J. Pat Burleson, 1936-2021: America’s First National Karate Champion

Ask a school owner where the coloured-belt system came from and you will get a story about Japan. Ask where the modern version came from — the one built to give a student a reason to stay another three months — and one of the answers is a storefront in Fort Worth, Texas, in the early 1960s.

Born: April 27, 1936
Died: October 31, 2021, in Azle, Texas, age 85
Lineage: Wado-ryu in Japan; Jhoon Rhee lineage in Texas
Rank: 10th degree black belt; the senior American rank under Jhoon Rhee
Known for: Winning the first U.S. National Karate Championships, 1964
Called: The Father of All Karate Champions

James Pat Burleson joined the U.S. Navy in 1955 and spent part of his service as a travelling boxing champion across the Pacific bases. He had boxed in high school and fought Golden Gloves. In 1957, stationed at Iwakuni in Japan, he started training in wado-ryu karate, and supplemented it with Chinese boxing study in Hong Kong.

He came home to Fort Worth in 1959 with a red belt in Korean tang soo do and no obvious place to put it. Then he met Allen Steen, at the time a brown belt under a Korean engineering student in Austin named Jhoon Rhee. Rhee asked him to change his red belt to brown to fit the system, and he did. In 1963 he was promoted to first-degree black belt — roughly three months behind Steen, making him by most accounts the second American to earn that rank on American soil in the Korean arts.

Washington, D.C., 1964

Jhoon Rhee promoted the first U.S. National Karate Championships in Washington in 1964. Burleson won the black belt grand championship, beating Sgt. Herbert Peters in the final.

The claim that gets made about that win needs a qualifier, and the qualifier is more interesting than the claim. The year before, in July 1963, Robert Trias and John Keehan had run a World Karate Tournament at the University of Chicago Fieldhouse, and an unknown brown belt named AlGene Caraulia won the black belt sparring division after eleven matches. Chicago came first chronologically. But it was billed as a world tournament. Rhee’s 1964 event was the first billed and run as a U.S. National championship — which is why the cleanest formulation, and the one we use, is that Burleson joined AlGene Caraulia in becoming the first recognised national champion of a sport that did not exist a decade earlier.

Rhee’s event ran continuously to 1970, and in 1965 became the first karate tournament to get national television coverage on Wide World of Sports. Burleson’s win made him the first genuine star the sport had. It also got him into the room, at a Los Angeles dinner for martial arts leaders, where he met Bruce Lee. They stayed friends until Lee died in 1973.

I noticed that Bruce Lee’s forearms looked like steel cables.— J. Pat Burleson, on their first meeting

The belt-goal system

Here is the part of his record that belongs in this magazine rather than in a tournament history.

According to the American Karate Black Belt Association, Burleson “was one of the first to use the ‘belt-goal’ system in the early 1960s. Before his system most schools had only white, brown and black belt ranking.” The World Martial Arts Ranking Association, which he later founded, credits him independently with pioneering belt programmes for the karate business.

Consider what that actually is. A white-brown-black ladder gives a beginner a goal roughly four years away. An intermediate ladder gives that same beginner a goal roughly twelve weeks away, and then another, and another. Every testing fee, every retention curve, every parent conversation about “what’s next” in every school in this industry runs on that structure. It is not an exaggeration to say that the single most important commercial mechanism in the martial arts school business was, in part, worked out in a Fort Worth storefront by a former Navy boxer who needed his students to stop quitting.

He opened that school in 1959, and Black Belt describes it as one of the first karate schools in the United States. It grew into a chain in and around Fort Worth; the number of locations is not documented anywhere and we are not going to invent one. He also promoted the Texas State Championships, which despite the name became one of the leading tournaments in the country.

What he built after the ring

He was an original member of the Southwest Karate Black Belt Association and a charter board member of the AKBBA’s Southwest Region. He left Texas in the late 1970s for other business ventures and came back to the Dallas–Fort Worth area in 1990 to help restructure the organisation’s governance.

Later he founded the World Martial Arts Ranking Association, a black belt credentialing body underwritten by the endorsement of thirteen American martial arts pioneers — an attempt to solve a problem the industry still has, which is that a black belt certificate means whatever the person who signed it decided it means. He also founded Christian Soldiers Karate, a faith-based programme now continued by his senior student Jamie Cashion.

After September 11, 2001, he trained airline flight attendants and pilots in self-defence.

And he worked in film and television. “If there was a guy getting kicked through a window,” he said, “it was probably me.” A good deal of that work came through Chuck Norris, on Walker, Texas Ranger and elsewhere.

Chuck Norris

The two were close in a way the record makes unusually plain. In Burleson’s own words: “Chuck was my best man when I was married and we owned karate schools together for a while.”

In March 2019 Burleson went into cardiac arrest; his family’s fundraiser recorded that his heart stopped and an AED brought him back. That September, Norris headlined the J. Pat Burleson Invitational at the Ridglea Theater in Fort Worth to defray the medical bills. Seven hundred and ninety-eight people came. More than forty tenth-degree black belts were in the room, along with Cynthia Rothrock, Jeff Smith, Cliff Thomas, Linda Denley and Troy Dorsey. Norris and his wife Gena signed autographs and posed for photographs for nearly three hours without a break. The organisers reported roughly $40,000 raised at the event and more than $15,000 online.

Burleson died two years later. Norris sent a video to the funeral: “Not only was he one of the world’s greatest martial artists, but one of the finest men I’ve ever known.”

What a school owner should take from J. Pat Burleson

He is the clearest case in this industry’s history of a competitor who understood that winning does not keep the lights on. He won the biggest prize American karate had in 1964, and the thing he is actually owed for is a retention mechanism he worked out in the same years, in a storefront, because students were leaving.

The second thing is credentialing. He spent the back half of his career trying to make a rank certificate mean something outside the school that issued it. That problem is not solved. It is arguably worse now than it was when he started on it.

Competition record

The fullest surviving list is the AKBBA’s: the 1964 U.S. National Karate Championships in Washington; the 1965 Texas State Championship; the 1965 Southwest Karate Grand Championship; the 1966 U.S. Championships in Dallas; and the 1966 Open Championships in Oklahoma City. He also competed at the 1963 World Karate Championship in Chicago and at Ed Parker’s Long Beach Internationals in 1964. He was on the cover of Karate Illustrated in September 1969. A complete win-loss record does not survive.

You had to be able to back it up in those days.— J. Pat Burleson, on the Blood and Guts era

He had a line about what that era was like on the business end, too: “I had a school next to a bar so I would get visitors pretty regular.”

Honors, students, and the end

He was inducted into the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame in 2002 and into the Masters Hall of Fame in 2014 as a Texas Legend. The AKBBA calls him the grandfather of American sport karate. He held a tenth-degree black belt and the senior American rank in Jhoon Rhee’s lineage.

In April 2014 he promoted John Worley and Larry Carnahan to tenth degree in front of hundreds of students. In 2011 Jamie Cashion gathered more than four hundred black belts for his seventy-fifth birthday.

He died on October 31, 2021, in Azle, Texas. More than a thousand people attended the viewing. His Celebration of Life was held at Open Door Church in Burleson, Texas, on November 3. He is survived by his wife Anna, seven children, twelve grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His obituary records that his biggest goal in life was to become more like his Savior Jesus Christ.

His school still operates in Saginaw, Texas, run by instructors including his son Luke Killen.

We’ve pioneered a rugged art, one that’s respected anywhere in the world.— J. Pat Burleson

Sources, and what we could not confirm

Death date. The funeral home records Sunday, October 31, 2021. A widely syndicated newspaper account says “Sunday, November 1” — internally impossible, since November 1 was a Monday. We follow the funeral home.
Birth date. April 27, 1936 per the funeral home; the same newspaper account says April 26.
Cause of death is not public. We have not connected it to the 2019 cardiac arrest; no source does.
Who promoted him to first dan. USAdojo says Jhoon Rhee; the AKBBA says Allen Steen. Both agree on 1963 and on the Rhee–Steen–Burleson lineage.
“Rhee’s first U.S. black belt.” This claim circulates in the Texas community but we found no reputable source supporting it, and six sources — including Burleson’s own biography pages — place Allen Steen first, in 1962. What is well documented is that Burleson ended his life holding the senior American rank under Rhee.
“American Karate System.” Burleson is sometimes credited with founding it. The American Karate System as an organisation was founded by Ernest H. Lieb in 1972 and does not mention Burleson. We have described what he demonstrably founded instead.
“First karate school in Texas.” Contested — the AKBBA credits Allen Steen with the first commercial storefront, in Dallas in June 1962. Black Belt‘s careful phrasing for Burleson, and ours, is “one of the first karate schools in the United States.”
John Worley and Larry Carnahan. Some accounts call Burleson their instructor. National Karate’s own record says Worley trained under Jhoon Rhee in Washington from 1970 to 1973 and that Burleson promoted him in 2014. We follow that.
The 250,000 figure. His organisation cites roughly 250,000 graduates, elsewhere rendered as 250,000 black belt descendants. Those describe different things. We have left the number out rather than pick one.
Number of schools, founding dates of WMARA and Christian Soldiers Karate, birthplace, parents and Navy rank are all undocumented.
Principal sources: the funeral home obituary; the Cleburne Times-Review and Weatherford Democrat funeral coverage; USAdojo; the American Karate Black Belt Association; Black Belt; Fort Worth Magazine; the family’s 2019 fundraiser page; and Burleson’s own interview with Chicago National Karate.