In this latest chapter:
Goodbye Mansfield, hello Leeds.
Training opportunities.
My own Dojo.
Mark Harland.
Kagami Shin Kai.
What was my outlook at the time?
Post Mansfield and my arrival in Leeds had given my karate full licence to develop in its own way – of course within the constraints of mainstream Wado and very much marching to the UKKW/Suzuki drum. In my own head I reckoned that the apprenticeship had been served.
In the final years at the Mansfield Dojo I had taken on a lot of teaching responsibilities and cut my teeth on what it takes to run a class; it held no fears for me. It just seemed a logical step to find my Dojo. My very brief conversation with John Moreton added a clue, a hint to where I could plant my flag in the city of Leeds. With the confidence of youth I had no doubt that this was going to work out.
Looking back on it now, I am aware that other Wado karate Dan grades and practitioners have uprooted to new locations and how tricky that can be. For some this was the sound of the Death knell of their martial arts future; where optimism was squashed, it was the tolling bell that says that all that training is now in the past and maybe just join a squash club to ‘keep fit’. For others, they went searching for a new Dojo, but struggled to find anywhere that was the right fit for them and as such, ‘karate’ was something that they used to do.
In my over-confidence and naivety this just never entered my head. I was full of optimism and genuinely believed that the streets were paved with gold.
The plan.
September 1978, a sportsbag with a few clothes, a fruitcake from my mother and of course my keikogi. Leeds was sixty miles north of Mansfield.
I started off living in student halls of residence at Beckett Park, Headingley, north of the city centre. The campus was situated in acres of parkland, all mown lawns and huge stone annexes consisting of hundreds of individual student rooms, in blocks that were built in 1912 as part of a massive training college. I was in Queenswood Hall; basically, a rambling Edwardian house kitted out with a bunch of shared rooms, all guys together.
For me the idea was to split between Dojo time and supplementary training time; and it was in this ‘supplementary training’ that I became quite creative; essentially, I was willing to try anything.
The move away from Mansfield was like a breath of fresh air, a chance to reinvent myself. I went about it like a man on a mission, planning and scouting out the opportunities almost like a military campaign.
I must say, at this stage, I wasn’t hugely worried about the college work, and in actual fact, in my four years in Leeds the work was seldom a point of stress. Again, that was down to organisation and motivation (plus I enjoyed it). Whenever I was tempted to slacken off on the work discipline, two factors kept me on the right track; the first being that I kept an eye on the attrition rate; I watched people on my course who took their foot off the gas pedal and either dropped out or were ‘asked to leave’, I was determined not to be ‘that guy’. The second was that I had no desire to scuttle off back to Mansfield tail between legs and return to the Godawful factory work. That was enough of an incentive alone.
However, so much of my thoughts were occupied with training.
While I was living on campus, I gained permission to use the weights room of the PE college, Carnegie, which was always interesting because you never knew who was going to walk through the door. I hardly saw any of the rugby set in there; the only heavy lifting they were interested in was in the college bar. It became a bit of a joke, the piss-head rugby crowd were only ever seen in the evening, while the serious athletes were only ever seen at 6am for their morning run – always an early night for those people.
In the weights gym were specialist athletes; like the canoeists; guys with massive shoulders, yet tiny skinny legs. And throwers; lots of throwers, javelin, discus and shot; many of them trained by Wilf Paish, at 5 foot 3 inches, a very small man who would drift in and out of the gym and never seemed to smile. Paish was to have his finest hour in the 1984 Olympics as mentor to Tessa Sanderson and Fatima Whitbread.
On-campus Shotokan karate.
I initially tried to connect with the Shotokan group on the campus, but the Shotokan big cheese must have seen me as too much of an outsider and let me know that I just wasn’t welcome. On the first and only session he told me to go and train in a corner. I had never encountered this attitude before and was genuinely surprised by the closed mind of the instructor, and this guy was quite a big noise in the local Shotokan scene. This is why it was such a short-lived experience.