ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
Leo Fong is one of the wisest people I know. Now in his ninth decade in the martial arts, he’s also one of the most experienced, accomplished and versatile. When he talks, I listen. A few of the pearls he’s dispensed over the years have been rattling around in my pocket for some time now.
As a firm believer in the power of principles, Fong encourages his students to seek the deeper truths of the martial arts. “There is an important difference between understanding what makes a clock tick and knowing how to tell the time,” he once said.
But in this quest for truth, Fong doesn’t advocate merely replicating the masters’ journeys but rather seeking what they sought — striking out for the same destination, paralleling their paths, not merely trying to duplicate them.
Fong maintains that five masters in particular helped shape the martial landscape of the 20th century: Gichin Funakoshi, Jigoro Kano, Morihei Ueshiba, Bruce Lee and George Dillman. With this in mind, I hatched a plan to examine the principles these masters laid down — the trails of breadcrumbs they left — to see if there might be some common ground.
