Past martial arts backgrounds?

Hi Brandon,

I grew up as a high schooler in a small coastal town in this state. As a high schooler, I watched a lot of instructional videos (warning: kung fu nerd) as an attempt to get better at standing up for myself from school inmates and other jerk encounters. After high school I started studying Hung ga at the local community college, which was transformative for me. It developed me physically which really helped my self-esteem as I was a small skinny child. I also learned a standing meditation from my father that I still practice daily. Not knowing much history of this practice, I later found a lot of similarities to Mantak Chia’s Iron Shirt Chi Kung, which I’ve integrated into my practice. I also study jeet kune do, because I’m a big Bruce Lee fan.

Thanks for sharing yourself!

Thanks for sharing! When was in 2nd grade my parents wanted me to take a martial art class because I was getting bullied pretty bad. I got beat up a lot and found out I was a faster runner than most of the bullies. I ended up on a style called Wu Ying Tao that was created by Bruce Terrill. That changed my life and I knew it then. In total, I was only in that class for about a year and a half but I had learned how to use it to defend myself. I got jumped by 4 kids at school and was able to groin kick all 4 without getting hurt myself. The class closed down due to lack of student and I didn’t do martial arts again until I was 17.  However, I kept up with what I knew and spared every chance I got. The martial art foundation I had gotten in grade school protected me many time before Wing Chun found me.

I got into Wing Chun because one of my friends father taught it and it was affordable. Sifu Randy Lewis took me under his wing and quickly I became the senior student in charge of class. My main job was to teach every new student the foundation of this art. I did this as trade for my training along with taking my Sifu’s garbage out, unloading grocerys and working around his house. As a young man, I leaned how to work hard for what I believed in through his example. He left the school to me officially in 2010.

Sifu Randy passed away six and a half years ago at this point. I continued to teach and train by myself until I met Steve several years ago. Steve gave me a new outlook on this art. It was nice to have a teacher and mentor again.

I grew up in Southeast Portland. Everywhere from the willamette river in Sellwood to 82nd and Foster were my stomping grounds. One of my closest friends and I spent a lot of our childhood doing hoodrat things with our older brothers/cousins. Staying out in the streets til 4 AM, drinking and smoking at such a young age provided a lot of heated and petty moments fueled by passion which usually ended up in us fighting in some shape or form. My close friend who lived through all this with me was passionate about boxing. He knew all the technical things. I was pretty ignorant to it all but being as close as we were, we squared up a lot . We used to skip PE in middle school and beat the shit out of eachother in the locker room. I hated going against him cuz unlike a lot of people, he had technique backing him so he usually whooped my ass. A combination of that and us doing bad street shit as kids made me decent at fighting, in hindsight, WHEN I was angry or had that fire of passion triggered inside me. I never really dove too deep into the technicals, and as time went on I encountered buddhism when I was around 16. I dove as deep as I could into that for about a year, while still keeping my door open to other “spiritual” guides. But for the most part I was following Buddhist teachings. There were sporadic periods where I would renounce a lot of my “worldly desires” or withdraw from pleasurable things just to see how far I could go with removing my “attachments”.  It all sounds funny to me now. But that time in my life pretty much completely evaporated my will to hurt anyone. My journey brought me elsewhere and I’m no longer buddhist, or a spiritual philosophiser of any sorts. The most spiritual thing I feel I did was stop being spiritual. Now my main focus is how do I become MORE alive? Lol anyways thats all just side story to lead me to say, I still have a fiery passion but my will is hardly in the direction of harming people. Which is good, but due to this, I’m not sure how well I’d hold up in a fight these days. That uncertainty is what inspired me to want to get back into martial arts. I wanted to do something different that the masses dont really know anything about. Wing Chun attracted me because the IP Man movies are fly but also because of how much finesse and control is in the art. Boxing is a lot of BOOM POW SMASH. And that can go on for a while. With what I’ve witnessed so far in wing chun it’s like you blink and you’re already dead. I’m happy to be here with all that I’m learning. It’s another passion for me now along with the other artistic things I do. I want to get to the point where I can control any type of physical altercation if it occurs and protect my loved ones from ever being hurt if I’m present. With all that said some of my old fighting spirit is revived since I joined and I’m too hyped to start sparring.

I started as a kid. My father wanted to toughen  us up , so he insisted I that me and my brothers take a taekwondo class. We did that for around 6 months then took a boxing class for awhile. When I was 25 I was working in construction and one of my co workers was a brown belt in taekwondo and was always talking about his art. One day I asked him to spare with me and I was amazed at how effectively he was able to block my kicks and punches.  I excitedly asked him to further train me and so began about a year of training in the den of my house. The training was mostly sparing and kicking the crap out each other and at the time I was very pleased with the training. My trainer John lewis was very good at what he did. Taekwondo and a form of karate. My dad, who was a veteran of many real life fights started coming over to watch our training sessions after watching several training sessions he one day told me that something was missing in my training. He told me that although my kicks were getting good, I was weak in close and needed better close range training. So I began looking for another trainer for both me and John.  I got extreamly lucky. The first place I found was a place called  professional martial arts witch had a style called wing chun. I had never heard of it and had no clue what it was, but the classes were on sundays and that was the only day I had in my busy schedule. This is how I met my sifu and mentor sifu randy lewis. He explained the art and that was exactly what my dad wanted me to try. After just a few classes I began to see that wing chun was far superior to anything I had done previously and i began to train vigorously. During this time I also took another martial art called wu ying dow. There I was trained  to recognize 3 different fighting ranges witch I continue to use to this day , there I also met kelvin and his son damian who became my sparing partners , a couple very talented guys who over time really helped me to refine my 2nd range techniques,  and sparing in general.   After training with sifu randy lewis for about four years sifu ray joined, he trained very hard and had a natural talent. He quickly became the best us us all. Over the years,  spent with sifu randy and christine lewis, I learned a very solid wingchun foundation. Sifu lewis and christine were very good at what they  did. I also learned a lot from Sean bishop christine,and sifu ray. Both Sean and especially sifu ray helped me continously refine my hand techniques. Over the years sifu ray taught me many techniques including  staff sparing. I had never seen anyone who could use a staff like sifu ray can. After years of training I became separated from the school and pretty much my life. After about a 6 year separation my daughter refound sifu ray. I was extreamly pleased and could hardly believe he was now head sifu at lightning hand. How very lucky and fortunate I was that he welcomed me back as part of the lightning hand family. And wow, I was amazed at how good he had become. I mean , I thought he was good back then, but now…. yea.. wow…Since refunding him he, and some of his students have helped me understand much about the art I dident previously know. Very advanced, super secret wing chun tech. I’m very happy he is the sifu of lightning hand! He was definitely the best of us!

Let me post this small novel in the correct media form this time. Shifu Ray pointed out I  posted in Facebook open to everyone.

My Martial Arts experience started around 1965 when I was about 12 attending a YMCA seminar on Jujitsu. After the seminar, I talked my Dad into allowing me to learn more and signed up for some classes with an old man named Mr. Allen who had his much younger protégé teach classes. I remember learning how to apply the Japanese wrist lock/throw, Hip Throws and even a simple close up gun defense. In Jr. High and High school I joined the wrestling team competing at 119 lb weight class and became caption of the team my senior year. This provided me with some grappling experience. I decided not to continue in college feeling I need to focus on my education instead.

When I graduated from College I moved from Akron, Ohio to the California and decided I need to learn more about how to defend myself against someone using there fists since wrestling was not very effective in this situation I took up Kenpo Karate first learning Tracy brothers variant. Then when the studio was sold off to another owner I learned Ed Parker’s version, he brought Kenpo to America and sponsored a yearly Martial Arts tournament in Pasadena where Bruce Lee was discovered by Hollywood for the Green Hornet TV show. Ed was know as Hollywood’s Martial Arts instructor and train stars such as Elvis Presley.

I even studied some traditional Kung Fu call Wing Lam while studying Kenpo. When I moved to Oregon I continued my studies learning still another variant of Kenpo requiring me to earn my brown belt status 3 times for each Kenpo variant. Kenpo was ok and you could see some of Bruce Lees influence that was picked up by Ed Parker who was friends with Bruce. Kenpo had a belt system requiring learning new basics, 20 to 40 self-defense techniques against various attacks, and forms for each of the belt levels. It was a very structured system to learn Martial Arts but had too many things to remember making it difficult to act spontaneously. After about a 5 year break from Martial Arts I found another system that caught my eye. Sheng Hun Kung Fu which was a system comprised of 7 animal styles: Bear, Mantis, Crane, Cobra, Mongoose, Tiger and Dragon.

This is where I met Dan Evans who is now currently studying Wing Chun at Lightning Hand Academy. We were workout partners and earned our first two black belts in Bear, (basics of all 7 animals) and Mantis at about the same time. This style was also influenced by Tracy’s Kenpo since our shifu once studied this system so it also followed the same learning system including many street techniques, basics and forms for each belt. Fun to learn but difficult to remember and execute all the material as I grew older. So in all, I have over 30 years of serious Martial Arts experience but have forgotten most of it. After retiring I decided I would like to continue with Martial Arts but with a style that would work for someone my age. Always wanted to learn Wing Chun and find it is perfect style for me. It also does not require extreme athleticism to execute effectively and there are far fewer basics and forms to learn. Rather then learning 100s of street techniques and trying to remember in real time which one to apply it focus on playfully working with the basics to spontaneously respond in a self-defense situations. I also like the idea of moving quicker by learning to relax your muscles so they are not working against you and learning to use your structure to apply power.

Here is my story. You will read this, and think “man, does this guy like talking about himself!” But I swear, every episode highlighted here has a ton of stories, and this long treatise is a manifesto of restraint and brevity on my part.

I got involved with martial arts when I was really young. My Dad was an old-school martial artist like you don’t see nowadays. A vietnam era veteran, my Dad joined Ed Parker’s Kenpo organization in the late 60’s/Early 70’s, when the vets were coming home from the war and martial arts were new to America. I grew up on my Dad’s stories, and was enthralled by martial arts for as long as I can remember.

My Dad moved my family to Southern Oregon when I was six. There he discovered Tai Chi…there was a great teacher at the time, Steve Doob, and he went all in. When I was 8 or so, I started showing a real interest in defending myself. I was a chubby, sensitive kid in red-neck purgatory, so he figured I better learn to fight if he wanted me to see my 18th birthday. My first memories of getting lessons were in the back yard of my house, learning to stand at attention, and doing basic Kenpo blocks and kicks. A little later, I picked up the Yang Style short form (which I consider my first martial arts style), and I officially started taking classes when I was 13. I started with American Freestyle Karate (a style from a guy name Dan Anderson) at Rogue Community College in Grants Pass.

Karate changed my life. I had a couple of great teacher…Linda Harris, Scott (red-haired guy…can’t remember his last name), and Robert Rubio. Robert really adopted me, basically, and I studied under him until I left for college. When I earned my brown belt, he brought his whole Filipino family to witness it in the college gym. He hand-sewed my belt, and I have it today. Robert gave me family, confidence and courage, that serve me to this day, and kept me strong through some dark times. The family I feel with Wing Chun reminds me of those days.

I started college in Ashland, where I met Sensei Darrell Bloom at the Siskiyou Aikikai, and I learned that martial arts wasn’t just punches and kicks, but also meditation and spiritual practice. I also had a brief stint in Shotokan Karate under Master George Clark (“Haaardshhhhip breeeeds CHARACHTER!”), which I took for credits. Somewhere in there, my Dad and I took a class in San Soo Kung Fu under Sifu Michael Mirdad, who owned a new-age crystal/book shop in Ashland, which I still remember (I just googled Michael, and he is now styling himself as a spiritual teacher, healer, and mystic in Sedona, AZ). I finished college at Lewis and Clark in Portland. I took Master Choi’s Taekwondo, which was offered as a class for credit, and did lots of tournament fighting. I also continued Aikido studies at the Multnomah Aikikai under Sensei Frank Apodaca, so in all I managed four years of Aikido.

After college with my sweet English degree, I went through a period I like to call “what the fuck do I do with myself now?!?”…I worked at restaurant jobs and later started temping. This period marked the longest time I went without martial arts, around six months. I got hired at a big bank, and laid off three months later. Around this time, I met my then girlfriend, now wife. My big bank offered to relocate me for a job in San Francisco, so I did that.

In SF, you might imagine I joined a secret conclave of old world Chinese martial arts masters, but sadly, no. There were two options near my flat…Doc Fai Wong’s school in the Sunset near my house, or Song Om Taekwondo under Michael Brantseg. I went to Doc Fai Wong’s school, where they taught me the salute, which literally was yelling “Doc Fai Wong” while we punchy-kickied. Nah bro, not for me. Michael’s Taekwondo school was really cool, and he was a national champion with badass skills, so I did that. Serious opportunity missed…Wing Chun in San Francisco!

A year and a half in SF and my girfriend, now wife, welcomed my daughter into this world, and we decided that SF was no place to raise a family when you are broke-ass. At the ripe old age of 23-24, we moved back to PDX to raise our daughter. Shortly after arriving in Portland, I found the art I was to commit to for the next 20 years. The style was called Sheng Hun Kung Fu, and my teacher was Shifu Gary Schaefer. One of the Shifus there was none other than our own William Baird, who is now part of our Wing Chun school. After around 5 or 6 years, I earned my black belt under Gary, and began teaching for him. A while later, maybe 10 years in, he had a nasty divorce with his wife, and he moved to Northern California. Me and a couple other guys took over his school and ran it for several years. We kept it going for a while, but then things went bad, so me and some of the guys took Sheng Hun underground and started teaching out of garages, warehouses, gyms…wherever we could find a place to punch each other. I really love Sheng Hun, but this period wasn’t super positive. My teacher went from never wanting to be commercial to “why aren’t you selling more patches”…I have a lot of good friends from this art that I train with today, so I will leave this there.

After many years in a style that no one has heard of, I decided the check out a style that everyone has heard of. I found Sifu Ray on Barbur Boulevard, which was some sort of bait and switch bullshit. See, he got me hooked on the Wing Chun junk, then started to move further and further away! At Barbur, I fell in love with Wing Chun, and decided this was the style I wanted to do from here on out. It made me comfortable within a range that always scared the hell out of me. I call it the “Close talking uncle” of martial arts. I like to freak out my own students by getting all close and personal, Wing Chun style. “Hey buddy, how you doin? Smell what I had for lunch?”

I am really grateful for what I have found at Lightning Hands, although I can’t hide my disappointment at never being about to spray lightning from my hands, Palpatine style (false advertising?). I feel incredibly lucky to be on this journey, and Sifu Ray’s class offers a rare sense of community that feels like a capstone to my experience, and a promise for more. In our orbit are Steve and Wes, great teachers and standard bearers in their own right. There is support, tenure, and accomplishment within this school. I have seen a lot, and I know not to take something like this for granted.

Dan – you arent shooting lightning yet ? Shaking my damn head.