Allen Steen, 1940-2025: The Man Who Made Karate a Business

He beat Joe Lewis and Chuck Norris on the same night in 1966. It is not the most important thing he did. Allen Steen built the first real chain of martial arts schools in America, and almost every school owner reading this is running some version of his business.

Born: March 30, 1940, in Texas
Died: December 30, 2025, age 85
Instructor: Grand Master Jhoon Rhee
Rank: 10th degree black belt, Taekwondo
Known for: Texas Karate Institute; the American Karate Black Belt Association; the U.S. Karate Championships
Called: The Father of Texas Blood and Guts Karate

In 1958 Allen Steen went to the University of Texas at Austin to study business. He walked past a demonstration by a Korean engineering student named Jhoon Rhee, who broke three boards in mid-air, and changed course. Roughly 180 students signed up for the class that formed out of that demonstration. Six of them earned a black belt. Steen was the first.

That is the part of the story everyone tells. The part that matters to this readership came four years later.

The first commercial school in Texas

When Rhee left for Washington, D.C. in 1962, Steen took over the students and opened his own school near Southern Methodist University in Dallas — by his family’s account, the first commercial martial arts school in the state. He ran it under Rhee’s name, as the Jhoon Rhee Institute of Karate, and then he stopped.

Steen and J. Pat Burleson broke from Rhee’s organization for commercial independence and financial control, and rebranded as the Texas Karate Institute. No source describes a feud, and there is good evidence there wasn’t one: Rhee debuted his Safe-T sparring gear at Steen’s tournament a decade later. It was a business decoupling, and it is worth pausing on, because in 1962 there was no template for what these men were doing. Two instructors decided that the person who signs the lease should control the pricing. Every franchise agreement and licensing dispute in this industry since is a footnote to that decision.

What Steen built after it was a chain. At its core were nine company-owned locations in Texas. Skipper Mullins, who served as vice president of the Texas Karate Institute, put the affiliated network at thirty-seven schools around the country. Counting the schools his black belts went on to open, the lineage runs to hundreds.

By 1970 Black Belt was writing about him as a pioneer of what it called big business karate, and ran a profile titled “Allen Steen, On the Business End of Karate.” In 1970. There was no trade press for school owners yet — this magazine would not exist for another twenty-six years — and the largest martial arts publication in the country was already treating him as a business story.

How the model actually worked

The mechanism was promotion from within, with an exit. Barry Guimbellot, who spent decades in the Steen organization, described getting his start this way: “When our manager asked if I’d like to take over the school because he was moving to another location to open his own school.” Managers ran locations, and managers who performed were pointed at a school of their own — which stayed inside the association. Guimbellot then partnered with Walt Mason for twenty-two years; when Mason died, his son took over and eventually bought Guimbellot out.

That is a succession ladder, built in the 1960s, in an industry that mostly still struggles with one. It also answers the question school owners ask most often, which is how you keep a good instructor who wants to be an owner. Steen’s answer was: let him, and keep him in the network.

He kept going. In 1971 he partnered with a twenty-one-year-old named Tom Thompson to become the fourth importer of martial arts supplies in America — vertical integration into equipment, nine years before most of the industry understood there was an equipment business. He introduced video into training around 1970. By the turn of the 1980s he had moved into the oil business through SESCO Petroleum and handed the schools to his own students.

Steen’s business practices became the example for other school owners, tournament promoters and teachers worldwide.— From his obituary

July 31, 1966

At Ed Parker’s Long Beach International Karate Championships, Steen won the heavyweight final over Joe Lewis. Chuck Norris took the middleweight title that same evening by beating Skipper Mullins — Steen’s own student. Then Steen beat Norris for the grand championship.

Two independent fighter-record archives, neither belonging to Steen’s camp, carry the date and the bracket. It is one of the best-documented results of the era, and the sequence is better than the legend: the Texas school beat the California school on California’s floor, in front of Ed Parker.

The rest of the competitive record is thinner and worth stating carefully. Second place in free sparring at the 1963 Chicago World Karate Tournament. A grand championship at his own inaugural Texas tournament in 1963, which was normal practice then. A place on the victorious 1966 U.S. National Karate Team in Hawaii alongside Mike Stone, Skipper Mullins and Norris. Black Belt rated him a top-ten American fighter in 1966. His schools claim more than thirty major titles; that number appears in only one lineage of sources and should be attributed rather than asserted. He stopped competing around 1967, at twenty-seven, to run the business.

His technique was a sliding sidekick, and his obituary says he would knock opponents out of the ring with it.

The tournament

Steen’s other durable contribution was the event. He launched a Texas championship in the mid-1960s and built it into the U.S. Karate Championships in Dallas, and he did it by opening the format to all styles at a time when tournaments were organizational affairs. That decision is why American sport karate became commercially viable: an open event can sell tickets, and a closed one can only sell to its own members.

The 1973 edition, billed as the tenth annual, filled Dallas Memorial Auditorium with roughly nine thousand spectators and black belts from forty-one states. Bill Wallace beat Steen’s student Roy Kurban in the grand-championship final. ABC’s Wide World of Sports televised the black belt competition. Jhoon Rhee’s Safe-T equipment was mandated for free-fighting at Steen’s championships in February 1974 — the first event to require it.

Blood and guts

The nickname attached to the Texas scene of the 1960s and to Steen in particular, and nobody has documented who coined it. What the training actually was, Skipper Mullins described first-hand: “The classes were 2½ to three hours long. We did a lot of exercises including hundreds of kicks. We also did a lot of sparring.” Students quit from the injuries and the intensity. The ones who stayed, Mullins said, turned out to be excellent black belts.

Mullins on Steen himself: six foot two, about a hundred and eighty pounds, “had a badass sidekick and attitude, and was fiercely competitive. He expected no less from his students.” Mullins called him the meanest fighter he ever faced.

The style absorbed Western boxing and wrestling. It was pragmatic rather than orthodox, and it was built for bare-knuckle tournaments with real contact.

What a school owner should take from Allen Steen

The most interesting thing about him is a contradiction the industry usually treats as impossible. He ran the hardest training floor of his generation and the most commercially sophisticated school chain of his generation, at the same time, in the same buildings. The standard argument — that commercial systems soften the art, and that hard schools cannot scale — did not hold in his case and he never appeared to notice it was supposed to.

The second lesson is the succession ladder. He solved instructor retention by giving instructors somewhere to go that was still inside his network. Most owners still solve it by hoping.

The people he produced

Champions: Skipper Mullins, Fred Wren, Demetrius Havanas, D.P. Hill, Roy Kurban. Teachers and grandmasters: Larry Caster, Keith Yates, James Toney, Richard Jenkins, Marian Erickson, Royce Young, and a second generation including Walt Bone, James Butin and George Buckner. One source credits him with training more nationally rated fighters than any instructor except Chuck Norris; that is a single-source claim and we pass it along as one.

J. Pat Burleson is sometimes listed among his students. That is not quite right and Burleson’s own account says so: Steen introduced him to Rhee while Steen was still a brown belt, and Burleson ranked roughly three months behind him. They were near-peers who built Texas karate together.

Away from the floor

Steen was a national champion skeet shooter and a three-time All-American in the sport, a licensed pilot, a golfer and a skier. He founded and ran an oil company. He was inducted into the American Karate Black Belt Association Hall of Fame and, in 2007, the Taekwondo Hall of Fame.

He died on December 30, 2025, at eighty-five. Services were held at Restland in Dallas on January 9, 2026.

The association he founded as the Southwest Karate Black Belt Association in 1964, renamed the American Karate Black Belt Association in 1972, is still operating.

Sources, and what we could not confirm

Cause of death and survivors are not public. No source states either. We have not guessed.
“Rhee’s first black belt in America” is contested. Most sources, including his own obituary, say Steen was first, in 1962, with Burleson roughly three months behind. One account credits Burleson with Rhee’s first U.S.-awarded black belt. The formulation that holds under every source is first American-trained black belt, and that is what we have used.
The demonstration date varies. His obituary says UT Austin, 1958; other sources say 1959, and some say Southwest Texas State in San Marcos. Rhee taught at both. The likeliest reading is that he saw the demonstration in 1958 and enrolled in the class that formed in 1959.
Founding years differ. The association is dated 1964 by the AKBBA itself, 1966 by Black Belt and 1967 by USAdojo. We follow the organization’s own record. The Dallas tournament is dated variously 1962 through 1966; the 1973 event was billed as the tenth annual, which points to 1964.
School counts differ — nine company-owned locations, thirty-seven affiliated per Skipper Mullins, hundreds in the extended lineage. All three are reported here rather than averaged.
No verbatim quotations from Allen Steen appear anywhere on the open web. Every quote in this piece is someone speaking about him. We would rather say so than manufacture one.
Tuition rates, contract terms and enrollment procedures are undocumented. The likeliest surviving record is June Angerstein’s profile, “Allen Steen, On the Business End of Karate,” Black Belt, December 1970, which is not available online.
Principal sources: the Restland Funeral Home obituary; Black Belt; the American Karate Black Belt Association; USAdojo; AKATO; contemporaneous fighter-record archives.