Still influencing young minds and bodies.
Urban came in. If you weren’t lined up at 6:00 you didn’t take part in class. One guy came in late, got back-kicked into the wall for his trouble and was thrown out of the dojo. In those days there were only a few dojos and the teachers all knew each other. If you were kicked out of Peter Urban’s, you were not welcome in Don Naegle’s. “Sensei Urban went to Japan in 1996 to see Yamaguchi. When he got back, he called a half dozen of us together at the dojo around a low table. It was me, a cop named Al Gotay, and a couple other guys. Sensei Urban sat ceremoniously at one side of the table and slowly pulled a meat cleaver out of somewhere. Everyone jumped. No one knew what was going to happen next. Al Gotay’s hand instinctively flashed around for the gun tucked in his belt. Sensei Urban lifted the cleaver high in the air then, with a dramatic gesture, sank it into the middle of the table with a thud. ‘I cut the ties with Japan,’ he proclaimed loudly.” Like many karate seekers of the era, young Chuck Merriman was always looking for the source - the truth of it all, the essence. At first, like most of us, he thought it was Japan. No one new
Okinawa from Timbuktu and all the dominant post war teachers were Japanese, like Yamaguchi. Did he ever find the “truth”? Does anyone? You dig deeper and deeper and, in the end you are still relying on a teacher’s interpretation of someone else’s ideas. After Higaonna died in 1915, Miyagi went to China to find his legendary teacher, Lu Lu Ko. Miyagi never found him and spent the rest of his life molding Goju Ryu out of what he learned as a young man from Higaonna. Chuck Merriman was no different. He simply wanted to learn. He and a few others brought a Japanese named Yamamoto over to run the organization after Peter Urban left, but Merriman’s search has been lifelong. “Yamamato was tough but it was all sparring. Kata was like a warm up for sparring. No one even talked about bunkai.” Sensei Merriman went on, that cool Arizona morning, recounting a litany of people with whom he had dealt over the years. You could substitute the list for a who’s who of American karate pioneers and leaders. Teams to Spain, teams to the Pan Am games, AAU competition. He was in the stands at Martial Arts Grandmasters International ®
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