Industry History

Industry History is the record of how the martial arts school business became a profession. The section covers the people and institutions that built it: the Jhoon Rhee Institute and the first commercially run schools, the Educational Funding Company and Nicholas P. Cokinos, the arrival of professional business systems into martial arts instruction, NAPMA’s founding in 1993 and the trade press that followed, the tournament and championship circuits, and the recipients of the Martial Arts Professional Lifetime Achievement Award from Joe Lewis through Chuck Norris. Much of this history exists nowhere else in writing — the people who built the profession largely did not publish, and the trade publications that covered them have mostly disappeared. The journal treats it as reporting rather than nostalgia: dated, named and sourced, with obituaries and induction citations written to stand as the record.