In Memoriam: The People Who Built This Industry
This industry is barely seventy years old in America, and the people who invented it are dying. Most of them will get a paragraph somewhere. That is not enough for the men and women who worked out, from nothing, how a person teaches martial arts for a living.
These are not obituary rewrites. Each one is a working record: what the person actually did, what they built, what it cost, what a school owner can still take from it, and — stated plainly — what we could not confirm. Where the received story and the documentary record disagree, we say so rather than pick the flattering version.
The profiles
Jhoon Rhee
1932 – 2018 · The Father of American Taekwondo
Arrived in Texas with forty-six dollars. Invented the foam sparring gear that is in the Museum of Modern Art, taught 350 members of Congress for free over forty-five years, ran the first television campaign this industry ever had, and paid his instructors in equity.
Chuck Norris
1940 – 2026 · The man who sold America on martial arts
An airman who took a class at Osan because it was there, and became the first homegrown American martial arts movie star. His school chain struggled in the 1970s, which is the part nobody tells. KickStart Kids has run for thirty-four years.
Allen Steen
1940 – 2025 · The Father of Texas Blood and Guts Karate
Beat Joe Lewis and Chuck Norris on the same night in 1966, and then built the first real chain of martial arts schools in America. Black Belt was writing about him as a business story in 1970.
J. Pat Burleson
1936 – 2021 · The Father of All Karate Champions
Won the first U.S. National Karate Championships in 1964. His more durable contribution was the belt-goal system — the intermediate-rank ladder that most of this industry’s retention still runs on.
Nick Cokinos
1921 – 2014 · Founder, the Educational Funding Company
The only man in this section who never earned a belt, and arguably the most consequential. He brought the dance-studio playbook to martial arts in 1967, and built the billing company that a substantial share of American tuition ran through.
Ji Han-jae
1936 – 2026 · Dojunim, Sin Moo Hapkido
He did not invent hapkido. He built the kwan, the curriculum and the certification structure that let it spread across two continents — and fought Bruce Lee in Game of Death along the way.
Hiroshi Shirai
1937 – 2024 · JKA Shotokan
Won both kata and kumite at the 1962 JKA championships. Sent to Europe on a demonstration tour in 1965 and stayed fifty-nine years. Italy’s karate population is his doing.
Dai-won Moon
1943 – 2026 · Father of Mexican taekwondo
Won Allen Steen’s U.S. Karate Championships three times as “David Moon,” then went to a country with no taekwondo in it and built five hundred schools.
Tony Thompson
1950 – 2025 · West Coast World Martial Arts
Co-founded one of America’s earliest affiliate-school networks with Ernie Reyes Sr. and held the partnership together for fifty-seven years.
Rainey Cheeks
1952 – 2026 · 9th dan, taekwondo
Bronze at the first World Taekwondo Championships in 1973, and the Madison Square Garden All American Open. Then forty years of much harder work in Washington.
Carol Middleton
1948 – 2026 · D.C. Self-Defense Karate Association
Founded a school in 1976 and directed it for fifty years. Learned American Sign Language so deaf students could train with her.
Richard Norton
1950 – 2025 · Zen Do Kai; fight choreographer
Co-created an Australian system, fought Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan on screen, then choreographed Mad Max: Fury Road. Took a BJJ white belt in middle age.
Richard Bresler
1953 – 2025 · Gracie Jiu-Jitsu’s first American student
Took his first lesson from his roommate in 1979, funded the Gracie Academy, invested in the first UFC, and made coral belt from a hospital bed.
Takayuki Kubota
1934 – 2024 · Founder, Gosoku-Ryu
Founded a style and an international organisation — and invented, named and trademarked the Kubotan, the best product story this industry has.
Keith Kernspecht
1945 – 2024 · European WingTsun Organisation
Built the largest martial arts school network in Europe: more than a thousand schools, on a licensing model almost nobody here has studied.
Saekson Janjira
1961 – 2026 · Six-time world Muay Thai champion
Two hundred fights and a Lumpinee title in Thailand, then thirty years teaching Americans the real thing — rebuilding from zero twice.
Wong Kiew Kit
1944 – 2026 · Shaolin Wahnam Institute
The traditionalist who behaved like a publisher — he wrote the curriculum down instead of guarding it, and reached students on six continents who never met him.
James Lew
1952 – 2026 · Emmy-winning stunt coordinator
From the original Kung Fu series to Avengers: Endgame. Fifty years in an industry that discards martial artists in their thirties, because he kept moving up the credit list.
Gary Alexander
1938 – 2025 · Isshinryu, “The Hammer”
One dojo in New Jersey and a national reputation, built out of promoting the tournaments everyone else came to.
Marcio Stambowsky
1959 – 2026 · Rolls Gracie’s Famous Five
8th degree red-and-white belt, one of the small group Rolls Gracie produced before 1982, who came to America in 2007 and built his own academy.
Orned “Chicken” Gabriel
1950 – 2025 · United Karate Federation
Opened in San Diego at seventeen and stayed fifty-eight years. Twenty-five black belts in a career — roughly one every two and a half years, deliberately.
Koang Woong Kim
1940 – 2025 · U.S. Taekwondo Academy, Kenosha
Forty-eight years in one Wisconsin storefront while chairing the WTF technical committee three times — then handed the school to his son.
MoonSung Lee
1939 – 2025 · Astoria, Queens
Fifty years in one neighbourhood, teaching the children of his first students. The compounding asset that cannot be bought or franchised.
Kang Won-sik
1939 – 2024 · Songmugwan; the Kukkiwon
He led the 1978 unification of the kwans — the political achievement that made a taekwondo rank mean the same thing everywhere.
Dennis Penfold
1931 – 2024 · 8th dan judo
Seventy-six years on the mat, and a career spent insisting that coaching is a separate skill that has to be taught.
Pepe Roses Juaneda
1949 – 2025 · IJF Secretary of Refereeing
Refereed judo at two Olympics and organised the refereeing at two more. Officiating is the product, and he built the system behind it.
Daniel C. Brown Sr.
1940 – 2025 · Brown School of Judo, Utica
One school, one mid-sized city, fifty years — and a son who became an NCAA national champion. The median reader of this journal, written up properly.
Toby Cooling
1944 – 2022 · Order of Isshin-Ryu
Shimabuku promoted him in Okinawa and told him to go home and teach. He did — for fifty-one years, while working as a deputy sheriff.
Tone Shimizu
1938 – 2025 · Judo instructor
Born in the Philippines, raised in Yokohama, educated in Seattle. His family sent memorial gifts to a judo scholarship endowment.
Gary Lee Cox
d. 2025 · Green Beret and instructor
Fifty years of teaching that left almost no documentary trace. A cautionary entry about what survives a career in this business.
Dale Thompson
d. 2026 · Orlando Judo
Seventy years on the mat and a leader of the Florida yudanshakai — the regional structure commercial martial arts still lacks.
Manny Saavedra
d. 2024 · World Sansei Goju-Ryu
Founded his own organisation out of Miami in 1979, from Peter Urban’s USA Goju line. The thinnest-sourced entry here, and the one that best shows what happens when an organisation keeps no records of its own.
How these profiles are researched
- A death is confirmed before anything is written. A named obituary, a funeral home record, or reporting from a major outlet. An absence of recent news is not evidence that someone has died, and we do not treat it as such.
- Every claim is traced to a source, and where the sources conflict we print the conflict and say which we follow and why.
- Promotional records are labelled as promotional. Titles, undefeated streaks and student counts are frequently unverifiable. We report how a person was billed and what the documentary record shows, separately.
- Numbers that only one source carries are attributed, not asserted.
- We do not manufacture quotations. Where a subject left no quotable record, we say so.
- Cause of death and survivors are printed only when the family has made them public.
- Corrections are welcome and are made with attribution. If you trained with these people, worked for them, or hold records from the era, we want to hear from you — particularly on tuition rates, contract terms and enrollment procedures from the 1960s and 1970s, which are almost entirely undocumented.
In progress
This section is being extended. Profiles under research include figures from Shotokan, Taekwondo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, Wing Chun, Isshin-Ryu, women’s martial arts and the commercial school industry, covering losses from 2024 through 2026. Names are added as each death and biography is verified, and where the sourcing is thin the entry says so.
If there is someone you believe belongs here, tell us.
Related
The NAPMA Lifetime Achievement Award recognises people while they are still working. The masthead lists the columnists and contributors who have written for this journal since 1996, and the interview archive collects long-form conversations with the people who built the business.