History
Mike Anderson
His life seems to come from the pages of a novel. From the deepest poverty to wealth, only to lose everything; from fame to the boredom of everyday life. The history of American karate as told by one of its leading players.
Michael Anderson is the 36-year-old President of the World All-Style Karate Organization. He has been married for 14 years to Alice, a slender German woman he met during his military service in Europe. They have three children, a girl and two boys, and live in St. Petersburg, a quiet town full of retired Jews from New York who have moved to Florida for its warm weather.
I first met him in Wolfsburg, at a WAKO European Championship, but I had already seen his long, bony face and Afro-style hairdo in countless karate magazines. He knew I was going to spend my vacation in the USA and gladly offered to show me around. We landed in Miami and stayed at a hotel in Miami Beach. Mike drove down to Miami to meet us. I naively thought that St. Petersburgh, on the Gulf of Mexico about 300 kilometers away, could be reached in three hours, but it took about 6 hours to drive to his new headquarters because of the 55 mph speed limit. Along the way, we got involved in an endless conversation and after a while, both my wife and Bruno Munda, who were accompanying me, wanted to throw themselves out of the car. He told me the story of his life, which sounded like pulp fiction. Mike's mother was Romanian and his father, an Indian, was crazy, as are all Indians according to Mike. From his father he had inherited both the ability to adapt to any situation and his nomadic instinct, a desire to live one day at a time and a reluctance to plan anything at all.
Mike had a terrible childhood as his dad abhorred any job with regular hours. He had lots of odd jobs and ultimately became a bandit and was tracked down all over the USA until he was apprehended in New York and sent to Sing Sing prison. In the meantime, his mother had divorced and remarried. Unfortunately, her new husband was a jealous psychopath who habitually beat and mistreated Mike and his little brothers. He was eventually put in a mental hospital from which, unfortunately, he escaped to return home and try to kill his wife. It was Mike himself who saved his mother,his brother and himself from his stepfather's fury, shooting him ten times with a pistol. Obviously, Mike was in the right and was never prosecuted, but we can imagine how traumatic that must have been for a thirteen-year-old boy.
Mike was a bright kid and continued with his studies until he received his degree in literature. Then came his military service in Europe. During his college days he had taken up karate while living in Dallas, Texas, where Jhoon Ree, the father of the American Taekwondo and the inventor of contact karate protective gear, was teaching. As a brown belt, Mike went off to Europe, to Berlin where he began teaching karate to Germans, among them the famous Georg Bruckner, who later became European WAKO's president. Bruckner, then 30 and the German karate champion, abandoned his fledgling karate and plunged into Mike's Taekwondo, and they have been together ever since. Mike became the first president of the European Taekwondo Federation at the end of the 1950s. Mike returned home after four years, got married and ventured into business manufacturing and distributing karate and judo uniforms and equipment. Within ten years he was a millionaire. He opened many gyms, organized the first tournaments and became friendly with all the greatest American karate champions. He published his own martial arts magazine in competition with Black Belt, owned by the Koreans. As happened with European karate, in Taekwondo, after the honeymoon, Americans rebelled against their Korean masters and opened their own independent dojos. Mike had his headquarters in Oklahoma, but being a rich man, he felt the lure of Beverly Hills and the usual scenario: expensive cars, a huge mansion and plush offices in the most exclusive area. He also started production of martial arts programming for television. This was the time of "Professional Karate" magazine, Joe Lewis, Mike Stone, Chuck Norris and Bill Wallace. Those were good times, lots of money flowing, the perfect time to launch contact karate with the help of Don and Judy Quine and Universal Studios in 1974. It was the start of the Professional Karate Organization, now totally owned by the Quines.
Today Mike is poor, gone are the riches and the glory with the surrounding court of complacent girls, marijuana parties and extravaganzas for the champions. He lost half a million dollars through bad investments and losing operations, not to mention the episode of his treasurer vanishing with 150,000 dollars. A disaster, but he kept on living, smoking 80 cigarettes a day, eating on occasion and being an eternal optimist, dishing out brilliant new ideas and talking, talking, talking. He has crammed a lot of living into his 36 years, and now he wants to rise again, betting on WAKO, whose interests in Italy are my responsibility. The following is my interview with Mike.
Q. We were in New York and we saw so-called "pioneers" of karate everywhere. Who are the real pioneers of American karate?
A. The first one is Robert Trias, then Jhoon Ree who was our master in Dallas and taught Taekwondo to champions like Allen Steen, myself and a group of people who still head up the largest karate organizations today.
Q. Henry Cho says the future of Korean Karate is great because they are united. What's your opinion?
A. Henry Cho is a bloody liar. Suit yourself, call Allen Steen, my old master and ask him. The Koreans are divided into 500 groups. Just to mention a few there's the Korean Taekwondo Association recognized by the state, the World TKD operating out of Canada, and incidentally they use my products, then Allen Steen's AABBA, the strongest in the USA, with a Korean background but it's now totally detached from Korea, and there's also Jhoon Ree and his group, and many others.
Q. Have the Koreans really invaded the USA?
A. Certainly, but there are many people like Allen Steen who succeeded in challenging them and the popular belief that everything that comes from the Orient is synonymous with perfection in the martial arts. These Asians are all merchants, selling their junk as if it were precious. Some Americans fall for it and it's probably the same in Europe. But they are finding their match with our Taekwondo black belts regularly beating their 6 th or 7 th Dans publicly.
Q. What are the main organizations and what are the percentages of the various styles on the American scene?
A. 80% of American karate has Korean origins, then comes Okinawa's karate, and lastly Japanese karate. If you buy Bob Wall's "Who's Who", you'll notice that all the 150 people mentioned have their own organizations. The most important are Allen Steen's, which I've mentioned before, then Robert Trias' U.S.K.A. (United States Karate Association), and ours, WAKO, which has been recognized by the two previous ones as the official semi-contact organization. Trancosa, Urquidez, Halloway and the Texas groups are also affiliated with us.
Q. Does American karate follow the traditional rules or does it use protective gear?
A. Out of 100 athletes 90 won't fight without protective gear, and the match with strictly bare hands and feet is disappearing. As far as I know only the Shotokan people still stick to that tradition, and who are they? Nobody talks about them anymore! My "crazy" friend Mikami told Nishiyama and the JKA to go to hell. Meanwhile Mikami has gathered a large following in New Orleans because he still competes personally with his own fighters as well as those from other organizations.
Q. Aaron Banks says that karate is dying because of full contact.
A. Aaron Banks is a turkey. Karate is dying because of people like him. The problem is that many people got their black belts in unorthodox ways and then started teaching without being culturally and technically prepared to do so. Many gyms suddenly sprung up and were improvising. This was OK during the karate boom, but now, with karate fading, people have learned to distinguish between a good teacher and a turkey like Aaron Banks. So, only the good serious teachers will be left and will survive the bad times. As for Banks and his bull shit of full contact killing karate, he was the one who lost face when he decided to stage an international event with technically mediocre fighters from New York and Boston on live television. I won't even mention the outraged complaints sent to the TV station by real karate instructors. Mr. Banks has only himself to thank for his final demise. Ask Benny Urquidez or Howard Jackson why they don't want anything to do with him.
Q. Sure, but Banks isn't the only one saying that full-contact is ruining the image of karate.
A. Mark my words, the future of karate will definitely depend on full-contact, and the karate people should support it because nobody in this country will pay to see a karate match. Figures speak louder than words: 200 people at Long Beach for the WUKO World Championships while there were 12,000 at the 1974 First World Pro Championships in Los Angeles!. That's the way it is here, in Europe and Asia. People want to see action and reality, and the only karate we see on TV here is full-contact, but with Bruce Lee dead the only way up is through full-contact and television.
Q. How many full-contact practitioners are there in the USA?
A. Not many as a percentage. I foresee semi-contact settling at around 90%, while full contact will grow modestly and traditional karate, without protective gear, will surely disappear.
Q. Given your opinion, how would you view the attempt to put traditional karate in the Olympic games?
A. I say they are day-dreaming. Traditional karate won't ever be in the Olympics because it's unreal. There's already too much political wheeling and dealing in the more popular established sports. Can you imagine the absurdity of a traditional karate match being decided on points awarded by judges with no contact? It's difficult enough in boxing where they hit each other hard. Full contact is the only discipline I think will have a chance in the Olympics. Even the Japanese are riveted to their TVs when kickboxing and Thai boxing are being broadcast, and our Benny Urquidez is far more popular in Tokyo than their own masters. And the reason is because he's a regular guest of local TV, plus kickboxing is practiced all over Asia and is very close to full-contact. If you convince the Asian partners to remove all knee and elbow blows from their discipline then you'll have it, the prefect sport everybody will be interested in, and the crowds will understand it at once, without indoctrination. It would be a truly spectacular, exciting sport.
Q. But in Europe, the strongest organization politically, WUKO, which is against full contact, is pressing to enter the Olympic Games
A. Delcourt makes me laugh. WUKO is nothing in the USA. A small group of WUKO gyms in Los Angeles are headed by Richard Kim, but where does he stand in the whole picture of American karate? He's an absolute zero. His WUKO team that participated in the Long Beach World Championships didn't represent American Karate at all. The US has much better athletes than that. Just ask yourself, how will Delcourt be able to get recognition of WUKO here and even in Japan where you need a magnifying glass to find his affiliates. Trust me, they are hopeless unless they decide to join us and accept contact karate.