Mr. Sullivan on the Karate Connection and learning the basics

(posted on Facebook several years ago)

It was 1980 that things looked up again. Vic LeRoux, who had been a student of mine from the time he was fourteen years old and later a co-worker and fellow instructor at Mr. Parker’s West L.A. school, came to me and said he’d like to get the “Old Gang” back together and open a dojo on his side of town.

I told him he’d never get the “Old Gang” back together but chances are he’d create a “New Gang”.

He asked me to be the Head Instructor. It felt good to have a steady thing instead of just an occasional get together with old friends. And I was right about the Old and New Gangs. But the New Gang of the Karate Connection School is now the Old Gang and the Old Gang from the Crenshaw school is now the Over the Hill Gang. If that’s too hard to follow, don’t worry about it. It just means we’re all getting old.

When Vic was about to open the Karate Connection I asked him exactly what it was he intended to teach. He said, “The whole thing, all the techniques I taught at the West L.A. school.” I told him it was too much.

Then I asked him if he had ever taught anyone all of that material. He said, “Practically none, nobody ever stayed long enough.” I asked if that didn’t give him some sort of clue, maybe something was wrong.

I told him how, in the early days there weren’t but a handful of techniques, so we concentrated on the basics. And the guys of that time were some of the finest practitioners of the Art I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with and learn from. They were focused, the system was lean and the Old Man wouldn’t allow anyone to advance without impeccable basics.

Kenpo techniques have always been and still remain, the most fascinating part of the Art. It isn’t hard to understand why techniques won favor over strong hard basics and it was my observation that the instructors doing the actual teaching wanted still more.Their appetites seemed insatiable. The basics were still there but they seemed to be gotten through as quickly as possible in order to get to those “Fabulous Kenpo Techniques”

As the demand for techniques grew so did Mr. Parker’s ability to create them. He once told me that with the number of basic moves he had to work with, the number of combinations was virtually limitless. The only problem is, not all the combinations are worth putting together. Some things just don’t blend and flow.

If it doesn’t work don’t do it!

I told Vic, if I was to act as the Head Instructor we were going to have to go back to basics and cut down the number of techniques taught up to black belt. My feeling was and still is, when a student got his or her black belt they could go and learn all the techniques they wanted from wherever they might choose. But we weren’t going to turn out black belts who didn’t have the strongest basics we could give them.

The sum total of the Art is in the basics.

There’s never been a great practitioner in any style or system who didn’t have great basics. Can’t be done..."