He hates all forms of Karate, even Kyokunshinkai. He has Dan grades in Goju Ryu Karate and Fujian White Crane Kung Fu. Here's a bit about him:
Apparently he did Muay Thai in Tokyo and fought on the heavyweight circuit but I can't find proof except this on Quora
I’m not sure if this will be of any help, but here goes: Steve Morris is (or was, I’m not sure if he’s still around) the head of Goju Ryu karate in the UK.
He spent some time in the 1960s / early 1970s living in Tokyo at a boxing gym, and fighting in the Thai boxing contests that were extremely popular there through the 70s, 80s and 90s - probably while also training with Yamaguchi, the head of Goju. Morris might have been one of the fighters that Oyama would have seen while developing Kyokushinkai (Goju plus other stuff).
In the 80s and 90s he was reckoned to be the toughest man in British karate. Admittedly this was something to do with his size and strength, as he was a big geezer. He could do a deadlift with a 200 pound bar, four men sitting on his shoulders and hanging off him, and the guy on the top pressing up against the ceiling to try and stop him locking out his legs (over 800 pounds anyway). He used to run training courses in kickboxing (what we would call Thai boxing now) and Goju.
So it doesn’t look as if a career in Thai boxing did any harm to his Goju karate, though perhaps traditionalists might not see it that way. But, if they did disagree with him, they would have done it very, very quietly, when he wasn’t around, and prayed it never got back to him…
Well, he wasn’t called Mad Morris for nothing. In his day he was an iron-hard cruiserweight who could beat anyone in the country. He would have minced up the big Kyokushinkai guys like Whybrow for example.
He has trained a lot of good coaches like Vince Jauncey, Mick Blackwell and so on (mostly for short periods till they couldn’t take any more) and you should probably talk to them first before you say he never did anything.
Because he is very difficult to get on with, nobody sticks around with him long. That’s just the way it is. He used to walk around Brixton at night with a heavy gold chain on, to get more fights in. If you made Floyd Mayweather (with his private life) a cruiser and made Conor Mcgregor a cruiser with all the mouth, and added in Tyson with his worst episodes, you’d have Morris.
He was the first guy to go out East, live there, and fight in Thai boxing (on the Tokyo pro circuit there at that time - he was double the size of any Thai of that era). What he says always has a grain of truth in it although you have to consider it the same way as McGregor’s shyte.
There is no need to respect him - he is one of the old guard who could really fight and proved it. As a person, you don’t want him living next door. Now he’s shrunk down and he’s a little old geezer like me, he is in his 70s or late 60s now. Mind you he can still go through the motions but I’m a cripple now.
He’s basically a street fighter who trained hard in the martial arts for about 60 years and beat anyone around in his day. But don’t expect any manners or whatever - he is and always was a fighter not a teacher or an administrator or anything else involving organisation or cooperation with others. He’s the flip side of the martial arts coin: a guy who could really do it, in his day, when everyone else was talking complete bollocks about nice katas and pretty techniques; and much of the time he was a total c**t.
It is what it is. The guy was a fighter not a model of etiquette. Like Tyson without the fame. Everything he touched dissolved in the end because he was not a team player. But don’t knock what he could do or stuff he taught to people who could stick it for a bit. In his day he would have beaten Dolph at the time when the guy was about to go for the European Kyokushinkai championships but got a film gig instead. There aren’t too many people you could say that about, and most of them were in Amsterdam not the USA. At that time, Americans thought Thai boxing was a game for scrappers who could never beat a real martial artist. Most people did to be honest. People like Morris changed their mind.
You can call him an arsehole now, but you sure wouldn’t have 25 years ago and expect to live. Maybe Peter Aerts had a chance, not many others.
The thing I feel sorry about for him most is that he stayed tied up with Goju for far too long and should have just ditched it and moved on. There was a very limited market for a Goju-Thai mix then, and still is, it’s a dead end. For a long time - decades - he tried to mix the two; but if he’d switched to Thai boxing 100% (as I did at that time, faced with the same choice) he would have been in at the ground floor with Thai boxing’s start-up in the UK, and he had 10 years on everybody else at the time including all the Thais here, none of whom were anything compared with him.
He has that old geezer sadness now and it’s not pretty to watch.
Pedigree
An incomplete martial arts autobiography They say it’s not the pedigree of the dog in the fight but the fight in the dog that’s important. Regrettably, every time my name comes up in co…
morrisnoholdsbarred.com
Apparently he did Muay Thai in Tokyo and fought on the heavyweight circuit but I can't find proof except this on Quora
I’m not sure if this will be of any help, but here goes: Steve Morris is (or was, I’m not sure if he’s still around) the head of Goju Ryu karate in the UK.
He spent some time in the 1960s / early 1970s living in Tokyo at a boxing gym, and fighting in the Thai boxing contests that were extremely popular there through the 70s, 80s and 90s - probably while also training with Yamaguchi, the head of Goju. Morris might have been one of the fighters that Oyama would have seen while developing Kyokushinkai (Goju plus other stuff).
In the 80s and 90s he was reckoned to be the toughest man in British karate. Admittedly this was something to do with his size and strength, as he was a big geezer. He could do a deadlift with a 200 pound bar, four men sitting on his shoulders and hanging off him, and the guy on the top pressing up against the ceiling to try and stop him locking out his legs (over 800 pounds anyway). He used to run training courses in kickboxing (what we would call Thai boxing now) and Goju.
So it doesn’t look as if a career in Thai boxing did any harm to his Goju karate, though perhaps traditionalists might not see it that way. But, if they did disagree with him, they would have done it very, very quietly, when he wasn’t around, and prayed it never got back to him…
Well, he wasn’t called Mad Morris for nothing. In his day he was an iron-hard cruiserweight who could beat anyone in the country. He would have minced up the big Kyokushinkai guys like Whybrow for example.
He has trained a lot of good coaches like Vince Jauncey, Mick Blackwell and so on (mostly for short periods till they couldn’t take any more) and you should probably talk to them first before you say he never did anything.
Because he is very difficult to get on with, nobody sticks around with him long. That’s just the way it is. He used to walk around Brixton at night with a heavy gold chain on, to get more fights in. If you made Floyd Mayweather (with his private life) a cruiser and made Conor Mcgregor a cruiser with all the mouth, and added in Tyson with his worst episodes, you’d have Morris.
He was the first guy to go out East, live there, and fight in Thai boxing (on the Tokyo pro circuit there at that time - he was double the size of any Thai of that era). What he says always has a grain of truth in it although you have to consider it the same way as McGregor’s shyte.
There is no need to respect him - he is one of the old guard who could really fight and proved it. As a person, you don’t want him living next door. Now he’s shrunk down and he’s a little old geezer like me, he is in his 70s or late 60s now. Mind you he can still go through the motions but I’m a cripple now.
He’s basically a street fighter who trained hard in the martial arts for about 60 years and beat anyone around in his day. But don’t expect any manners or whatever - he is and always was a fighter not a teacher or an administrator or anything else involving organisation or cooperation with others. He’s the flip side of the martial arts coin: a guy who could really do it, in his day, when everyone else was talking complete bollocks about nice katas and pretty techniques; and much of the time he was a total c**t.
It is what it is. The guy was a fighter not a model of etiquette. Like Tyson without the fame. Everything he touched dissolved in the end because he was not a team player. But don’t knock what he could do or stuff he taught to people who could stick it for a bit. In his day he would have beaten Dolph at the time when the guy was about to go for the European Kyokushinkai championships but got a film gig instead. There aren’t too many people you could say that about, and most of them were in Amsterdam not the USA. At that time, Americans thought Thai boxing was a game for scrappers who could never beat a real martial artist. Most people did to be honest. People like Morris changed their mind.
You can call him an arsehole now, but you sure wouldn’t have 25 years ago and expect to live. Maybe Peter Aerts had a chance, not many others.
The thing I feel sorry about for him most is that he stayed tied up with Goju for far too long and should have just ditched it and moved on. There was a very limited market for a Goju-Thai mix then, and still is, it’s a dead end. For a long time - decades - he tried to mix the two; but if he’d switched to Thai boxing 100% (as I did at that time, faced with the same choice) he would have been in at the ground floor with Thai boxing’s start-up in the UK, and he had 10 years on everybody else at the time including all the Thais here, none of whom were anything compared with him.
He has that old geezer sadness now and it’s not pretty to watch.
