I hear this alot from folks from the early days that they took Texas Korean Karate, which in a nut shell ITF style of TKD. I know Pat Burleson and Skipper Mullins along with GM Kurban and Ray Mc callum was a big part of that tradition, but what seperated Texas Korean Karate from ITF and the TKD of yesterday?
Korean Karate was a term thought up for sales!
In the 60's the only thing known in the US was Karate if you were to hang a sign out on your door that said TaeKwon-Do no one would know what you were. A restaurant, a laundry, a car shop...
So the term Karate was amalgamated with most all martial arts in order to sell to the public what you were doing because people then knew, "Oh, thats one of them their Asian fightin schools".
Then you saw this meld into Karate/TaeKwon-Do
Now when you go into a studio that says Karate you are not sure what they are teaching until you see for yourself.
As an aside, Texas was just a descriptor, probably meant that you had to have a passport or speak Korean with a southern drawl. :uhyeah: just kidding
In reality most of these pioneers that came over to the US only were of a green belt capability wearing a black belt.
Then the sales games really started. If you watched in most citys, which can be varified by phone books, the sales phylosophy was that the black belt with the highest rank was the best. So the rank would jump each year as Korean instructors would try to prove they were better with the higher rank. Belt hoppers.
But on the other hand this was how they made their living so it was sometimes justified by them having to feed their family.
They were just sent over to propigate the art, not paid by the organization.
Similar to the ITF Black belt status card. ITF had money, but when they sent Choi to Canada he needed a way to support himself and what he was doing. Thus the status card that they could sell to students. It really had nothing to do with status or tracking black belts. Simply a way to make money to support an instructor.
