Interview from England

This was written in 2000 by England's Phil Buck, Kenpo black belt under Gary Ellis and Hung Gar stylist

This exclusive interview was conducted with Kenpo master Lee Wedlake at the American Kenpo Karate Systems Millennium Internationals, which were held in Plymouth, England in October 2000. It gives a snapshot of the development of Kenpo in the UK at that time.
Mr Wedlake is currently a 9th Degree first generation Black Belt in the art of Kenpo, and rightly regarded as one of the leading authorities on the art in the world today. A successful writer, he is also highly skilled and knowledgeable in Chinese, Russian and Filipino martial arts, allowing him a unique cross-disciplinary outlook.

PB: I’m talking to Mr Lee Wedlake, who is one of the top men in Kenpo today. Mr Wedlake, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, perhaps when you started in the Kenpo system ?
LW: I started in the Kenpo system, an offshoot of the Kenpo system, in late 1972 which was after five years experience in Judo. I stayed with that instructor for a short time. I fought a man named Michael Sanders who was a black belt under Mills Crenshaw, who was one of Ed Parker’s first Utah black belts. Mike passed away in a motorcycle accident in 1979, and I got directly under Ed Parker in ’79, trained with him up until his death in 1990.

PB: So you really are one the first generation old school guys ?
LW: Well I wasn’t there as long as (Frank) Trejo or Huk (Planas), those guys. But I met Ed Parker in 1977 so there’s a pretty long span of time. I mean, the guy opened his first school when I was, well, born (laughs). I wouldn’t say I was one of the first first guys tho’.

PB: One thing that always amazes me about you is your depth of knowledge of the Kenpo system. The way it was engineered. Perhaps you could tell me a bit about that.
LW: Well, I’m amazed about the system itself because, you know, when I first started I knew there was more to it than I was getting from my first teacher. My second teacher started to point me on a path and of course I got with Ed Parker, but I co-trained with Frank Trejo because he was managing Pasadena when I first got out there. So Frank helped me improve my fighting skills quite a bit. And then I met Huk, and was privileged to be able to start working with him, and have been since about 1981 or 1982. I would say at this point in time that I’ve learned more about Kenpo from Huk than I did from Ed Parker. But it was Ed Parker’s logic and all the contact that I had with him along with all the keys I’ve also got from Huk over the years, I was able to assimilate all that and compare it to previous knowledge and other things I’ve picked up along the way.

PB: You’re also involved in other martial art systems, notably the Filipino martial arts and Taijiquan. How do those affect how you teach and train ?
LW: There are lots of good concepts and drills, exercises and so on from all of that that integrates nicely into Kenpo if for no other reason that to be able to build the relationships of the historical perspectives – where this came from, why we do it the way we do. In my estimation there’s not enough time spent on the internal aspect of Kenpo that the Tai Chi helped with. The weapons principles that I picked up in the Escrima helped me to put the Kenpo techniques together, because if you learn Kenpo by memorisation you learn five knife techniques, you learn x number of club techniques. A lot of instructors don’t pick up the points where to blend those, where they should fit together to help develop spontaneity and your ability to pick up all the attack lines. In the Escrima, those guys have got all of that stuff figured out already, so you take that idea from them and apply it to what you’ve already got and you’ve got something that works – works better.

PB: Is this why you think a lot of people are cross-training in Escrima and Kali ?
LW: Well nowadays everybody’s cross-training in everything, and as the decades go by it was the Bruce Lee phase, then it was the Ninja phase to the grappling phase, went through a little bit of the weapons phase. With the Internet, and more people are travelling and the doors have opened through the Karate schools and martial arts schools around the world, there’s more people being exposed. And there’s the commercial aspect – well, if we open our doors we’re going to make more money. So the cross training really helps, with the boxing and the Thai boxing, the grappling stuff. Kenpo is a great core system, it’s like the Rosetta Stone for martial arts. We can read what other people do, and they have a hard time reading us. My experience working with the Tai Chi people and the Escrima people is that they say ‘oh, that Kenpo stuff’s pretty cool because you guys have these other neat techniques, but you also have a way to describe them that makes a whole lot of sense’. Then they start using our terminology to describe what they do, because the methods of motion are similar in a lot of respects.

PB: One thing I’ve found, training in both Kung Fu and Aikido, that you can apply principles and concepts from Kenpo to those arts as well. They seem to be universal.
LW: There are a lot of universal concepts, you know, general rules and all that. Historically if you go back and look at the roots of Aikido, its related to Jujutsu, but the founder of Aikido (Morehei) Ueshiba also studied internal Chinese martial arts. You get Bagua (Pa Kua), Xingyi (Hsing-I) and all of that. So its no surprise.

PB: There’s a similarity between the Bagua techniques and the Aikido, you can look at a Bagua stylist and an Aikidoka and see a lot of similarities of motion.
LW: No surprise.

PB: Let’s change the subject, as I want to talk a little bit about the weekend. How do you
think its gone ?
LW: It’s gone well. It’s been a good response. Fairly large event, I would think. I don’t know how many competitors they had but the seminars would seem to be well attended and the atmosphere was good so it was a good weekend.
PB: I think we cleared something like 500 competitors, so there was a big crowd on the day.
LW: Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me. It turned out very well for Gary Ellis.
PB: Certainly this weekend I kind of feel sad that it’s over, because it’s all about the brotherhood. Everyone seems so friendly and gets together and has a good time doing it.
LW: The feeling that we’ve had at other camps in other parts of the world and particularly in Europe has been perpetuated here this week and I feel the same way, it’s “Ah man, I’ve got to go home tomorrow.”
PB: Luckily, your real world is Kenpo – that’s quite a good situation to be in, I think.
LW: Yes, I’m fortunate because I’m able to be a full time instructor. I have a school in Florida with about 250 students. I can make a living off of it and be able to go out and travel and meet people like you.
PB: One thing we’re hoping in the UK is that this event will start a percolate a bit of interest in Kenpo. In the UK its kind of marginalised, its not really considered “mainstream” in a country that’s dominated by sport Karate, Shotokan, kickboxing. How do you see us making inroads with Kenpo in this country ?
LW: I think what Gary’s done with inviting the Jujutsu people over to teach and they can see what we do, and it’s that sort of thing that helps build bridges, you know. And everybody gets educated – they learn from us, we learn from them, and as long as that sort of thing keeps happening I think Kenpo’s going to grow.
PB: On the competition side…a lot of emphasis is placed on the competition side of martial arts these days, and it’s certainly an aspect of the Kenpo system. How important a side of it do you think it is ?
LW: Well, every warrior culture, or every aspect of a culture that affects a warrior, has got to have a proving ground. And with some people it’s just training in their sport until they can go and compete somehow. Its like, a lot of people play tennis but they’re not going to go do Wimbledon, okay ? So if someone likes or wants to compete they have that avenue available to them as a proving ground for the new warrior to see if they can get out there and actually do that. That’s what Larry Beltramo was talking about today. Even if you lost, you still won because you got out there and you tried versus the person who says I’m not, I’m too afraid. An American president named Teddy Roosevelt had a saying to the effect that it’s the man in the arena against the poor timid souls who just won’t get out there. So I think that’s the good thing about tournaments. The bad thing is that if you don’t get good judging you can be throwing away a lot of money and time, and for some people its just not a good experience, so they should not be forced to do it.
PB: There’s an argument, quite prevalent in UK martial arts magazines, that points fighting promotes a certain kind of mentality insofar as it’s not really getting to the realism of martial arts, it’s just a sport and you lose the art.
LW: It’s a sport. It’s a game, so you play by the rules of the game. I equate that to handgunning. I was a bodyguard, I was trained as a bodyguard, and I trained with police officers, so what you learn from combat tactics on the street in a real life survival situation is going to be different from what you do for competition handgunning where there’s pop-up targets, crawling through tunnels and all of that sort of thing. You learn to play the game and there’s a certain set of rules and then when you get to real fighting then its different, so if you decide you want to fight like a point fighter then fight like a point fighter, if you don’t want to do that then don’t go do that. So, it’s a decision, its individual decision what you want to do.
PB: Mr Ellis has said to me many times you fight how you train. Does that impact that decision ?
LW: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, is that if you think that’s the way you want to fight then that’s what you should go do. Personally I went through the whole thing of point fighting, I did well at it, I placed in some big national tournaments in the United States and I had this vision of being able to play this game where somebody would throw a punch at me and they just wouldn’t touch me at all, and that’s not going to happen. I got away from that after a while, and said ‘I know I’m going to get hit, its just a matter of how hard’, and I changed my fighting style because I decided I didn’t want to fight like that anymore. I had no use for that. That phase was over.
PB: You’ve still got this ability to not get touched. I’ve had hands-on experience with you and you seem to be not there all the time. It’s kind of scary.
LW: Well, its something I’ve been trying to cultivate. You know, it’s all in the footwork.

PB: I know that over the last few years you’ve formed a close relationship with Mr Ellis, you’re over here quite regularly to teach. How do you see that relationship hopefully developing with Kenpo over time ?
LW: I met Gary Ellis back in about 1985 or 1986, and we hit it off. We lost touch for a short time and it wasn’t because of him, I was moving around the United States and it’s been a very good relationship because Gary’s an open-minded person and he moves very well. When you watch him work it always makes me think of Ed Parker because he’s about the same size as him, the same physical build, same intensity, he looks a lot like Ed Parker. And the fact that he’s willing to keep training is very important, and that alone will take Kenpo a long way.
PB: I noticed when you came over in May for the seminars he lined up with all the other Black Belts, he trained with all the other Black Belts. That’s rare to see for a man of his level.
LW: Yeah, that’s right, because I think too many people get to 1st Degree Black and say, well I know everything now, and they go sit on the side. I take seminars myself, I’ll go out there and roll around on the ground with the guys so I think that’s the way it should be.

PB: Tell us a little bit about Systema.
LW: I came across it by accident through a video tape someone had given me and just by a series of coincidences I managed to hook up with this instructor in Toronto, Canada named Vladimir Vasiliev who comes to the UK to teach occasionally. It’s a Russian martial art that’s supposed to have been around for a couple of hundred years now, and it almost looks like anything you want it to look like. It looks like an internal art, it looks like White Crane, it looks like Kenpo, it looks like Silat, it looks like Eskrima, it’s a very strange looking system. Very internal sort of thing, soft system, extremely effective, and Vladimir as an instructor has got a good personality and is very very willing to share. So I was impressed with all of that, and trained with him a little bit on a seminar basis probably half a dozen times but it’s proved to be a nice integration into Kenpo. Once again with the drills and things that I mentioned earlier that you can take from Tai Chi or the Eskrima. It’s a tool in the toolbox. I wouldn’t give up my Kenpo to just go and do that, but it’s good stuff if its something you can get your hands on to put hand in hand with the Kenpo.

PB: One last thing, as the ceremony is about to begin. What do you think of England, I know you’ve been over a few times now.
LW: You know, England is one of my favourite places to visit and people think I’m crazy but I love going to London.
PB: You are crazy if you think that.
LW: Well, yes. (Laughs). But I like English people. My heritage goes back to England. Jaki MacVicar when I was here years and years ago went back and looked up my name in the Domesday Book. So it goes way back.
PB: So you’re one of us ?
LW: Yeah, in fact they say the family was from Devon. I found a coat of arms here for the family name and the whole deal, so it’s kind of like going back home.
PB: Mr Wedlake, thank you very much.