Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
of 5000 Years of
Martial Art Tradition
Enter Teuk Gong Moo Sool (Part 1)
The debate of what are better, traditional or modern martial arts has been a heat-
ed topic for a few decades now. Few actually address the need for the unity of the
old and the new.
Traditionalists firmly stand their arts... even other contemporary his mind. While in middle school and
ground in legacies and place their arts. In some cases school owners high school he would subtly practice
faith in time honoured traditions, make their own program just to avoid motions with his fingers rather than
philosophies, and ritualized forms. the politics and high costs of being pay attention in class. Needless to
They scoff at modernized systems connected to controlling forces of as- say he got scolded for that a few
as crude, barbaric methods of street sociations. times.
fighting with no sense of spirituality.
As in our own cultures a few mas- He studied like that for 10 years prac-
Many practitioners of modern sys- ters decide to carefully develop and ticing 7 days a week, rain or shine.
tems see the world as an urban jun- structure a system that can do eve- Soon after he started formulating
gle. There can be no room for nice- rything it should. One of the rare few his own system in his mind as it was
ties such as uniforms, pretty dances, is Grandmaster No-Won Park, the taking too much time in his schedule
and outdated weapons. Their arsenal founder of Teuk Gong Moo Sool. and there was so much repetition
includes quick and dirty close combat between the academies. That atti-
techniques and street weapons. History in Brief: GM (Grandmaster) tude became one of his mottos in his
Park was born in Iksan, South Korea life. “Take everything you know and
Another group is the innovators who on April 19th, 1956. The young boy make something new.” It now means
attempt to mix the old and the new. quickly showed an aptitude for athlet- anything in your life, not just the fight-
The results are mixed as it could ics and throughout elementary school ing arts.
result to a hodge podge of ideas competed in track and field events. In
and experiences. In a few cases the addition he started practicing Taek- In September 1977 he enlisted into
opposite can be found. Devastating wondo at the age of nine alongside mandatory military service and was
arts such as Kenpo, Anshu Stephen his uncles who were close in age to placed into an elite special guard
K. Hayes’ To Shin Do and Chun Kuk him. He was enthralled with it. unit until May’80. There he learned
Do (the Chuck Norris System) are sniper skills, bodyguard techniques,
among a few of the success stories. When he began middle school he advanced pressure points, survival
These success stories are the culmi- traveled to a nearby town and visited skills, etc.
nation of great people’s minds, skills, 3 separate martial art academies
research and constant development. a day. Like most young men he In late ‘78 the Korean government
thought whatever he was doing at wanted to develop special martial art
In my 2nd home of South Korea the that moment was the universal truth techniques for their counter terror-
amount of actual real traditional art and encountered any plateau with ist agents. They needed a system
forms can be counted on one hand. earnest. So completely immersed in that was quick to learn and efficient.
Everything else seems to be modern the arts he spent every waking mo- The desperate urgency was due to a
revisions and adaptations of other ment going through combinations in hijacked plane in ‘77.
COMBAT WWW.COMBAT.CO.UK
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By Master Guy Edward Larke