Elvis Presley and the Birth of Modern American Karate

Most people remember Elvis Presley as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. I remember him as the co-owner of the Memphis karate school where, one afternoon in 1976, I trained with Bill “Superfoot” Wallace. I was a teenager who had been running my own school for a year. Wallace was the reigning PKA world middleweight champion. Elvis was alive, at Graceland, and deeper into martial arts than almost anyone outside Memphis understood. Fifty years later I can see what that afternoon was: a few hours inside the room where American karate was turning professional.

Elvis Presley was not a celebrity who took a few karate lessons for a photo opportunity.

He trained for nineteen years, from a rented apartment in West Germany in 1959 until his death in 1977. He earned a tested black belt from one of the hardest examiners in the United States Army. He sought out Ed Parker, Kang Rhee, Tetsuji Murakami, Mike Stone and Bill Wallace — a list that reads like a syllabus of mid-century American martial arts. He put his own money into a karate school and into a film meant to sell competitive karate to a mass audience. And the movement vocabulary he built in the dojo followed him onto the stage in Las Vegas.

None of which made him a great fighter. He never was. But the distance between “celebrity with an honorary belt” and “the man who bankrolled a professional karate documentary and signed rank certificates as Master of Martial Arts” is the distance this article is about.

Germany, 1959: where Elvis actually started

The usual version of this story says Elvis started karate in 1958 when he was drafted. The dates are worth getting right, because they change the picture.

Elvis was inducted at the Memphis draft board on 24 March 1958 and arrived in Germany on 1 October 1958, stationed at Friedberg and living off base in Bad Nauheim. But the documented karate instruction starts later. The Deutscher Karate Verband — Germany’s national governing body, and about as authoritative a source as exists on this — records that Jürgen Seydel wrote to Elvis offering to teach him, that Elvis accepted, and that Seydel taught him in his Bad Nauheim apartment from October 1959 until Elvis returned to the United States on 1 March 1960. In December 1959 Seydel brought him along to regular group training at Bad Homburg.

Seydel was not a convenient local instructor. He founded the first karate club in Germany at Bad Homburg in 1957, took his first dan in 1959, and was the only dan-graded instructor in the entire country until 1965. The German federation’s own chronicle calls him the father of German karate. He later received the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Federal Cross of Merit, from the president of Germany.

There is a second instructor most tellings leave out. Graceland’s official timeline records a furlough to Paris from 12–17 January 1960 taken “with his karate instructor, Jurgen Seydel,” during which Elvis trained in Shotokan under the Japanese instructor Tetsuji Murakami — by one account nine consecutive days of it. A twenty-five-year-old at the height of his fame spent his leave in a Paris dojo.

So the honest version is: five months of documented private instruction, plus group training, plus a week in Paris. Not a lifetime, but not a photo opportunity either — and, critically, it did not stop when he got home.

The black belt that counts: Hank Slomanski, 21 July 1960

Of all Elvis’s ranks, one is well documented, hard-tested and essentially uncontested. It is the first one.

Command Sergeant Major Henry “Hank” Slomanski — the name is often misspelled Slemansky — enlisted in the US Army in 1944 at sixteen, took three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star, trained under Dr. Tsuyoshi Chitose, and by report won a Japanese karate championship in 1953. He was, by every account, not a man who handed out favours.

Chito-ryu’s own governing body records that on 21 July 1960 Elvis received his black belt from Slomanski, and that he carried the sho-dan certificate in his wallet until he died. The style was Chito-ryu. Some sources say Shito-ryu or Shorin-ryu; those are errors. The test happened in the United States — Elvis had been discharged on 5 March 1960 — though sources disagree on whether it was in Memphis or in the base gym at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

The Fort Campbell account, from within the Kenpo community, holds that Elvis was deliberately sent to a brutal examiner precisely because other instructors had grown reluctant to promote celebrities, and that a fourth-dan was used as a full-contact test partner. Slomanski’s verdict afterwards is quoted in several places and is the best line in the whole story:

“The kid ain’t pretty, but he’s tough, and he’s a black belt.”

Slomanski promoted him again, to ni-dan, on 17 October 1963. That promotion is recorded by the style but is thinner in the record than the first.

Ed Parker and seventeen years

Elvis met Ed Parker, the founder of American Kenpo, in May 1960 at the Beverly Wilshire health club, where Parker was demonstrating for a group of doctors. Parker’s recollection of the introduction has an unexpected diffidence to it: “After it was over, he came up to me and said ‘Uh, I don’t think you know me, but my name is Elvis Presley.'”

What followed was the longest relationship in Elvis’s martial arts life. The Washington Post, writing a year after Elvis’s death, described Parker as his martial arts instructor and “informal bodyguard for 17 years.” Parker’s students filled that role too: Dave Hebler, the fifth black belt Parker ever promoted, worked as an Elvis bodyguard from 1972 to 1976.

Parker also promoted him, repeatedly, inside the International Kenpo Karate Association. The physical evidence is better than the narrative here: an IKKA gold identification card issued to Elvis as a fifth-degree black belt on 23 February 1972 has passed through auction, and Graceland’s archives hold his seventh and eighth degree Kenpo certificates. Parker defended those promotions on the record: “I truly felt that he had earned it. It wasn’t an honorary thing.”

Not everyone agreed, then or now, and we take that up below.

Parker matters to this story for a second reason that has nothing to do with Elvis. In August 1964 he founded the International Karate Championships at the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium — the tournament that introduced Bruce Lee to the American martial arts public, where Lee demonstrated the one-inch punch. Mike Stone won the first one. Chuck Norris, Joe Lewis, Jim Kelly, Benny Urquidez, Billy Blanks and Bill Wallace all came through it. Parker understood something most traditional instructors of his generation did not: that martial arts in America could be staged, promoted and sold.

Which made him and Elvis a natural pair. Both men understood performance.

Kang Rhee, Memphis, and a white Cadillac

When Elvis was home, his instructor was Kang Rhee.

Rhee was born 30 January 1938 and came to Memphis around 1964 at the invitation of an American serviceman he had trained in Korea. He established his PaSaRyu association in Memphis in 1966, on Poplar Avenue, and became one of the significant figures in the city’s martial arts life — he ran a St. Jude benefit tournament every year from 1970 to 1993, took a Tennessee Governor’s Award in 1988, and was named a Tennessee Ambassador of Goodwill in 2001. He died on 16 August 2019, which is the anniversary of Elvis’s death, forty-two years to the day.

Graceland states plainly that Elvis trained with Rhee from 1970 to 1974. Rhee gave him the training name “Tiger” — Elvis had first asked for “Mr. Panther” and changed it because of what the word meant politically in 1970. The name outlived the training: the “Mad Tiger” jumpsuit Bill Belew designed for the 1974 Las Vegas season was, per Graceland, inspired directly by the nickname Kang Rhee gave him.

Rhee promoted him to seventh degree in March 1973 and to eighth on 16 September 1974 at a private ceremony at the studio.

And then there is the Cadillac. It is true, and it is documented by Graceland rather than by legend: a custom Eldorado, bought by Vernon Presley, driven by Elvis as his personal car for about ten months, then given to Kang Rhee in 1973. It was triple white with a Continental-style rear end and a silver grille, and it carried a dashboard plaque reading “To Master Kang Rhee from Elvis Presley.” It survives, in the Harrah Collection at the National Automobile Museum in Reno.

But Kang Rhee’s Memphis operation matters to this article for another reason entirely. One of the instructors working there in the early 1970s was a man from Indiana with a ruined right knee.

Bill “Superfoot” Wallace

Anyone who competed in American karate in that era knew the name.

Bill Wallace, born 1 December 1945, started judo in 1966 and tore up his right knee in practice. The injury ended his judo. He took up karate in February 1967 and rebuilt his entire game around the other leg, using the right purely as a base and turning the left into a roundhouse, hook kick and side kick delivered at a speed that opponents described as unreadable. Hence the nickname.

It is worth pausing on that, because it is the part of the Wallace story that actually transfers to a school floor. He did not overcome the injury. He reorganised around it, and the constraint produced the most recognisable kicking arsenal of his generation.

Wallace worked for Kang Rhee at his Memphis school — Wallace has said so himself — and Rhee’s organisation listed him as a full instructor in the PaSaRyu association. At the same time he was a graduate student at Memphis State University, teaching karate, judo, wrestling and weightlifting in the physical education programme, and he took his M.S. in kinesiology there in 1976.

On 14 September 1974, at the first PKA World Championships at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Wallace became world middleweight champion. He never lost the title. He retired undefeated in 1980 at 23–0, his last bout on 8 June 1980 against Robert Biggs.

In 1976 he was the reigning world champion, he was finishing a master’s degree in Memphis, and he was the head instructor at a karate school on Overton Park Avenue.

An afternoon at the Tennessee Karate Institute

What follows is my own recollection. I have no document to support it and I am not aware of anyone else who can corroborate it. Readers should weigh it accordingly.

In 1976 I spent an afternoon training with Bill Wallace at the Tennessee Karate Institute in Memphis — the school Elvis Presley had put his money into two years earlier.

I was sixteen. I had started teaching in 1974 and opened my own school in 1975, at fifteen, under Jhoon Rhee. In the hierarchy of that room I was nobody, and I knew it.

What I remember most exactly is the left leg. You can watch the film of Wallace and understand intellectually that he was fast. Standing in front of it is a different category of information. The kick arrived before the decision to throw it seemed to have been made. There was no telegraph, no chambering you could read, no shift of weight that gave you a half-beat of warning. He would explain what he was about to do, do it, and it still landed.

I did not walk out of there thinking I had been present at anything historic. I thought I had been given an extraordinary afternoon of training. Elvis Presley was a name on the building’s story, not a presence in the room; he was alive, he was in Memphis, and he had nothing to do with my day.

Fifty years on, the arithmetic looks different. Wallace was the world champion. The school existed because the most famous entertainer alive had decided to fund it. Professional karate was fourteen months into its existence as a televised sport. And I was a fifteen-month-old school owner who had wandered into the middle of it.

What the Tennessee Karate Institute actually was

This is the part of the Elvis karate story that gets flattened most often, in both directions. People either say Elvis owned a karate school, full stop, or they dismiss the whole thing as a rich man’s hobby. The documented version is more specific and more interesting than either.

The Tennessee Karate Institute opened in the Crosstown area of Memphis in 1974. Graceland dates the opening to 4 July 1974, when Elvis marked it with a ninety-minute karate demonstration alongside Ed Parker; footage of it was later used in This Is Elvis. A surviving TKI rank certificate numbered 001 is dated 5 July 1974 — the day after.

Elvis’s role is best described as founding financial partner and co-owner, not proprietor. Patrick Wrenn, who was one of the partners, has said that Elvis, Wallace and he “put in money and ran the studio… for four years as a corporation.” Bill Wallace, in a 1978 interview, put it more bluntly: “He owned the school that I was teaching at.” A contemporaneous 1974 event report described Wallace as a man who “runs a karate school owned by Elvis Presley.” Elvis bankrolled the build-out and paid the head instructor. He did not run it day to day.

The paperwork is revealing about how the partners saw him. Certificate 001 is signed by Elvis Presley as “Master of Martial Arts,” countersigned by Ben Edwards as chief instructor and by Ed Parker as a second master of martial arts. The school gave Elvis a martial arts title, not a corporate one.

The founding group was Elvis, Red West — his long-time friend and bodyguard, who held a TKI black belt certificate signed by both Elvis and Ed Parker — Bill Wallace as head instructor, and Patrick Wrenn.

There is a persistent claim that Elvis withdrew his support and the school folded in the mid-1970s. We could find no source for it, and the first-hand accounts say the opposite. TKI operated continuously from July 1974 until 1978. It closed for three reasons that arrived together: Elvis died in August 1977, Wallace left to chase the professional circuit and film work, and Wrenn’s back gave out while he was alone in the studio.

The postscript is the best part. Patrick Wrenn reopened the Tennessee Karate Institute at its original address, 1372 Overton Park Avenue, in August 2017. It operates today as both a school and a museum. If you want to stand in the room, you can.

14 September 1974: the night karate turned professional

To understand where Elvis sat in this, you have to understand what was happening around him.

Point karate was thriving. But a group of fighters and promoters was pushing toward full contact, and on 14 September 1974 at the Los Angeles Sports Arena the PKA World Championships crowned the first professional champions. Three of the four were American:

• Joe Lewis, world heavyweight champion, beating Franc Brodar of Yugoslavia. Lewis had fought what is generally regarded as the first kickboxing bout in North America on 17 January 1970 and originated the idea for the championship itself.
• Jeff Smith, world light-heavyweight champion, beating Wally Slocki of Canada on a decision. Smith went on to defend the title seven times, including on the undercard of the Thrilla in Manila in October 1975.
• Bill Wallace, world middleweight champion, through Bernd Grothe of West Germany and then Daniel Richer of Canada in the final.

The lightweight champion was Isaías Dueñas of Mexico.

Elvis’s documented personal connection among the three Americans was Wallace, who worked for him. We should be careful not to manufacture friendships out of proximity: there is no good evidence that Elvis was close to Lewis or Smith.

There is a widely repeated claim that Elvis supplied the uniforms for the first American world champion kickboxing team. We are not printing it as fact, because the specific version does not survive checking. The September 1974 championships were not a team event — they were an individual tournament — and the contemporaneous report credits the uniforms at that event to the Canadian designer Gilles Galipeault. There is a separate, thinner account that Elvis bought custom red-white-and-blue gis from Tokaido in Japan, at roughly $400 each against about $35 for a standard uniform, for an American karate team’s European tour. That story may well be true. It is not the September 1974 story, and we could not find primary documentation for it.

The New Gladiators: Elvis tries to sell karate to America

Elvis did not only want to practise karate. He wanted other people to watch it.

In 1974, George Waite — a Kenpo student of Ed Parker’s — brought Parker a concept for a documentary on elite karate competition. Parker took it to Elvis. Elvis approved it, put in $50,000 to start production, co-wrote it, narrated it and appeared on camera demonstrating. Graceland holds the original handwritten script.

Shooting ran through 1973–75 and followed the American team to London and Brussels, with demonstration footage shot in Memphis. Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, Roy Kurban, Emil Farkas, Darnell Garcia and Ron Marchini appear. The cinematographers were Allen Daviau and John Hora, both of whom went on to major careers.

It was never finished in Elvis’s lifetime. After his death the producer abandoned it, and the original 16mm elements reportedly sat in the bed of a 1961 GMC pickup in a West Hollywood garage for roughly thirty years. A version was released on DVD in the early 2000s and an expanded edition followed in 2009. The rights history is murky enough that we are not going to assert who controls it.

Set the commercial failure aside and look at the intent. In 1974, the most famous entertainer on earth spent his own money trying to put competitive karate in front of a mass audience. Every school owner reading this is in business partly because somebody eventually succeeded at that.

Was Elvis Presley really a martial artist?

This is where the accounts usually go wrong, in one of two directions. People either inflate his ability because they love him, or dismiss the training because he was famous. Neither is necessary, and the evidence supports a more precise answer.

On ability: Elvis was not Joe Lewis, Bill Wallace or Jeff Smith. Those men walked into arenas against elite opposition and proved what they could do under pressure. Elvis built no competitive record at all. Pretending otherwise insults the men who did.

On rank: he held ranks in two separate systems at once, which is why the histories tangle. The Chito-ryu line ran from Slomanski — first degree in 1960, second in 1963. The Kenpo line ran from Ed Parker — fifth degree in 1972, and seventh and eighth degrees whose certificates Graceland holds. Kang Rhee’s PaSaRyu ranks were a third, parallel track. The defensible position for a trade journal is this: the 1960 first-degree black belt is well documented as a tested, earned rank. The high dan grades of the 1970s are contested, and are best described as promotional or honorary rather than competitively examined. Parker disputed that characterisation in his lifetime. Others in the Kenpo community dispute Parker. The records that would settle it are not public.

On whether he was a serious student: the answer is plainly yes, and the question is more useful than the rank question. He trained for nineteen years. He sought out demanding instructors on three continents. He kept training through a touring and film schedule that would have ended most people’s hobbies in a fortnight. He financed a school, paid a world champion to teach in it, and signed its rank certificates. He put $50,000 into a film to promote somebody else’s competitive career.

That is more than a hobby. It is not mastery. Both things are true, and a trade journal should be able to say so without flinching in either direction.

Memphis, twice

There is a symmetry in this story that I have never quite got over.

Memphis made Elvis once already. As a young man he absorbed blues, gospel, country and rhythm and blues; he listened to Black artists on WDIA, spent time around Beale Street, and knew and respected musicians including B.B. King. That collision produced something that had not existed before.

Fifteen years later the city staged a second collision, in a different discipline. A Korean master named Kang Rhee settled in Tennessee. A kinesiology graduate student from Indiana with one working leg became the fastest kicker alive. The most famous entertainer in the world walked in and started training. And in 1976 a sixteen-year-old school owner from somewhere else entirely walked through the same door for an afternoon.

That is the thing about this business. It puts people on the same floor who would otherwise never have met.

What a school owner should take from this

Three things, and none of them are about Elvis.

Constraint is a strategy. Wallace did not recover from his knee. He rebuilt his entire competitive identity around what still worked and became world champion with half the usual arsenal. Most school owners have a version of that knee — a bad location, a small floor, one instructor, a demographic that does not match the textbook. The operators who win are rarely the ones with the fewest constraints. They are the ones who reorganise around them instead of waiting for them to clear.

Somebody has to sell the art to people who do not do it. Ed Parker understood this in 1964 and built a tournament that made stars. Elvis understood it in 1974 and spent $50,000 trying to film one. Every student who walks into your school arrived through a door that somebody built outside the martial arts world. That job never stops being yours.

Proximity is not achievement, and it is still worth something. I trained with Bill Wallace for one afternoon. It did not make me a champion and I have never claimed it did. What it did was show me, at sixteen, what the ceiling actually looked like — and you cannot aim at a ceiling you have never seen. Put your people in rooms with operators who are better than they are. The afternoon costs almost nothing and the recalibration lasts fifty years.

Timeline of record

Dates below are the best-supported version of each event, drawn from Graceland’s official timeline, the Deutscher Karate Verband, the Chito-ryu organisation, contemporaneous press and auction lots with estate provenance. Where sources conflict, the conflict is named in the sources box at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Did Elvis Presley really have a black belt in karate?

Yes. He received a first-degree black belt in Chito-ryu karate from Command Sergeant Major Henry “Hank” Slomanski on 21 July 1960, and carried the certificate in his wallet for the rest of his life. That rank was tested and is not seriously disputed. He later held higher ranks from Ed Parker in American Kenpo and from Kang Rhee in PaSaRyu; those higher grades are contested and are better described as promotional than competitively examined.

What rank was Elvis Presley in karate?

He held ranks in three systems. Chito-ryu: first degree in 1960 and second degree in 1963, both from Hank Slomanski. American Kenpo: fifth degree in February 1972 from Ed Parker, with seventh and eighth degree certificates held in Graceland’s archives. PaSaRyu: seventh degree in March 1973 and eighth degree in September 1974 from Kang Rhee. Because these are parallel ladders in different systems, accounts that merge them into a single progression tend to contradict each other.

Who taught Elvis Presley karate?

His documented instructors were Jürgen Seydel in Germany (1959–60), Tetsuji Murakami in Paris (January 1960), Hank Slomanski in the United States (from 1960), Ed Parker in American Kenpo (from 1960), and Kang Rhee in Memphis (1970–74). He also trained with Mike Stone, Bill Wallace and Dave Hebler.

Did Elvis Presley own a karate school?

He was a founding financial partner and co-owner of the Tennessee Karate Institute, which opened in the Crosstown area of Memphis on 4 July 1974. His partners were Red West, Bill Wallace and Patrick Wrenn, and the business ran as a corporation. Elvis funded the build-out, paid Wallace as head instructor and signed rank certificates as “Master of Martial Arts,” but did not operate the school day to day.

Is the Tennessee Karate Institute still open?

Yes. The original school ran from July 1974 until 1978, closing after Elvis’s death, Wallace’s departure for the professional circuit, and a back injury to Patrick Wrenn. Wrenn reopened it at the original address, 1372 Overton Park Avenue in Memphis, in August 2017. It operates today as a school and a museum.

Why did Kang Rhee call Elvis “Tiger”?

Kang Rhee gave Elvis the training name when he began instructing him in 1970. By Rhee’s account Elvis first asked to be called “Mr. Panther” and changed it to “Mr. Tiger” because of the political associations the word “panther” carried at the time. The name reached the stage: the “Mad Tiger” jumpsuit designed by Bill Belew for the 1974 Las Vegas season was named for it.

What was The New Gladiators?

A documentary on elite karate competition, conceived by George Waite, brought to Elvis by Ed Parker in 1974. Elvis invested $50,000, co-wrote it, narrated it and appeared on camera. It followed American competitors to London and Brussels. It was never completed in his lifetime; the original film elements were lost for roughly three decades before a version was released on DVD in the early 2000s and an expanded edition in 2009.

Did Elvis use karate in his stage act?

Yes, and the best evidence comes from his own instructor. Ed Parker told the Washington Post in 1978 that “his karate motions helped him to radiate a vibrance to the audience, and they stimulated a vibrancy in himself.” The same piece credits the training with turning a nervous post-Army performer into one whose movements were carefully choreographed and karate-inspired. No first-person quote from Elvis himself on the subject has been located.

Was Bill Wallace really Elvis Presley’s instructor?

Wallace was head instructor at the school Elvis co-owned, was paid by Elvis, and in a 1978 interview said he would occasionally go out to the house to train with him. He was the reigning PKA world middleweight champion from September 1974 and retired undefeated at 23–0 in 1980.

Which leg was Bill Wallace’s “Superfoot”?

The left. He tore up his right knee in judo practice in 1966, which ended his judo career, and rebuilt his karate around the left leg, using the right as a base. The roundhouse, hook kick and side kick he developed off that single leg became the most recognisable kicking arsenal of his era.

Related reading

• The Champions Reunion, with Jeff Smith, Bill Wallace and Joe Lewis — the three 1974 world champions, in conversation
• Jhoon Rhee, 1932–2018 — the author’s own instructor and the father of American Taekwondo
• Chuck Norris, 1940–2026
• In Memoriam — our archive of researched memorial profiles
• Industry History — more from the archive