Athletics
This 1968 Winged M photo of Mark Brown and Jolene Thorpe is from one of the first MAC karate classes, run, at the time, by Sensei Robert Graves. The program began in late 1967.
Karate
MAC’s Karate Program Through the Ages S
eptember 1967 witnessed the birth of MAC’s karate program. The club hired Robert “Bob” Graves, a Hidetaka Nishiyama All-American Karate Federation (AAKF) Shotokan Karate black belt, as its head instructor. Nishiyama was Japan’s greatest karate champion, and also was the U.S. representative of the Japan Karate Federation. Graves, who was born in Portland, also managed other Pacific Northwest AAKF schools. (Interestingly, MAC’s current head instructor, Bill Plapinger, was once a student of Graves.) The February 1968 Winged M has the first published photos of Graves and class members at their dojo in the old weight room, and the December 1968 issue has a photo of Nishiyama teaching a MAC class of approximately 35 students. The February 1969 issue has the report of
60 | The Wınged M |
april 2014
MAC’s first-ever Karate Committee, written by its first chairperson, Stanley Martz. A.R. “Dick” Allen, one of the class’s first students, later rose to power in national and international karate. In 1970, the World Union of Karate Organizations (WUKO), the predecessor to today’s World Karate Federation, was formed. However, the AAU, then the official governing body for all U.S. Olympic sports, did not then recognize karate as a sport. Nishiyama and Allen, who was a friend of the then-AAU president, together became the driving force to take karate into the AAU fold. In almost no time at all, Allen became both AAKF Pacific Northwest chairperson and its spokesperson to the AAU. And in October 1971, chiefly through Allen’s efforts, the AAU admitted the AAKF as an “allied voting member,” though not yet a separate sport.
In December 1971, MAC students joined other Northwest AAKF students in a karate halftime demonstration at a basketball game at Memorial Coliseum. The number of students in MAC karate classes increased Tom Levak rapidly, with the February 1972 Winged M reporting, through new Chairman Wes Carpenter, that class size had risen 300 percent. At the April 1972 WUKO World Championships in Paris, Allen, by then the AAKF’s national director, also was acting as the AAU Karate Committee chairman, as well as a WUKO first vice president. At about the same time, so Allen would