Manny Saavedra, died 2024: Founder of World Sansei Goju-Ryu
He founded his own organisation out of Miami in 1979, from roots in Peter Urban’s USA Goju. This is the thinnest-sourced entry in this section, and we publish it with that said out loud rather than not at all.
- Died
- Reported as 27 September 2024
- Title
- Hanshi
- Founded
- World Sansei Goju-Ryu Karate-do Organization, 1979
- Based
- Miami, Florida
- Lineage
- USA Goju, under Peter Urban
An independent account published in 2011 — thirteen years before his death, and so not written to burnish an obituary — describes him as “the HeadMaster and Founder of the World Sansei GoJu organization,” founded in 1979 and headquartered in Miami, with his roots in USA Goju under Peter Urban. That is the firmest thing in the public record about him, and it is enough to establish that the organisation and the man are real and independently attested.
Peter Urban’s line
Urban is one of the load-bearing figures in American karate: he brought Goju to the United States and then, when the Japanese authorities declined to recognise an American offshoot, founded USA Goju anyway. The organisations that came out of his lineage — and there are many — are all descendants of that decision to stop asking permission.
Saavedra’s World Sansei Goju-Ryu is one of them. It is the same pattern that runs through Allen Steen and J. Pat Burleson breaking from Jhoon Rhee’s organisation in Texas a decade and a half earlier: the American instructor who decides the person running the school should control the school.
What a school owner should take from Manny Saavedra
Not from his life — the record is too thin for that. From the state of the record itself.
A man founded an international organisation, ran it for forty-five years, and when he died the only thing on the public internet giving a date was a single page on a student’s dojo website, alongside some posts from people who knew him. No newspaper, no funeral notice, no organisational announcement that survived.
If your organisation has no succession plan for its own records — who holds the certificates, who runs the website, who tells the membership — then this is what forty-five years of work looks like from the outside eighteen months later. It costs almost nothing to fix while you are alive.
Sources, and what we could not confirm — read this one carefully
- We held this entry back from the first publication of this section, and we want to be plain about why. The only web source giving a specific date of death is a single dojo website, gojuusa.com, which states: “Grandmaster Manny Saavedra, founder of the World Sansie Goju-Ryu Karate-do Organization Passed away on September 27, 2024.” We found no newspaper obituary, no funeral-home record, and no organisational announcement.
- What changed our mind is corroboration of the fact, though not the date. Independent posts from other martial artists refer to him as “the late” founder of Sansei Goju, including one announcing his passing. Those are not citable sources, but they are people who knew him, posting separately.
- Treat 27 September 2024 as reported, not established. A single source for a date is below the standard the rest of this section holds to.
- Note the spelling. The organisation appears as both “Sansei” and “Sansie” — the latter on the page that is the source of the death date. Lists circulating with “Sansie” are copying that page.
- No age, birth year, birthplace or cause of death is available anywhere. We checked Legacy.com and found a 2024 record for an “Emmanuel A. Saavedra” that is not him — a child who died that December. Anyone researching this should avoid that trap.
- Principal sources: gojuusa.com; Ric Pascetta’s 2011 article for Martial Arts Insider.
We would very much like to hear from anyone who trained under him or holds World Sansei Goju records. This entry can and should be better.