Sayonara Sensei

I got a call yesterday from one of my oldest and dearest friends, the man who, as a teenager, gave me one of my very first karate lessons. He was a blue belt at the time, I a fresh faced, long haired kid with a stiff new white belt. He called to tell me our Sensei, Lou Correa, had died. We don't know how or why. We don't even know how old he was, though my guess is 67 or 68. Neither of us have seen Lou in decades and it's fair to say that we, at one time two of his most devoted students, have mixed feelings about our old Sensei. But his passing reminds me also of the great gifts he gave me, the most fundamental of which is having been there to help put my feet on the path of Karate-Do.

I was a skinny, nervous kid from suburban Southern California when I entered Berkeley High School in 1974. My parents were divorced and my mom moved my brother and I up from Santa Barbara to work on her Ph.D. at Cal. BHS was big (5,000 students), urban, interracial and scary to me. I knew no one and no one knew me. I'm sure I had anger issues stemming from the divorce, though I wouldn't have admitted that at the time. During my second week of school, I almost got in a fight with a kid several inches shorter than me. I was the one who backed down. Cursing my cowardice, I resolved to not let myself get pushed around. I don't know if it was before or after that, but I had learned there was a self-defense class at the school, part of the PE department. (I see now how amazing BHS was in those days, compared to the pathetic state of funding for our schools today, but that's another topic for another blog...). I signed up the next day and that's when I met Louis Correa.

Lou was big by my standards, 6'2" or so, maybe 190 lbs. I was 5'6" and 120 lbs. soaking wet. He was swarthy with long black hair cut in a kind of page boy style. Lou had a large strawberry birthmark on his face and that was practically the only thing I saw when I met him. It was huge and I thought he'd been in a fight and lost. Lou was not a pretty man, but he had the kind of full sensual Latin features that many women found they couldn't resist. (If I were to make a movie of Lou's life, I would cast Javier Bardem to play the lead. He has the same kind of face that seems to morph between ugly and beautiful in seconds.) Most of all, Lou had charisma. Although his external persona was that of a laid back hippy from Brooklyn, he exuded a barely contained strength, a proverbial animal magnetism and aura of potential ferocity, like a dragon or the Shotokan tiger was held captive inside his skin, just waiting for an excuse to explode out of him. For this practically fatherless boy, lost in a new world, he was irresistible.

From the moment I took my first lessons (one of which was given by my friend Antonio, whom I alluded to above), I was hooked on Karate. Within a few weeks, I had joined Lou's school, Samurai Dojo, in Oakland. While still a white or yellow belt, I remember telling a visiting karate-ka from Japan that I hoped to teach someday. He laughed at my hubris but I knew then that I never wanted to quit training. But as much as I really did love the art, what I was really hooked on was Lou and on the group I had joined. The instant I put on my first gi, I'd joined a new tribe, entered a new family. Lou was the head, the father. I had big brothers and sisters. I belonged. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that for some of us, Samurai Dojo was not so much a karate school as it was a cult. Our religion was martial arts, Lou was our leader and we followed him, almost unquestioningly. Lou used to joke that he was raising an army, but some of us probably would have followed him into battle. We read the Japanese martial arts classics: Book of Five Rings and Hagakure. We studied the history of the samurai and watched all the great historical films. We fancied that we were, in fact, modern samurai, and Lou was our daimyo, our lord. (We also identified more with the scruffy, half-outlaw ronin, masterless samurai than with the refined and proper gentry in those movies.)

Lou's training methods were harsh and traditional, though I realize he was taking it easy on us in comparison to how he was trained (as I came to learn when I read his memoir of studying with John Slocum in New York). He would often beat out the count for a our basic exercises with a wooden staff, stamping it on the floor in cadence. If our stances weren't low enough, he walked between the rows of sweating students, swinging that staff over his head, and woe to he or she who didn't drop a little lower. (To be honest, I don't think Sensei ever actually beaned anyone with that stick, but if he had, it would have been seen as an appropriate lesson for the student.) More than one student found themselves on the wrong side of Lou's temper, for one offense or another. The punishment for these transgressions was often facing everyone in the dojo for kumite, sparring. One by one, the students were called up to fight the guilty party until Lou was satisfied that justice had been served, the lesson learned or enough damage had been done.

The training at Samurai Dojo sounds brutal, and by today's standards it probably WAS brutal. But few of us suffered serious injuries, though there were plenty of broken toes, busted knuckles, occasional black eyes and bloody noses. We went through buckets of Tiger Balm and miles of surgical tape. I remember one sparring session where I faced a brown belt, a man much older, larger, stronger and faster than me. Each time the command "Hajime!" (begin) rang out, I ended up on my ass. It didn't matter what I did, the outcome was the same: he would sweep my feet, knock me down and "finish me off" with a reverse punch (he didn't actually hit me). It was humiliating but I got back up each time, determined to keep fighting. That was the spirit of Samurai Dojo. We wore uniforms with Daruma Taishi (Da Mo or Boddhidharma) stenciled on the back, with the old saying, "If you get knocked down 7 times, get up 8." I got knocked down a lot more than seven times. But I always got back up.

If harsh training methods were the only aspect of my relationship with Lou Correa, this would be a story no different from most other martial artists who trained in those days. That's how we did things then. But the dynamics of the people and the times and Lou's own character traits made things a lot more complicated. It was the 1970s and drugs were a big part of life in Berkeley and Oakland and they figure into this story as well. Some of Lou's top students lived in the same house with him and those relationships strained under the close quarters. I myself lived in the dojo for a time, after my mom moved to Providence to take up her new position as professor of comparative literature there. There were dojo romances between the students and Lou himself slept with some of his students. At one point, I found myself on the receiving end of the "trial by kumite" ritual. I perceived this as an act of  personal retribution for expressing romantic interest in a student that Lou himself was involved with and so after the fight was done (I had held my own fairly well, I thought), I quit the dojo. I later found out the "offense" I'd committed was not being sufficiently respectful to one of the senior students, and so I returned. But my faith and unswerving loyalty to my Sensei and willingness to be part of his "army" had suffered. This disillusionment was painful, but I see now, totally necessary for my own growth.

Not long after this, Samurai Dojo closed it's doors forever. Lou moved back to the East Coast and I saw him only once more, almost 10 years later. I'd been training with my then new and still current Sensei Rod Sanford for a few years and I'm afraid I might have bragged a bit about my new style. I'm sorry, Sensei.

I did still call Lou "Sensei", and despite (and because of) everything I went through, Lou Correa will always be my Sensei. One of many teachers, to be sure, but he was the first. And of all the lessons I've learned from all my teachers, the main lesson Lou taught me, taught us all, is perhaps the most important one not only in the martial arts, but in life. It's the lesson of damashi. Spirit.

If you get knocked down seven times, get back up eight.

Domo arigato gozaimashita, Sensei. 

Sayonara, Lou.

Ossu!