Martail Arts Worldview
As a 23-year-old graduate student in Middle America in the early 1970s, I was hungry for whatever I could learn about the Asian martial arts.
On the East Coast and West Coast, schools had been emerging and multiplying since the mid-1960s, but those of us who lived in “flyover country” had few opportunities to broaden our understanding of arts like karate, kung fu, judo and taekwondo.
At Union University in my hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, I’d been fortunate to train from 1969 to 1970 in the then little-known art of hapkido. In a field-house basement, a Korean student and former captain in the ROK Army known only as Mr. Suh organized and taught the system to a small group of dedicated students. Suh ran a nononsense traditional class, and for 10 months, we couldn’t get enough of his instruction. Despite the bruises and the blood, we always looked forward to our next session.
Fellow student Ivy Scarborough put it this way: “Mr. Suh
