking beanbags and listening to 50-year-old-men tell me how they once saw a guy punch another guy so hard in the chest that his head literally exploded.
The next time a person wants to start a fight with me, I’ll look them straight in the eyes, punch the air and shout, ‘Taekwondo is over 2,000 years old! Since the time of the Three Kingdoms, Taekwondo has been taught from generation to generation! The Kukkiwon Building in Seoul is the Taekwondo Headquarters! Taekwondo translates to “the art of kicking and punching”! Taekwondo is my favourite martial art! Taekwondo is my life!’
I may not win the fight, but I might finally earn my blue belt.
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