Tony Thompson, 1950-2025: Co-Founder of West Coast World Martial Arts
Two men met at San Jose State in the mid-1970s and started an association. Fifty-seven years later it was still running, with somewhere between thirty and forty affiliate schools. In an industry where partnerships rarely survive a decade, that is the headline.
- Born
- 27 September 1950
- Died
- 24 July 2025, San Jose area, California, age 74
- Rank
- 10th dan, Great Grandmaster
- Co-founded
- West Coast World Martial Arts Association, with Ernie Reyes Sr.
- Taught
- Taekwondo, Muay Thai, boxing, wrestling, escrima, grappling
Tony Bruce Thompson met Ernie Reyes Sr. at San Jose State University in the mid-1970s, and the two of them built the West Coast World Martial Arts Association out of it. He died in his sleep after a prolonged illness, at seventy-four.
WCWMA grew to roughly thirty-two to forty affiliate schools — the figure varies by source — and it is one of the earliest American affiliate-school networks of its kind. Thompson taught a deliberately mixed curriculum decades before anyone called that cross-training: taekwondo, Muay Thai, boxing, wrestling, escrima and grappling, in the same building.
What a school owner should take from Tony Thompson
This is the one on the list that maps most directly onto the readership of this journal, and the lesson is the partnership.
Fifty-seven years is longer than most marriages and vastly longer than most martial arts business partnerships, which typically fracture over money, rank, or whose name goes first. Thompson and Reyes ran an affiliate network — a structure that concentrates exactly those pressures, because affiliates ask both partners for rulings and play them against each other if they can.
It held. Anyone about to sign a partnership agreement should want to know how, and the honest answer is that the mechanism was almost certainly not in the paperwork.
Sources, and what we could not confirm
- Identification is secure. Tony Thompson is a common name and we checked this specifically: two independent sources tie the same death date to the same WCWMA role, and Ernie Reyes Sr.’s own published biography names him as co-founder.
- School count varies by source — 32 to 40, or “more than 35.” We have given the range rather than pick one.
- Cause of death is described only as a prolonged illness.
- Principal sources: USAdojo’s announcement, a family memorial page, and Ernie Reyes Sr.’s published biography.
We would welcome first-hand accounts of how the WCWMA partnership actually worked. It is a better business story than anything currently written down.