Jhoon Rhee, 1932-2018: The Father of American Taekwondo

He arrived in Texas in 1956 with forty-six dollars and very little English. He died sixty-two years later having taught more than 350 members of the United States Congress, invented the equipment that made sparring survivable, and commissioned the advertising jingle that half of Washington, D.C. can still sing. Almost everything your school does on a Tuesday night traces back through him somewhere.

He described himself as the smallest, weakest, most uncoordinated child in his school, and said he once lost a fight to a younger girl. He started training in the mid-1940s, at thirteen or fourteen, in the Chung Do Kwan lineage, and by his own telling he started because of a street fight he had lost.

He came to the United States in 1956 as part of a military training programme, stationed at Gary Air Force Base in San Marcos, Texas. The Congressional Record puts the forty-six dollars on the official record of the United States. He enrolled at Southwest Texas State College in February 1958 and transferred to the University of Texas at Austin in September 1960 to study engineering.

He never finished the degree. That matters more than the degree would have, because the engineering coursework — speed and power, statics and dynamics — is what he later credited for the design of the safety gear.

Washington, 1962

He went to Washington in the summer of 1962 for what was meant to be a summer job at an existing karate school. The school had six students and could not pay his salary. So he opened his own, at 2035 K Street NW, on June 28, 1962, with twelve students on the first day.

By August he had more than a hundred and twenty-five. He never went back to school.

Forty-one years later, the mayor of Washington declared June 28 Jhoon Rhee Day.

At its mid-1980s peak the Jhoon Rhee Institute ran eleven studios and taught more than ten thousand students, with roughly twenty-five black belt instructors on staff. He had gone from one school to eight by 1970, plus studios in the Dominican Republic.

What he actually invented, on the business side

This is the section other obituaries skipped, and it is the reason this magazine exists.

He understood branding before he had a brand

He advertised his Texas programme as karate through the late 1950s, because that was the word Americans knew. He only adopted taekwondo after General Choi Hong-hi’s visit in 1960 — which is how he became, on this account, America’s first taekwondo instructor. He chose the word his market recognised, and changed it when the market could carry the real one.

He wrote letters to embassies

In 1962, before he could afford advertising, he wrote to ambassadors and embassies pitching his school’s character education and its academic guarantees, and bought two small ads in the Washington Post sports section. Teaching diplomats’ children in Washington is part of why taekwondo reached 179 countries and eventually the Olympics. It was, in modern language, a targeted outbound campaign to a high-value list, run on a budget of nothing.

He gave away lessons on purpose

In 1965 Congressman James Cleveland of New Hampshire was mugged. Rhee offered him free instruction. Cleveland recruited colleagues, and the Congressional Taekwondo Club was born — three mornings a week, before dawn, in the House gym in the basement of the Rayburn Building, free of charge, for the next forty-five years. More than 350 members of Congress went through it; the Congressional Record put the figure at 250 in 2000 and it was near 400 by his death. Nineteen of them earned black belts. Joe Biden, Newt Gingrich, Tom Foley, Carolyn Maloney and Greg Meeks are among the named students.

If I wanted to do this for publicity, I would do this for four years. Not 45 years.— Jhoon Rhee

“Nobody bothers me”

He was the first taekwondo master to advertise on television. The commercial featured his own children — Chun, then five, standing on a milk crate, and Meme, four — and ran for around twenty years across the mid-Atlantic on Washington channels 4, 5, 7, 9 and 20.

The jingle came later, in 1978, written and recorded by Nils Lofgren, who would go on to Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, at Bias Studios in Falls Church. Conception to broadcast took under a month. Lofgren was paid in a lifetime membership.

The copy: “When you take Jhoon Rhee self-defense, then you too can say ‘Nobody bothers me. Nobody bothers me.’ Call USA-1000. Jhoon Rhee means might for right!” And then Chun, winking: “Nobody bothers me either!”

Note the phone number. He did not buy a number; he bought a mnemonic. Rhee said the jingle boosted business by twenty percent.

I couldn’t believe it. Even now when I walk in the street — ‘Nobody bothers me!’— Jhoon Rhee, 2012

The report-card rule

Rhee required his students to earn A’s or B’s in school to be eligible for black belt rank. Every report-card incentive and character-education programme in this industry is downstream of that rule.

He paid instructors in equity

He gave Jeff Smith company stock, which Smith later exchanged for outright ownership of two schools. Smith came in as an instructor, moved up through management, and ended up training staff across ten locations. That is an instructor-retention mechanism most schools still do not have.

Nick Cokinos and the billing industry

Jeff Smith, who was there: “Nick Cokinos [the Educational Funding Company founder] helped Grandmaster Rhee initiate the [business] systems, although they had a falling out a few years later.”

EFC was founded in 1967, squarely inside Rhee’s expansion from one school to eight. Third-party tuition billing — the mechanism under most of this industry’s cash flow — was worked out in and around the Jhoon Rhee Institute in the late 1960s. Nobody has ever told that story properly. The deal terms, the contract structure and the nature of the falling out are not in any public source, and we will not speculate about them.

Safe-T equipment

In 1969 one of his students — identified as Pat Worley — had his cheekbone broken. Rhee decided to fix it.

The design process is worth the detail. He tried foam rubber sandwiched around hard plastic, bulky chest vests, face masks. The breakthrough came from seeing a water-ski jacket in a sporting goods store and adopting the material. He ran roughly thirteen prototypes. He tested headgear while driving, having his son Jimmy wear them and give feedback at traffic lights.

Manufacturing: foam dipped six times, fifteen minutes drying between coats, seams hand-glued on every visible edge. Finished units weighed under four ounces. He built a factory in Virginia — Rheemax, Inc. — to guarantee supply, because his specialised foam was capped at ten percent of a friend’s plant output.

Production went from about 400 pairs a month in January 1974 to about 2,000 a month by December, and reached roughly ninety percent penetration among American instructors. It was marketed through Professional Karate and Black Belt. Mandatory use was voted in by the professional tournament figures of the day — Chuck Norris, Pat Worley, Pat Burleson, Allen Steen, Mike Stone, Mike Anderson, Fred Wren — and adopted by the Southwest, Southeast and Northeast associations. Allen Steen’s championships in February 1974 were the first to require it.

Chuck Norris said the gear “upgraded Karate by 10 years.” Jeff Smith said something more useful to a school owner: it “minimizes the injury but also the student drop-outs.”

Read that again. The safety equipment was a retention product. The man who invented it and the man who sold it both understood that, in 1974.

His Safety Face Mask of 1976 is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His six patents were all filed in 1978 or later — five years after the gear went to market. He invented and commercialised first, and protected later.

When you’re tied by tradition, there is no improvement.— Jhoon Rhee, 1975

Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali

Rhee and Bruce Lee met in 1964 at the International Karate Championships in Long Beach. The exchange between them is almost always reported backwards, so, precisely:

Rhee taught Lee to kick. High kicks, side kick and round kick.

Lee taught Rhee the punch. An extremely fast strike built on exploiting human reaction time — it launches at the instant of decision, with no telegraphing lag, which is what makes it nearly impossible to block. Rhee named it the accupunch. He also trained in Jun Fan Gung Fu under Lee.

In summer 1973 Rhee filmed When Taekwondo Strikes in Hong Kong, playing a Korean resistance leader; he wrote the synopsis the plot was based on. He had a small uncredited role in Lee’s Fist of Fury, and then declined further film work to focus on his family and his schools.

Then he gave the punch to Muhammad Ali.

They met in 1975. Rhee demonstrated the accupunch; Ali could not block it and asked to be taught. Ali, on the record: “I learned the Accupunch from Mr. Jhoon Rhee. It acts at the exact moment you decide to hit, and there is no lag time at all.”

On May 24, 1976, at the Olympiahalle in Munich, Ali stopped Richard Dunn in the fifth round with the accupunch. It was the last time Muhammad Ali ever knocked an opponent down.

Martial ballet, and the rest of a public life

He choreographed forms to classical music — the theme from Exodus, Beethoven’s Fifth, “Granada” — and in doing so created the foundation of modern musical-forms competition. He also let his students create forms, formally approving one of his black belts’ Beethoven’s Fifth composition. That is the sentence about tradition, in practice.

He served on the National Council on Vocational Education from 1984 to 1988 and as a special advisor to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports from 1988 to 1991. He lobbied Congress into creating National Teacher Appreciation Day, recognised on October 16, 1986. He addressed roughly two hundred ambassadors at the United Nations on April 10, 2007.

President George H. W. Bush named him a Daily Point of Light on March 17, 1992. He was named one of the two hundred most famous American immigrants of all time — the only Korean-American on the list, alongside Einstein and Knute Rockne. Black Belt named him among the top two living martial artists of the twentieth century, and NAPMA gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.

The body

At sixty-eight, per the Congressional Record: a daily regimen of a thousand push-ups and a thousand sit-ups. At sixty he did a hundred push-ups in under a minute during a House committee hearing. At eighty he did a hundred in fifty seconds in the Cannon House Office Building.

He had open-heart surgery in 2004 — two bypasses, and a stroke during the procedure. Within two years he was breaking boards and doing a hundred push-ups in sixty-two seconds. “The fear that my teaching will stop never entered my mind,” he said. “I knew I would recover.”

Texas, and the men he produced

Before Washington there was Texas, and two students: Allen Steen and J. Pat Burleson, promoted within months of each other in 1962 and 1963, his first American black belts. When Rhee left for Washington they became the primary developers of karate in the Southwest, and made Texas one of the two birthplaces of American martial arts alongside Chicago. They also broke from his organisation for commercial independence — and Rhee still debuted his safety gear at Steen’s tournament a decade later.

Burleson won the first National Karate Championships, which Rhee promoted in Washington in 1964. Rhee said he was proud that one of his own students won his first tournament. He ran that event through 1970.

His other students include Jeff Smith, Jim Butin, Skipper Mullins, Fred Wren, Demetrius Havanas, Pat Worley, John Worley, Gordon Franks and Wayne Van Buren.

He was, notably, an independent. He never joined the International Taekwon-Do Federation or the Korean Taekwondo Association, and spent six years from 1964 to 1970 in meetings with Korean instructors trying to form a unified American organisation. It failed.

The end

He died at 7:25 on the morning of Monday, April 30, 2018, in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife Theresa and his daughter Meme at his bedside. He was eighty-six. His son Chun, who runs Jhoon Rhee Tae Kwon Do in Falls Church, confirmed his death.

“Martial arts was a way of life for him,” Chun said.

The Smithsonian reports his last words as: “I think I did enough.”