2022 BLACK BELT HALL OF FAME
AWARD WINNER
MAN OF THE YEAR GEORGE CHUNG
“We have a quick pace, a lot of action and demonstrations, and there is no redundancy.… No one has time to get bored. We want to educate and entertain.”
George Chung spoke those words in 1984 when a Black Belt writer asked him about the cable-television series he and Cynthia Rothrock had hosted for four years, but one could imagine that he spoke them yesterday about JungoTV, the streaming-video network he co-founded.
JungoTV — specifically, the Black Belt Magazine Channel it hosts — is all about education and entertainment. The education takes the form of instructional footage from the best of the best, both past and current champions, and masters. The entertainment manifests as coverage of the most prestigious tournaments, along with a catalog of martial arts movies starring the likes of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Sho Kosugi, Sammo Hung and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Education and entertainment, indeed!
But that’s not to say that inside Chung’s chest there isn’t the heart of a true martial artist. He was a five-time world champion renowned for his forms, and at one point, he was rated No. 1 in the nation — in part because of the way he innovated with music and acrobatic moves like walkovers and cartwheels. “Music is a trend, not a fad,” he told Karate Illustrated in 1980. “[But] I consider the true traditional value of the form. Form helps you develop good basics, for which there is no substitute.”
Chung, who was Black Belt’s 1983 Male Competitor of the Year, never let up on his mission to spread the martial arts through whatever means were at hand. Case in point: Regarding the aforementioned 1980s cable series, he said, “A lot of people procrastinate about taking martial arts. We felt if we could show people that they can do it, they would get involved. We show men, women, children and elderly people doing martial arts.”
To further propagate the arts, in 1988 he followed (also released as ).
