Kukkiwon History

[YoungMan]

Kacey,
I'm not saying he didn't play an important role in the promotion of Tae Kwon Do and its unification. He was very important in that aspect. But as far as being respected as an Instructor who advanced the ART of Tae Kwon Do, he was not. Quite simply, he would never have had success had he not convinced the Chung Do Kwan black belts to follow him.
I've read interviews with CDK Founder Lee, and from an Instructor point of view, Lee was much better than Choi. Choi was simply the face of Tae Kwon Do at that time. It was guys like Lee who gave it substance.

 

[exile]

Considering all the promotion that Gen. Choi did for Tae Kwon Do, he had surprisingly little martial arts experience. Other than a black belt in Shotokan (and even this is debatable depending on your sources), he had not much experience. This is one reason why I don't have as much respect for him.
Contrast this with several Kwan Founders (Lee, Yoon, Hwang etc.) who had many years of experience. Many of them undoubtably resented being arm-twisted by a guy like Choi who didn't have the same level of experience they did.

I don't want it to seem as though we're ganging up on you, YM, it's not that. You've read my posts, you know that I think that Gen. Choi played ruthless hardball in the down-and-dirty MA politics of the era; you've read (or should have read) Gm. Kim's interview in the January Black Belt... so you know that no one's trying to portray the General as a saint or savior. BUT... he was instrumental into fashioning TKD into a devastatingly effective battlefield combat system that won the sincere respect of South Korea's communist enemies in two very nasty, drawn out wars, the first of which saw the ROK's survival on the line, and looking pretty unlikely at several points. Gen. Choi's initiative was essential in making TKD a terrifically effective tool in those wars. I've read enough testimony from independent sources to convince me that Tae Hi Nam played a far more important role in the development of military TKD than most practitioners are aware of these days, and was invaluable to Gen. Choi as an expert on the technical content of TKD, but it was Choi's clout in the Korean army which made the technical contributions that THN and other virtuouso practitioners worked out available to thousands of ROK soldiers.

As for Gen. Choi's own rank, this is what Dakin Burdick, probably the most authoritative historian of modern KMAs, has to say here:

Hong Hi Choi, the future "father of Taekwondo," was meanwhile busy learning Shotokan Karate. To further his education, he was sent to Kyotoo in 1937, where he met Mr. Kim, a Korean instructor of Shotokan Karate. After two years of "concentrated training," Choi gained his 1st Dan. He then went on to the University of Tokyo where he continued his training and gained his 2nd Dan, after which he taught Shotokan Karate at the Tokyo YMCA. When the Second World War began, Choi was "forced to enlist in the Japanese army."​

You have to remember that Gen. Choi stirred very strong feelings both ways, he made a lot of bitter enemies and plenty of people with possibly quite legitimate grievances against him were nonetheless probably happy to say anything about him to discredit him once he fell from power because of his attempts at initiating a TKD-based rapprochement with the North Korean government. It's any but simple, what happened at that time. This is one of those cases where the truth suffers greatly at the hands of both those who want to canonize Gen. Choi and those who want to demonize him. My advice is, don't be too quick to rush to judgment here...

 

[terryl965]

Exile the way I see ir you either love him or hate him there is not much in between anymore.

 

[IcemanSK]

Another way to see the General was to say he was who he was. As GM Lee, Byung Moo (his right hand man for many years) said about him: (something to effect) that he was passionate about TKD. And sometimes that passion made him more forceful & less compasionate. (This was in the January 2008 issue of TKDTimes).

I'm betting that a lot of beloved politician's own children would say the similiar things about their political parent. "Everyone loved them, but they were never home."

Gen. Choi did great things to advance TKD: but he wasn't always kind in the process.

 

[YoungMan]

Unfortunately, that ruthlessness resulted in the current ITF-WTF split. Who knows where we'd be if things had turned out differently or if Choi had been a little more flexible.

 

[exile]

Unfortunately, that ruthlessness resulted in the current ITF-WTF split. Who knows where we'd be if things had turned out differently or if Choi had been a little more flexible.

Very strong personalities, people who are absolutely sure that they're right, very often sow the wind and then reap the whirlwind, or their descendents do; that's what happened here, I'd say. There seems to be an incredible amount of bad blood involved. Karate doesn't seem to have anything like this: there isn't nearly the same level of anger and resentment among the different styles. The whole contrast between the Okinawan/Japanese MA scene and the Korean scene is very deep and striking; I attribute a lot of it to the emergence of the KMAs in the forge of occupation and then a desperate war for survival, and the resulting incredibly 'loaded' symbolic weight that TKD has to carry.

I myself don't mind the WTF/ITF split per se, in terms of different emphases and methods. Try 'em all out and see what works, is the idea; in the end, it's all good for the practitioner. What bothers me about the organizational split between the WTF and ITF is the same as what bothers me about the split within the ITF itself: the huge investment of energy in anger and resentment that could have been put to use in building up the art. Exploring multiple hypotheses is the way we find out the right answer, but sectarian faction-fighting usually just ends up leaving rubble.

 

[YoungMan]

In a way I can't blame him. 35 years of occupation and then freedom; not surprisingly he and many of the others wanted all traces of the Japanese influences removed. Can't say it wouldn't have turned out any differently.