Two Weeks of Taekwondo

Does your brain ever pull seemingly random thoughts out of the depths of it’s memory banks? There’s a handful of memories that my brain seems to hold on to for a reason I cannot easily dicern, but I was just sitting here and one of them hit me and it made me laugh, which it always does. It is about the brief period of time in 2009 when I took taekwondo.

A little context: A dear friend of mine, I’ll call him David, had invited me to spend a few days at his house with his family and he was deeply into Tang Soo Do, which is, from how he described it, bad-ass. It taught bone breaking and throws and holds and all kinds of cool shit, and he demonstrated it on me and it hurt. He had me in various joint holds that hurt quite a lot. I was impressed, so I thought, yeah, I’d like to learns me some of this.

(That was a really fun trip, now that I’m thinking about it. We were sitting out on his back porch in Baton Rouge and watched his neighbor across the way, an older lady, collect a squirrel from a trap and butcher it. We sat back there and shot the shit for hours drinking Strawberry Abita and when we got hungry he roasted up some Boudin. Louisiana, man.)

Anyway, back home many hundred miles away, the only game in town was a taekwondo place, so I visited and signed up, but after a couple of lessons it became clear to me that this was the silliest shit ever. The female instructor, a waif who I could have taken out with one punch, explained that there was a minimal monthly fee, and that to test for leveling up, which corresponds to belt color, there was another “testing fee”. That immediately struck me as off. I wondered, If I have to pay for the test, how could I fail? Maybe I could, but see, then I’d be pissed off that I had to pay again, and I wouldn’t want to come back. I asked if I had to test. She said testing was optional.

Why would anyone start Tae Kwon Do without doing the whole colored belt thing? That’s the point, right? It makes me laugh when I think about it, because I asked her, “If I don’t care about what color my belt is and fitness is my goal, that’s really okay?”

Apparently no one had ever had this thought before because it kind of took her aback and she stammered a bit and said something like, well, technically you do not have to test, but we highly encourage it so that you advance your skills. Something like that. In other words, you don’t have to test, but you kind of do.

I was like, no, I’m good. I just want the fitness. When do we learn how to throw people? When do we learn the holds?

Oh, we don’t do any of that, she said.

Turns out, taekwondo is just a bunch of dancing. There are these forms which are just dances, really, these patterns to perform that have pretty much no connection to fighting. I mean, it could have been something akin to Daniel San waxing Miagi’s cars, you know, surprise, you were getting trained all along and you’re a karate kid now, LOL. I don’t think that was the case, though.

Turns out, my refusal to test really bothered them. They wanted that cash. The next lesson, she brought in the big guns, the head karate guy. He spent all session talking about the importance of testing while he instructed us how to do the karate dances. At that point, it was either pony up the testing cash or keep enduring these really weird lectures and sideways glances. I never went back after that.

In two weeks, I learned nothing about kicking or punching, and nothing about holds or throws. Just the dancing stuff.