I would venture to say that Korean kicking, whether synthesized into Taekkyon, Taekwondo, Hapkido, or whatever seems to be a constant. However, of the three mentioned, Taekkyon seems to be the one most resistant to outside change because it sees itself as the original Korean art. Taekkyon does predate Taekwondo,
Yes, that's my main point: there is a kind of subarctic emphasis—in many of the Siberian cultures and certainly in the Inuit cultures—on height/accuracy tests of kicking abilities, the more spectacular the better. Ethnologists back into the 19th century describes games similar to the modern jumping/kicking competitions of the Arctic and subarctic Inuit. If you combine the shoulder-grappling of Mongolian and Manchurian wrestling traditions with these leg-skill testing competitions, taekkyon fits right in, and it's not surprising, given the geography, that not just Korea but Japan as well, as Culin described it in his late 19th century ethnography of northern Asian games and sports, had the same competitive activity. No question, taekkyon taps into a much older traditional source than TKD. What we're really wrangling over is the nature and direction of influence between them.
and I could easily see them as saying those kicks originated from within Taekkyon.
I'm not saying that Taekkyon has always had all those kicks; but it seems to me that it would be the most likely original breeding ground for them. It is well known that Taekkyon and Taekwondo did some intermingling. It therefore stands to reason that as Taekwondo cast off its Japanese-influenced technique, it replaced those techniques with Korean-originated techniques, especially since those Taekkyon kicks and ways of moving are unique to it. Our free fighting was very similar to that as far as steps and flowing back and forth between partners. I definitely don't see that in Japanese karate, which tends to be much more rigid and linear.
Not to say that Taekwondo always had those, but if they did not descend from Taekkyon, they were at least highly influenced. especially since there were no longer Japanese overlords saying they couldn't do it.
OK. To me, the problem is, how much direct influence was there, given the thinness on the ground of taekkyon practitioners. There was an
idea in the air about taekyon, all right: the fact that, as Gen. Choi reported, Syngman Rhee himself insisted that what Nam Tae Hi had demo'd for his was taekyon, not, as the General himself recalls referring to it, tang soo do, is just one clue. I think that is part of the powerful attraction that the idea of taekkyon has had for many Koreans who have tried to reconstruct a history for themselves that they can salvage some self-respect from, in spite of what was done to them.
But there was a serious shortage of actual practitioners, relative to the number of people who were learning TKD. And if I recall what I've read correctly, military TKD, the kind that Gen. Choi and NTH taught, was very stripped down and brutal, emphasizing a kind of super-Shotokan attitude of just powering through the defender's guard and doing maximum damage in close-range fighting. It's kind of imponderable at this point where that influence could have come from. My hope is just that people will maintain an open mind and investigate other sources that might have fed the specific techniques we see developing in TKD in the late 1960s and early 70s, that kind of became its trademark.
Terryl965 said:
exile said:
Right, those people a quarter of a century ago or so could fight and wanted to fight. Think about Joe Lewis, Skipper Mullins, Ray Kurban, Bob Halliburton and the rest of them. But the TV lens is a kind of sausage machine: it grinds up everything going in, and everything coming out winds up looking the same...
Remember I was part of that group a long time ago
. Well it seems me and you are pretty much on the same page. Back when we spared it was more like a fight than a sport.
That to me is old-school TKD—and it was the attitude of the Korean military in the Korean and Vietnamese wars. All business.
It's not even competition and sport, I think, that does it—it's
mass viewership, the production of a spectacle for a bunch of spectators all over the word, sitting in front of screens, which has that effect I was talking about... when there isn't a personal involvement in the activity or the outcome, but just a kind of entertainment response: are we having fun yet? Hm, you've already done that once, can't you come up with something flashier? In the end, all MAs run the risk of becoming one or another flavor of what wushu has become, once they start going down that slope.
