the life and times of ed parker

7/22/2019 The Life and Times of Ed Parker

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-life-and-times-of-ed-parker 1/6

The Life and Times of Ed Parker - Part 1

By Bob Mendel

He was a streetfighter, a student of kenpo, the first American to open a commercial karateschool, instructor to the stars, businessman, film consultant, actor, writer, publisher, teacher,grandmaster. A force in the martial arts.

Meet Ed Parker, a legend.

He began in the martial arts at the age of 16. He was at achurch meeting when a man named Frank Chow startedtalking about beating up the local bully. Parker was sur-prised that Chow would lie in church. When Chow began todemonstrate some techniques he had applied in dealingwith the bully, Parker realized that he might be telling thetruth.

Parker studied with Chow for a number of years, until he

was told that he should begin working with Frank's brother,professor William Chow, at the Nuuanu YMCA in Honolulu,Hawaii.

"The thing I liked about professor Chow," recalls Parker,"was that to a streetfighter like me, his concepts and ideaswere better in terms of what was realistic. That's why Ireally went along with him. That was kenpo karate, al-though he changed the name in later years."

Parker's basics came from his training with the Chow brothers, but the middle and the end of hissystem would be developed through his own investigations over the years to follow. But he

credits professor Chow with starting him on the idea of how to make progress and on the thingsthat were practical.

With the U.S. in the midst of the Korean conflict, Parker was soon drafted, but fortunate enoughto be stationed in Hawaii and able to continue training with professor Chow.

After his discharge, he still had two more years of college left to get his degree.

"I talked to professor Chow and I saw that this field of endeavor could become a lucrative pro-fession," says Parker. "But I felt that I should finish college and get my degree, because if I wentinto business, it would give me more impetus. In fact, it worked out that way. And professorChow was in agreement with this."

The next major step brought Parker to Los Angeles, where he met Bert Goodrich, who owned agym. Goodrich happened to be a brother-in-law of Vic Tanny, who ran a successful chain ofbodybuilding studios in Southern California. Since Bert was in competition with Tanny, he de-cided to bring Parker on board as an added attraction. It worked out well for both. Not long after,a larger chain, the American Health Studios, came in and bought Goodrich out. The new man-agement saw no place for Parker and let him go.

"That really got me going on my own," Parker says. "Not having any knowledge of business was



the best thing for me at that time. Had I listened to others, I would have never gotten started.Being naive helped me to get ahead. I felt that business concepts and principles had to be tai-lored to different businesses. At the time, there was no other business like it. I started the firstcommercial school."

Through word of mouth, Parker began to build a reputation, managing to pay the rent and sur-

vive. He was living in a small, one bedroom apartment in Pasadena, Calif., with his wife, whowas pregnant with their first child. Then he met Terry Robinson at one of the American HealthStudios gyms.

Robinson was a former combat instructor, and, at that time, physical trainer to singer MarioLanza. Robinson also worked at the Beverly Wilshire Health Club. Robinson saw one ofParker's demonstrations and was impressed.

"He introduced me to the members of the club at the Beverly Wilshire," recalls Parker, "andthat's how I started with that crowd, which consisted mainly of directors, producers and moviestars. So I started small and again, through word of mouth, I began teaching other movie stars,often going directly to their homes."

One of Parker's new circle of friends was Blake Edwards, who was using martial arts for his firstmovie, Experiment in Terror, and employed some of Parker's black belts. When he started thePink Panther films, he introduced the character "Kato," Inspector Clouseau's servant with theevery-ready karate attack.

Parker still ran a small school in Pasadena, but because of the clientele he had developed atthe other end of Los Angeles, he decided to open a second school, still in operation today. Next,Parker started to be invited to some of the TV series as a fight consultant but quickly ran intodifficulties.

"The stunt guys were a clannish group and rightfully so," he says. "They didn't want someone

else to come in and take away their job. When the director asked for a karate expert, these guyshad some knowledge of jiu-jitsus, judo and a little karate and they would claim to be experts. Sowhen I came along I felt that I had the right to compete for the job."

Contacts in television not only brought Parker into some prominence, it paved the way for an-other legend in the martial arts. Parker got involved with the TV crime series, "I Spy," starringRobert Culp and Bill Cosby. Through that work, he met Jimmy Lee, a martial artist in San Fran-cisco, who was studying kung-fu.

"Whenever I would go up to Oakland," says Parker, "he'd ask me over and show me some ofthe stuff he was learning from his kung-fu professor and he'd ask me what I thought the movesmight mean. He was thrilled that I might have hit on the answer and that I might have come up

with some better solutions on top of that."

One day Lee called Parker and told him about a kid up in Seattle named Bruce Lee. Jimmythought the young fighter would be really good on the movie screen. So Parker went up to Oak-land when Bruce Lee came down for a visit.

"He was a cocky kid," says Parker. "He was very nice to me, but cocky. But he was able to pro-duce. I was very impressed with him."



At that time Parker was contemplating holding his first International Karate Championships,(now in its 26th year) in Long Beach. It was 1964. Parker decided to ask Bruce Lee to do ademonstration, which he would film. Then he could have a number of producers and directorssee the young man in action, which might be of some help.

"So he came and performed and did an excellent job," says Parker, "and we did a color film with

three different cameras. I took the film over to Bill Dozier, who at that time owned the "Batman"series and was planning on doing the "Green Hornet" series. He was also considering a filmcalled Number One Son, which was a takeoff on Charlie Chan. So he thought of having BruceLee play the number-one son. That project didn't work out so they used Bruce Lee as 'Kato' inthe Green Hornet instead."

So Bruce Lee got started in film through Parker's contacts and the rest is history. He workedwith Blake Edwards, met writer Joe Hyams, (Zen in the Martial Arts and numerous film scripts)and then went to Hong Kong, where his career started to flourish.

"I knew without a doubt that if he got on the screen, our industry would prosper. And it did justthat," recalls Parker. "I've had a number of people around the world condemn me for not coming

out with the film of the Internationals, saying that I owe it to the public. I could have made atleast a half a million dollars on it but it's my private stuff. I didn't do it to go out and make moneyon a friend.

"When I held the first Internationals, I invited everybody," says Parker, "even though there wasresentment between this guy and that guy. There was one guy who had come out with a lot ofbooks and in many of them all he did was wear a different outfit while he was doing the samemoves. But he impressed a lot of people and got them interested in the martial arts. So in somefashion, he was a contributor.

"My position was: How can we know who's who, unless everybody puts their cards on the table?So if some guy is a phony, let him come down and do his thing. If he can't perform, not only will

you know, others will know."

A lot of other people who have become permanent figures in the martial arts field were influ-enced or helped by Parker. Tak Kubota entered the Internationals in 1964 and met John Niita, aJapanese millionaire who sponsored his entry into the United States. Dan Ivan was an army re-cruiter whom Parker encouraged to get into the business fulltime.

Controversy follows public figures and Parker has been no exception. The world of the martialarts has its ideologues, purists, opportunists and hucksters. Parker not only had a way of mak-ing friends in this jungle of opposing philosophies, he had answers for his critics. One still con-troversial issue is the purity of a style or system, sometimes debated as the battle between tra-ditional stylists and the innovators. Parker was asked early and often why he didn't promote

kenpo as an ethnic martial art, since he himself was Polynesian by birth.

"I am a Polynesian but I learned this as an American," says Parker. "I brought the first Americanversion of the art into the continental United States. Not Okinawan, not Japanese, the Americanversion, and that's all I've lard claim to. Some of these guys get technical about who brought theart into this country. Then give credit to the Chinese, who started this when they came here andworked on the railroads."

Parker gives credit to his instructor, professor Chow, for "ten or 15 percent" of his knowledge at



the beginning of his career. The rest came from his own continuing investigations, a processthat evolved into principles of how to effectively teach. The first step, however, was learning howto learn.

Parker asked himself what he could examine that he already knew, that would have the sameprinciples and concepts, so he could make a comparison to help him understand the martial

arts? The answer was the language itself.

"Now with language, you can speak it and write it," Parker explains. "In speaking, we learn itphonetically, through the use of syllables, in the early years. I realized that in demonstrating atechnique, when I cocked my arm and blocked, in reality I would never do that. That would becontrary to logic in terms of application on the street. So why were we teaching this? I came tothe conclusion that we were teaching the phonetics of motion.

"But when we speak, we don't speak to each other phonetically, syllable by syllable. After awhilewe get out of phonetics and into the motion itself. So I noticed these comparisons."

Parker continues the analogy by approaching the written language. He points out that there are

three major ways in which we write. We print, a process in which we stop each action (each let-ter) before we start the next one. Then we have cursive, where the writing motion is continuous.The third way we can write is shorthand.

"Can we do the same in the art?" asks Parker. "Yes, we can. Most of the movements that arelinear, as in Shotokan, are like printed motion. You have to start and stop and start again.

"Movements that flow from one to another are comparable to script. When a punch comes, ifyou block and punch at the same time, then that's shorthand motion. So we have a wealth ofknowledge available to us from past experience. Let's go back to the written language. As wewrite, we use an alphabet. Can't we say some of these basic moves are the alphabet of motion?If we do a series of moves, calling them H and U and R and T, we could spell the word HURT."

Parker carries the analogy a step further, noting that someone's knowledge of the alphabetmight only run from A-to-G. They can still create words. They might use two IN and two Es andcreate the word DEED, or even make compound words, but it's not the complete range of lettersin the alphabet.

Parker then points out that the written language includes upper and lower case, such as A anda. By analogy, if the punch comes high, you block high. If it comes low, you use a differentblock, he explains.

"Let's go to music and the notion of sharps and flats. The sharp raises the note a half-step. If Ichop, that's a sharp edge. If, instead, I use the flat of my hand, less damage is done. The flat

lowers the note and the flat hand lowers the damage," explains Parker.

Over the years Parker developed his ability to find analogies, and that enabled him to think logi-cally and apply his moves to tactical ends. That made him realize that he was becoming whathe calls a mechanic of motion.

"Most of the guys teaching karate were salesmen of motion," he says. "They had no idea of theintricacies involved. They could open the hood of a car and talk a good story - it's got 5.4 liters



and so on. But if it was time to disassemble it and find the problem, fix it and put it back to-gether, they couldn't do it. They would have to go to a mechanic.

"So after you become a mechanic the next stage is an engineer. You say you only get 25 milesto a gallon? Let me see what I can do so you can get 50 miles to the gallon. That's where I'vegotten to, in terms of the art."

Parker's approach and ability to communicate his ideas clearly was not only helping his stu-dents, it was impacting other instructors in the martial arts community. Nick Cerio first metParker 20 years ago at a competitive event, when Parker was the referee for his match.

"He impressed me," recalls Nick. "He had charisma. He helped me a lot when I was creating myown system, so I've always looked up to him. It was hard to communicate with professor Chowso I would call up Ed instead and he would help me put together some good forms. He helpedme understand the circle of motion. I asked his advice on teaching methods and on the busi-ness side of it. I received my ninth-degree black belt in kenpo from Ed in 1983.

"He did an awful lot for the Americanized version of kenpo karate and he was often helping

people in his own way, although he tried to hide it," Cerio adds. "I remember at a tournament inBaltimore, a friend's daughter wanted to compete but she didn't have a gi. He just took her overto the stand and bought her one."

During this time Parker was not only teacher and lecturer, he was continuing to build an interna-tional chain of 170 karate schools in a dozen different countries. The business side of it startedslowly for Parker, beginning in 1964 and accelerating in the 1978-1980 period.

During this period he was also involved in other ventures. There were the films, seven in all,including Kill The Golden Goose, in which he starred with Hapkido master Bong Soo Han,released in 1974 and still available on videotape. There were roles in TV shows, and manymore that he turned down.

And there were books, 11 of them, on his approach to the art. He has just completed a definitivebook, the Encyclopedia of Kenpo, which will be a guide for students and instructors in his sys-tem and a lot of other martial artists as well. Parker is once again putting his energy into thekenpo association schools, both in terms of increasing their numbers and establishing andmaintaining a consistent standard of teaching.

"I have had a lot of people who write asking to become members of my association. But I'm notin it for the numbers. This kind of arrangement is like a marriage; if there's compatibility andrapport, then the marriage lasts.

"I assure the quality of the teaching done in my schools by providing the instructor with a com-

plete guideline to the material to be taught. If it is one of my franchises, they have this guidelineto work from. If they operate their own school in their name, in association with me, I sharesome of this thinking.

"There are a number of people from other systems and other kenpo styles that are offshoots ofmine and they've come back on board. They are making the transition and seeing what I'm say-ing is, in fact, correct."

Parker feels that he made a thorough study of motion before attempting to launch his system as



a version of kenpo. Others, he feels, have not been as diligent in their research. This was ex-actly what happened with Tony Cogliandro, who first met Parker in 1983, when he came to aseminar in New England.

"We were working in a different kenpo system," recalls Cogliandro. "It was more primitive,brought here in the late 1950s and everyone in New England was doing it. When 1 began to

understand what he was doing, at first I felt cheated by what I'd been taught before. But as I re-alized what he could offer, I got excited about what I could learn."

Parker and Cogliandro started the International Kenpo Karate Association of New England, andCogliandro became one of the staff of regional directors in 1987. There are now 40 schools inthe region where there had only been 15 before.

"He teaches true kenpo," says Cogliandro. "The kenpo we had was odds and ends of tech-niques, maybe 40 or 50 of' them. A lot of it was also taught incorrectly. In the Parker systemthere are 150 base techniques and another 100 extension techniques. His analogies are tre-mendous in conveying his ideas and the organization of the system is equally good. There isn'ta system in the world as thorough.

"It was an overwhelming experience and I expect to continue to learn more. He was the mostinfluential person in my career and I believe, the supreme model of a grandmaster."

the life and times of ed parker

Documents