San Francisco | 1963
Bruce shifted his weight with a bounce, poised to advance, “Are you ready?”
“Ready when you are Bruce.”
Ralph Castro steadied himself for Bruce’s strike, while James Lee and Ed Parker looked on, half amused and half curious. The four of them stood inside Castro’s martial arts school on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, and much like the late night think-tank sessions at Wally Jay’s home on Eagle Avenue, they were deep into discussing and demonstrating a wide range of martial arts matters. At the moment Bruce was ready to show off the speed of his lead-hand backfist, charging Castro with the task of blocking it.
Parker and Castro had just been introduced to Bruce earlier that evening. He was staying at James Lee’s house while down from Seattle. Parker was staying with Castro while up from Los Angeles. As he often did with other martial artists in his circle, James arranged for everyone to meet. After dinner in Oakland, the group all put on long beige trench coats (at the moment they collectively looked like a bunch of FBI agents) and braved the inclement weather to travel over the Bay Bridge to visit Castro’s school on Valencia.
As the conversation surged forward about styles, technique, and fighting mechanics, Parker began to warm up to Bruce. At first the kid was coming across as too cocksure for his liking, but the more they talked, and the more he demonstrated, the more Parker could see that Bruce could back up his attitude. Castro was also impressed with the kid, though at the moment he was confident he could block the impending backfist.
Parker and Castro were both natives of Hawaii. The two had known each other for a decade now, having spent Coast Guard training together at the nearby Alameda naval base. Later, on a trip back to the islands, Castro learned that Parker had studied kenpo under the same teacher as he had. These days they were close colleagues, operating their kenpo schools in a tight-knit orbit.
Castro had a tough reputation dating back to his high school days in Hawaii. In California his students were an intimidating presence at tournaments and martial arts gatherings. As a Bay Area resident, Castro would soon become a regular at those late-night martial arts sessions, exchanging ideas and techniques into the early hours of the morning with Bruce, James Lee, Al Novak, Wally Jay, and Allen Joe.
Parker too would fit right into the mix whenever he was in town from Southern California, and in time he would play a much larger role in the long-term trajectory of Bruce’s career.
Bruce was ready now with his move and in an instant stood still in disbelief. Castro had blocked his backfist clean. Again, the Hawaiians were surfacing on Bruce’s radar.
The word kenpo translates as “fist law,” or rather “the method of the fist.” It is a broad term—like “martial arts” or “self-defense”—that carries a complex and colorful history: it can be described as a Japanese word for a Chinese concept that was heavily influenced by the Okinawans, and uniquely interpreted by the Hawaiians. Better yet, kenpo would also be integral to the rise of martial arts culture in America.
Kenpo’s origins in Hawaii are often linked to James Mitose, a highly polarizing figure who is still controversial for many martial artists decades after his passing, having spent the last seven years of his life in Folsom Prison serving a sentence for murder and extortion (charges he denied to his death). Born in Hawaii, Mitose was relocated as a child to live with his mother’s family in Japan, where he learned his family’s art of kenpo, which contained techniques that bore similarities to jujitsu and Okinawan karate. He returned to Hawaii in 1935 while still in his early twenties and soon began teaching his family’s style around Honolulu.
Parker and Castro learned kenpo in Hawaii years later from William Chow, a small, gruff man of pure muscle who at five feet two went by the nickname “Thunderbolt.” He was known to be a volatile character who was rumored to have often tangled with U.S. servicemen around Honolulu. Chow worked with Mitose for a time (whether as a student or a colleague is a matter of debate) before running his own school, where he taught a style that was more heavily influenced by his Chinese heritage, conducting classes that were notorious for their stark physicality. In reflecting on Chow’s teaching style, one student recalled, “He was into full-on fighting in the classroom rather than sparring. I used to get broken ribs. It was bad. That’s how we learned it.”
Born into the Mormon faith, Parker was raised in the multiethnic working-class Kahili district of Honolulu, a rough immigrant neighborhood that boasted its fair share of street violence. In his late teens he studied under Chow for a relatively short period of time before attending college at Brigham Young University in the mid-1950s.
Accustomed to the thriving martial arts environment he had grown up around in Hawaii, Parker arrived on the mainland to realize that there were only a scant few martial arts schools in America. During the halftime of a Brigham Young–UCLA basketball game in 1955, Parker gave a kenpo demonstration and was subsequently met with a huge wave of interest from both students and local law enforcement.
He corresponded with Professor Chow and gained permission to open a school on the mainland. Relocating to Pasadena California in 1956, Parker soon opened his first location and quickly began attracting interest from the Hollywood crowd. Elvis Presley watched one of Parker’s demonstrations at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 1960, and the two became close friends and colleagues until Presley’s death years later. By 1961 Parker had been profiled in Time magazine as the “High Priest of Hollywood’s Karate Sect.” Two years later Parker appeared in an episode of The Lucy Show in which he taught judo to Lucille Ball. Over time his celebrity students would include the likes of Warren Beatty, Gary Cooper, and Blake Edwards (who cast Parker in two of his Pink Panther films).
Without many years of extensive training experience, Parker proved tireless in researching and interpreting a wide range of styles, developing his own modified system, and terming it American Kenpo Karate. By the time of his meeting with Bruce Lee, while the Asian martial arts were still scarcely known in America, Parker was really just getting started. He already had a small network of schools in place on the West Coast and possessed a much greater vision for numerous locations around the entire country. More notable still was an event that Parker was planning in the coming year, which would draw an unprecedented gathering of martial artists together, and become a cornerstone of martial arts culture in America.