Allen Steen 'godfather of American Karate'

Reproduced from the September issue of Martial Arts Professional Magazine. 1959. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. Alaska became the 49th state. The movie Ben Hur set box office records. The first Super Bowl was still eight long years away and a small, South Korean army officer's demonstration at the University of Texas birthed a revolution in the largely unknown and mysterious Asian martial arts. In the crowd that witnessed Jhoon Rhee that day was a young Texan named Allen Steen whose fascination and ensuing love for the martial arts would lead him to establish one of the first dynasties in American karate. He was a pioneering champion, one of the original martial arts businessmen, and an internationally known instructor and coach. Today Mr. Steen is 75 years old and still keeps up with the martial arts world. He sat down with one of his original black belts and Martial Arts Success's Keith D. Yates to reflect on what he's seen in five-plus decades of training. Q: You've had a number of firsts in the martial arts in America, from being Jhoon Rhee's first black belt, to opening the first commercial karate school in the state of Texas, to being the father of Texas "blood 'n' guts" karate. You have seen the martial arts evolve tremendously over the years. Let's start with that demo at UT in 1959. STEEN: Well, it was at the Student Union building but they couldn't call it martial arts or karate so it was going to be a demonstration of stretching. That's why the football and baseball and track teams were all required to be there. I was on the track team and like everyone else, was just there for the fun of it. Even though Mr. Rhee was doing full splits and everything no one seemed to paying much attention and everyone was talking among themselves so he finally had enough and stepped up to the microphone and asked for the biggest athlete to come down front. That kind of quieted everyone down and the football players looked over at coach Darrell Royal, who had just started at UT, and he just shook his head "no." So Rhee says, alright, give me the two biggest. Royal is still shaking his head. Now Rhee says he wants the THREE biggest and then he says something like, "and no babies,"-his english wasn't that good at the time. So finally Darrell Royal nods his head and the two Talbert brothers from Texas City and another kid go down. These guys were huge, Diron Talbert, in fact, went on to play for the Washington Redskins.