Masters Alliance
9th Dan BlackBelt and Olympic Gold Medalist Herb Perez visit with the best and brightest to bring clarity to the future of Martial arts.
Masters Alliance
Dr. Steven Capener: Weaving Resilience and Culture in the Tapestry of Taekwondo
Embark on an enthralling expedition through the kicks and punches of life with our esteemed guest, Dr. Steven Capener. A scholar and a champion in the ring, he weaves a narrative that stitches the intricate tapestry of Taekwondo with the threads of personal resilience and cultural immersion. Our conversation takes you from his gripping battle against a career-threatening injury to standing proud on the top podium—his story is a testament to the unyielding human spirit.
As we traverse across continents, Dr. Capener unravels the stark contrasts between the American and Korean Taekwondo ethos, exposing the professional rigor that defines the sport's landscape in its homeland. His tales of adapting to Korea's insular society, juxtaposed with his critique of the mechanical nature invading modern Taekwondo, offer a rare glimpse into the sport's evolution and the cultural nuances that shape it. Dr. Kaepner's dual passion for Korean literature and Taekwondo also colors our exploration, revealing how these intertwined interests have shaped his academic and athletic endeavors.
The episode crescendos with a hard-hitting analysis of the current state of Taekwondo, dissecting the role of technology in scoring and the challenges plaguing the realm of refereeing. Dr. Capener doesn't merely present the problems—he navigates us through the sea of potential solutions, urging a renaissance in the sport that balances power, skill, and the age-old tenets that once defined it. Through thoughtful discourse, we probe into what it means to stay true to the martial arts' soul in an age of automation and rediscover the core values that can recenter Taekwondo in our lives and communities. Join us for this layered conversation that transcends mere martial arts, delving into the philosophical and cultural heartbeat of Taekwondo with Dr. Capener guiding our way.
Welcome back. This is the Masters Alliance podcast, uncut, and I'm Herb Perez. Today we are joined by Dr Stephen Kaepner. He's an amazing individual who has made an amazing, epic journey throughout his entire life, which landed him in Seoul, korea, teaching and learning at their best universities. Teaching and learning at their best universities. Dr Kaepner is a professor of sport, philosophy and Korean literature, as well as being the Pan Am gold medalist in the first ever Pan Am Games on the most successful team in the history of the United States. Today he shares his thoughts on life, his adventure but, more importantly, the sport and martial art that we all love Taekwondo. So let's get started. As usual, buckle in. This is going to be an exciting ride. Okay, welcome to Masters Alliance, and I am Herb Perez, and today I'm joined by my good friend and brother for a long time. We met many years ago and then he went on his journey to become who he is now, and I'd like to welcome Dr Stephen Kaepner to the Masters Alliance. Hello sir.
Dr. Capener:Hello Herbert, it's an honor and a privilege. I've been watching your content and you've been doing some amazing stuff. I really enjoyed the previous episode with two-time Olympian Juan Moreno, a good friend of ours, and I think you're. You're having some conversations that need to be had about Taekwondo right now and I think you know putting out some information that is really valuable and helpful at this juncture.
Herb Perez:We're at Well, I think it's amazing that you were able to join us and we're going to get into a lot of awesome topics and things that I've been thinking about for a while, and I could think of no one better to have these discussions with rather than you. But I want to start early and I want to start with your early sports career. You were an extremely successful national team athlete and, after that, a coach. Can you share some of the things that you think contributed to your success?
Dr. Capener:Oh, I mean, you know I don't want to blow my own horn, toot my own horn. I mean, you know, I don't want to blow my own horn, toot my own horn. But one of the things that drew me to the sport of Taekwondo and also Judo I did Judo to a fairly high level was the fact that it really is a cerebral martial art. I mean, they all are to a certain extent, but because of the, because of the way that the sport evolved and the way it's designed and the speed you know it's. It's not my original simile, but it's been compared to like ballistic chess right compared to ballistic chess right. So not just the physical aspect of it, the physical challenges, but I realized that you have to be kind of smart to be good at taekwondo too, and that combination of physical and mental rigor that was required of it was very attractive to me both as an athlete and as a coach.
Herb Perez:I know that you faced some challenges, but I want to talk more about when you made the national team. What did you learn from that experience? What did you gain knowledge-wise? What did you learn from that experience? What did you?
Dr. Capener:gain knowledge-wise. Yeah, it was really. I mean, that was a long road for me and I should have been successful earlier. But I had a catastrophic knee injury when I was 18, where I tore my lateral, my medial meniscus, my anterior cruciate no, my lateral meniscus, anterior cruciate and medial cruciate ligaments they call the unholy triad of knee injuries. And then I repeated that injury again when I was 23.
Dr. Capener:And so I did most of my real hard training and achieved most of my successes on first one very bad wheel and then, of course, overcompensating, I started having a problem with the right knee and had some surgeries there as well. So by the time I went to the World Championships I'd had four or five knee surgeries already, and that's an eternal regret. Or five knee surgeries already, and that that's a eternal regret. I mean I, you know I wonder what I could have achieved if I'd had two healthy knees, because they, you know, not just recovery time that kept me out of several national championships, but you know there was I wasn't a hundred percent. So that regret stayed with me. But it also, you know, there's always a kind of a motivation. That occurs too when you see the possibility of something that you really want diminishing and it makes you more determined.
Dr. Capener:So I did make the team twice, once for the World Collegiate University Championships and then in 87 with you and our other good friends. And you know, I don't know about you, I imagine you feel the same way, but you know the national team was that was the ocean. Right, we, you know us is a big pond, but it, you know, domestic competition is a pond. And then you go into the ocean. But what I learned in that pond and you and I started having our successes about the same time, um, what I learned in that pond was that I could win.
Dr. Capener:And I remember the first time I really believed that was 85 national championships. Um, when I beat a couple of well-known guys in the early rounds and I felt really good and I realized I was maybe in the third or fourth round, I was in a big division. Lightweight was a big division. It was always the biggest division and, for instance, in 87, I had seven fights in one day to the finals. I realized I can beat any of these guys. I'm the best one here. The only thing that stops me from winning if I don't win is there's only two things that can stop me. One would be my own me limiting myself, not believing, not concentrating, not bringing to bear everything that I was prepared to bring to bear on that moment, or the referees.
Dr. Capener:Having witnessed that, yeah having witnessed that, yeah, yeah, and so after that I knew that I was capable of winning, uh, and, and I did, and you did, and then I've. I also had the same moments in international competition too, when I realized that the only thing that could you know frustrate me on that particular day would either be myself or the referees.
Herb Perez:You know, achieving success, as you did, and the teams that we were on together, but specifically, you know, achieving that success can have a profound effect and you talk a little bit about that. You talk a little bit about that and I want to talk about the Pan Am gold medal because I was honored to be on that team with you and it was the most successful team in the history of our sport in the United States and we won six gold medals and won bronze.
Dr. Capener:But achieving that success, how did it redefine your relationship with either winning or influence your outlook on your future goals. Well, you know that was a huge moment for me, maybe more so than even for some of the other members of our team, because I'm from Montana and Montana is a very big state with not very many people in it, and I was the only I think I'm still only at that point. I think I was only the second University of Montana, university of Montana. I was still. I still hadn't graduated, so I was still, you know, attending university Student to go to the Pan Am Games and either the first or the second to win a gold medal since the inception of the Pan Am Games. I was the only Montanan to win a gold medal that year at the Pan Am Games In all sports. There were several other Montanans at the games and so you know that got me some notoriety back home. You know that's kind of a big thing in Montana, where maybe it wouldn't have been such a big thing, wouldn't have been as big for, let's say, jimmy Kim, and you know Los Angeles right, where there were probably I don't know a couple hundred Californians at the games, and who knows how many other gold medals came out of California, right. So, um, you know, and it taught me, you know that old, what they call one of the old verities, one of the old truths, that people like winners, you know. So I was, I was, I got to bask in the, in the sun for a little while.
Dr. Capener:It didn't last long, because then the next year, you know, there's a whole nother story, the olympic year, right. But uh, yeah, I guess the the biggest thing I took away from it. There are two things. One was that, um, it all had not it, it had all been for something, right, all that effort and all that, you know, all those knee surgeries and all that pain and recovery, and all those 5.30 in the morning, 30 below Montana, winter mornings on the stairs or on the mountain, winter mornings on the stairs or on the mountain.
Dr. Capener:You know that there was really something worthwhile at the end of that trip, right, and you know I would have, I would have still felt something similar if I hadn't won a gold medal, but it made it, you know, it just made it way better and way more satisfying. And the other thing I took away from it was, like you said, the team that that six of us actually ended up getting to stand at the top of that podium and we had been in joint training at the Olympic Training Center for several months before that where we'd gotten really close. You know some of us were close before that but some of us weren't right and that, you know, we really co coalesced into a team and I think that was part of our success. Something I'd like to talk about later the culture of Taekwondo, and now it's changed.
Herb Perez:And that that leads me to my next question. I know that your knee injuries and everything had a profound effect upon your decision-making process, but the decision to move to Korea and uproot your life to training in Korea was really a bold move. Was really a bold move? I mean, was there a particular moment or something or a specific aspect of your training or tradition that made you realize that was the path you had to take or wanted to take?
Dr. Capener:No, I mean, I was an avid reader as a kid and, you know, through my whole life, and one of my favorite genres was adventure, to be honest, and I'd always in my mind I'd always seen myself embarking on some romantic, perhaps dangerous, adventure into the unknown. Louis Lamar novels combined with, I think I read Homer's Odyssey when I was a middle school or high school student and the epic. The idea of the epic or the hero's journey just captivated me and I always believed, thought at some level, that I was destined for something like that, that I had to go out into the world and, you know, find my own epic, my own journey, and that there had to be an element of heroism to it which requires sacrifice and commitment to some kind of ideal or cause. Right, and so a conflux of different, I guess, elements of my personality, fate being in a certain place at a certain time, and all these things came together to point me in the direction of Korea, and Taekwondo was obviously a really big part of that. I got to visit Korea for the first time on a team from New York.
Dr. Capener:I went out there very precociously and fought in a selection tournament for this all-expenses, expenses paid trip to Korea to fight in two Goodwill games with two of Korea's top teams and I won. It felt like I had to fight half the island of Puerto Rico to do it. And no kidding some guy that you know, you remember those Jersey. The tournament was held in Jersey because it was the greater New York Area Taekwondo Association, which included New Jersey, and they fought in those high school gyms on hardwood floors and the spectators just stood around the ring right.
Dr. Capener:So I remember something hitting me in the back of the head in the final with this Puerto Rican guy, and it was some dude with a Puerto Rican flag.
Dr. Capener:He tried to top me with the flagpole in the middle of the fight anyway, sorry, um, and your instructor. So the guy that ended up leading the team was the one that brought all these Puerto Ricans and he was a bit cynically arguing that I shouldn't be allowed on the team even though he was bringing people from Puerto Rico, and so he, being the guy that was actually going to get on the plane with us, had a lot of say in it. But your instructor intervened on my behalf and said that I was his student actually and that I just happened to be training in Montana, but he claimed me as his own and he fought for me in that meeting and no one could deny him because he was um, his credentials in taekwondo were so impeccable and and his, his character, uh, and so, thanks to him, I got to go on this trip and it was an unbelievably eye-opening and appetite-wetting experience that ended up being a big factor in how events would play out later.
Herb Perez:And that leads me into my next question, and I want to share this with the listeners because, having been there and realized all the things you did and those decisions, and then visited you virtually as many times as I could, almost every every year, now that you're living and learning in korea and they're, you're experiencing the culture and what some people would call the spiritual aspects of korea and the united states. Since you've been immersed in both american and korean culture, would you say there is a fundamental difference or similarity in the spirit of competition or how it's perceived in each place?
Dr. Capener:Well, to be honest, one of the things that to the reality that was waiting for me, but many were not sort of exoticized, hollywood-inspired, you know, and you know the way that American culture sort of looks at other cultures it almost caricaturizes them right. So a lot of those weren't accurate. But I also have to blame the Korean instructors because they gave us a false idea of what Taekwondo was in Korea. I remember, at a black belt meeting before a tournament in Montana, one of the Korean masters who I would consider one of my instructors, you know he was telling us about the status of Taekwondo instructors in Korea and he said it's like the most respected job after doctors and lawyers. And when I got to Korea and I realized that he was just lying, that just was a lie. You know people who went into Taekwondo were not the most educated class in Korea. They weren't really respected by anybody outside of Taekwondo. You know there were and if you look at how Korean popular culture portrays them they're, you know they were often portrayed in movies. You know being close to gangsters and things like that. So you know, of course, if you were part of the Taekwondo culture, it had its own rules and its own codes that made it unique and attractive. But by and large, no parent wanted their kid to become a taekwondo instructor. I'll tell you that that was about 50th on the list, if not lower. So you know, when I got here I realized that by the time I got here taekwondo had become extremely professionalized. That, unlike us, you know, we became fascinated with the idea of it. We went to a school, we started practicing it and we did it initially for fun, maybe to learn how to fight, and then we realized that there was this really cool sport that we could practice like other people did wrestling or gymnastics, right and so we sort of came to it organically.
Dr. Capener:But by then in Korea they had sport middle schools, sport high schools and sport universities where kids are having to make a choice at a very early age Am I going to study or am I going to do sport? And their parents often make this decision for them by looking at what their their aptitudes are right and like well, you know my little bong shik. He's not very bright, but he's pretty good at sports. So, bong shik, you're going to a taekwondo middle school and from then on, it's not that they don't study, but they're on a completely different track. They get very basic educations and they do basically, uh, taekwondo full-time in a professional setting with professional coaches, you know, um, sponsored gear, everything, um, you know, and it's a wonder than the eighties we could even win a medal off of a if a Korean was in a division, because the approach was so different. And so competition in Korea was a way to get into the right high school and then you have to win medals and get into the right university and somewhere in there try and get as high in the national team rankings as you can, hopefully make a national team and then hopefully win a world championship, an Asian Games gold medal or Olympic gold medal. But you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of Koreans are trying to do the same thing. And how many gold medals are there, right? So competition was very much a zero-sum game thing. You know I was.
Dr. Capener:When I moved to Korea. I was fascinated at the level of sophistication of the system, so much better than anything anywhere else in the world and I was very disappointed at the lack of any attendant sort of philosophical engagement, um attempt to attempt to add a spiritual dimension or or a philosophical dimension to the sport it was. It was very utilitarian. So you know America has its own version of that. You've got fights breaking out at kids' soccer matches and stuff among parents. So that's our cross to bear.
Dr. Capener:But you know, I was because I was, and I realized this early on that there are results-oriented people, that there are results-oriented people and there are process-oriented people, and Korean Taekwondo was 100% results. You know this as well as I do that we saw these guys that were gods of Taekwondo and as soon as they were done competing, as soon as there was no more result to be had from putting on a uniform and practicing and fighting, they were done with Taekwondo. That I didn't see very much in America. Right, you came to it because you liked it, you did it and stayed with it because you liked it and then, after you're done competing, you still liked it and still you mostly did it it and still you mostly did it.
Herb Perez:So I mean, now that you've, you're there and I you know, I understand and agree with everything you've said, because those are certainly observations in the limited amount of time that I've spent there, that I've seen and I've certainly had the same experiences here in the states, but you've, you've clearly made korea your home and could you share with us what it is. Is it a feeling, is it an experience? Is it the connections with the people? But what makes this place resonate with you so deeply?
Dr. Capener:You know that's a hard question and I guess it does. But it's a hard one to answer because it's a very difficult place to assimilate to. Not because the culture is so you know, I don't know opaque or impenetrable. It's not. I've penetrated it. You know pretty deeply. And it's not that it is the fact that Korean-ness, the idea of Korean-ness and Korean identity, is extremely insular. It's based on shared blood, much more than culture.
Dr. Capener:Culturally, I can be as korean as a korean. I've spent more than half my life here. You know culture is learned. Culture is not genetic. You know you can learn all the, all the cultural practices that Koreans claim are imbued with Koreanness. They learned right, so, just like language.
Dr. Capener:But that's not where they place the locus of identity. That is how you look. Are you physically Korean? And there's no getting over that hurdle. No matter how long you stay here, no matter how good your Korean is, no matter how much kimchi you eat, no matter how many PhDs you get, there's no door in that wall. So you're forever outside, in a separate, somewhat liminal For me it's very much a liminal space because I am absolutely a Montanan at heart, in my heart, in my soul. It's with me every day. I miss it terribly. America, not so much America writ large there's. I would rather live in the poorest part of Korea than in some of the more wealthier areas of the United States, because of how the US is right now and how it's changed. But there's clearly something that keeps me here and I think and you're, you're gonna get this and we've we've probably talked about this in one of our many late night. Stay up, you know, um, maybe sharing adult beverages and doing those deep dives that we do.
Dr. Capener:I think that what kept me here was that every day is a challenge. Can be a big one, can be a little one. There's something every day that I have to bring my concentration to bear on, to get over whether it's. You know. How do I, you know, get security cameras installed on my house, right, you know, in the Korean language and dealing with a technical issue I've never dealt with before, for instance, you know, or something, and that you know the old adage that steel sharpens steel, that I've been constantly engaged with challenge. I won't say every day, because you know I could stay in bed all day, but you get what I'm saying. You know, life here never stops challenging me. It stops challenging me and, in my version of that, the way that I understand and have digested that is. That is making me better, that's making me smarter, it's making me stronger, it's enlarging my toolkit, it's enlarging my understanding of myself and what I'm capable of, of myself and what I'm capable of, and so, you know, that's probably the biggest thing that's kept me engaged in Korea.
Dr. Capener:You know, and then there's, on a more quotidian level, there's just the fun Korea's fun. I love the food, the fun Korea is fun. I love the food I like in limited ways because I don't like the whole package, but in limited ways. I like the way the Koreans socialize. Again, like I said, there are aspects of that that I don't care for, but it's really fun to go out with the Koreans that I'm close with and spend an evening just getting my Korean on. You know, doing the Korean thing, and you know, you've been, you've had that experience many dozens of times. You know what I'm talking about. It's very different than the way that we socialize in the United States, and I still enjoy it a great deal, you know, especially if you're with people that you like and trust. So it's a complicated question.
Dr. Capener:Korea, you know I love Korea. It just fascinates me. That's not my relationship with it. I appreciate the differences and in some ways I think Koreans do things better than Americans in many ways. And then there are things that I absolutely don't understand and will never understand and think that. You know, I can't for the life of me figure out why a better way hasn't been found. So it's a mixed bag right For me at this point? Ideally, I'd like to be able to spend more time in the United States, but I also don't want to leave Korea. So what do I do? You know, ideally, if I'm, if I hit the lottery tomorrow, you know, I can divide my time and myself between those two homes, because Korea is definitely a home for me.
Herb Perez:And you went to Korea, and I agree, I think, that you immersed yourself in the challenges when you spoke about your original reason for going and the hero's arc and the challenge of it, and then the way you just described what you did.
Herb Perez:It leads me into the next part of this, which was you didn't just go to korea and um teach english in a in a school for kids. You, you went to korea, went back to school, and I think you're you are the well, I know that you're the only person in our sport that has done it at this level, and I'm not talking about um, just the united states. You are unique in the world in that you have two doctorates from their two best universities, arguably their Harvard and Yale, and one is in Korean literature and the other one is in sport philosophy, and your dedication to those educational pursuits was inspiring for me, certainly, but between those different things you know philosophy and literature what subject awakened the most curiosity in you and what was it that drove that passion, or continues to drive that passion, because you're certainly still producing academic work.
Dr. Capener:Well, yeah, I mean, that's like choosing between your mother and your father, right? So sport philosophy was just the name itself was so attractive to me because I was fascinated by the idea of philosophy in college and you know, in my own sort of systematic way, I read a lot of philosophy and you know, as you know, because you majored in philosophy, you know that's a Steve Martin has a joke about that. I can't remember what it is, but about going to college and people who major in philosophy. Going to college and people who major in philosophy. And you know how I I I should have looked that up before I came on the podcast, because it's pretty funny. But you know, it's a it's a tongue-in-cheek thing about how it's not very useful, right? Um? But for me, I always thought that it was a way to explain phenomenon and and that's what philosophy's purpose was. So I wanted to explain, I wanted to solve some problems in sport, specifically in Taekwondo, and I needed philosophy as one of the tools to do that. But you know, majoring, I actually did a master's degree and a PhD at Seoul National University and that I was there for over eight years, and so you know I got a pretty good grounding in both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, which is a form of comparative cultural studies, and so I'm thankful that I got that as part of my education.
Dr. Capener:Literature I just always loved, I just loved reading it. I was actually teaching translation at Iwo Women's University. They had just opened a new graduate school of translation and interpretation and by virtue of the fact that I could speak Korean, they recruited me there, even though I wasn't trained as a translator per se. But I realized, teaching translation of Korean literature, that I wanted to do a deeper dive into that. I liked the literature, I liked reading it. I liked reading it, I liked translating it. So I went back to graduate school. I actually quit that job in order to do it, which was not the smartest, you know, move from a pecuniary standpoint of view. I ended up going back to being an unemployed, struggling grad student in my early 40s.
Dr. Capener:But you know, then I got a whole another sort of grounding in another discipline, something that I liked and something that I'd always wanted to systematically study Literature, I just liked literature didn't have to be English literature. Study Literature, I just like literature didn't have to be English literature. So they both, I guess, were pieces of the puzzle for me. I can't say that I could choose one over the other. I think that there's a synergy that I got from doing both of them, you know, just in the process of becoming a scholar, right, an academic. Both of them definitely played their part in producing and you know I'm in a job that actually demands that I publish. So I've published on both sides, continuously throughout my career as a scholar. I've written on sport, philosophy, on taekwondo, as well as a lot of Korean literary criticism literary criticism.
Herb Perez:So Well, I've seen and read a lot of your work and you wrote, I think, the seminal piece on the origin of taekwondo and debunked a bunch of the myths that are out there as to its history, its legacy and certainly its origins. But I know you're coming up upon your retirement age and I know that you have some plans to do something else in academia. But what do you consider? What would be your next thing that you'll explore, and will it involve maybe the next generation in partly a mentorship role? Or will you continue to teach, teach, or do you have any plans to perhaps write or publish anything?
Dr. Capener:yeah, well, you know, I'm too, I'm, um, I'm actually, uh, korea has a mandatory retirement age in even private universities. So I'm currently currently a professor of literature and translation at Women's University here in Korea, which is interesting because I spend most of my time educating young Korean college students all of them female Korean college students, all of them female and so I'm pretty tuned into what's going on in the heads of that generation. What are the concerns of young Koreans? And that's why I can't just unconditionally say that Korea is great because it's got a lot of problems. Unconditionally say that you know Korea is great because it's got a lot of problems and you know that's not. I'm not saying that as a disgruntled expatriate. I'm saying that as somebody that hears this from his students every day. But I can lecture, continue to lecture for a few more years. So I have a lectureship at my alma mater, yonsei, and I believe that they intend to continue to invite me. I lecture in Korean culture and Korean literature there, you know, as far as so, yeah, I'm not done. Being an academic or a scholar or whatever would be the more appropriate term there's still some things I need to write, and I want to write in an academic vein Also, I'd like to write about my own sort of experience of growing up in Montana, starting taekwondo you know the whole sport side of it, the national team and then the trip to Korea.
Dr. Capener:I think it's an interesting story. I have never seen anyone else, not only in our sport but outside of the sport as well. The really deeply embedded expat community is not very big Because, like I said before, korea is a hard place to, you know, really find acceptance, and so there are some people with you know fascinating stories and I know that because they write books about them. You know fascinating stories and I know that because they write books about them. You know, I think my story is pretty interesting, so I'd like to, I'd like to write about it.
Dr. Capener:You and I were talking the other day and I think I said this to you, that you know, something I learned in college was the best way to understand something is to try and write about it. So I guess this would be an exercise in me trying to work out why I did the things I did, why I made the choices I made. So you ask me and you can see that I actually have to think about it. It's not, I don't have any, any ready answers. It's it's something that I'm still trying to figure out, so I think writing about it would be a good way to sort of untie the knot, as they say, sort of denouement.
Herb Perez:Yeah, I think, and I agree with you. I think we live our lives and the type of life you've lived requires that you participated in the present and, to whatever degree, you can plan for the future. So it's probably not until it's done. And, as they say, you can't tell the true value of a man, um, until that life is done, and then you can kind of reflect back on it. And I think we owe it to ourselves to reflect upon ourselves and what we've done, and certainly you and it.
Herb Perez:It does lead me into my next question, because, um, you had another passion besides taekwondo, um, and then, at the point where you felt, because of your knees, you couldn't do taekwondo, um, and then, at the point where you felt because of your knees, you couldn't do taekwondo any longer. You ventured and were one of the pioneers, in my mind, in jujitsu and, um, you were in korea practicing it, teaching it, and and still do. And have you observed a progression in how the korean practitioners understand it? Is their approach different? Because I know you've taught in, certainly, taekwondo in the States. Is their approach different from how it's taught or learned here in the USA?
Dr. Capener:There's a. That's a good question. I would, I'd approach that from two angles. The short answer is yes, not just the United States, but I would say in Western cultures. It is a fighting sport. It is a fighting sport. It's like judo. It has no pretensions to anything other than getting better at fighting within its you know rule set. This is a problem that taekwondo has. You know that it's got three or four or five disparate identities that have nothing to do with each other. I expect we'll come to that topic later.
Dr. Capener:But so, for instance, a guy showed up about a year ago at our club, purple Belt, which is a fairly high level that's six, seven years of training and a Korean guy, guy, big guy, and actually he's an opera singer. He's got this long opera singer hair. Um, he's, he's very good. I hadn't really spoken to him um one-on-one until the other day. I sat down and asked him you know where he trained before he came to our school, and he said Milan, italy. I said all right, you, you're an opera singer, you were trained in Italy. He says yeah. I said oh, that's really cool. So well, you know how does the training there differ from the training here? And this is a.
Dr. Capener:This is something I've heard from not only other Koreans who have trained outside and then come back, but also non-Koreans who have come to Korea to train, and he said that they're more physical, the physicality, they're bigger, they're stronger. Not a lot of people here. Well, I think that's changing too. People here well, I think that's changing too. They're getting very good at being up to date on the latest sort of training methodologies. But I would say things like cross-training, weightlifting and all that is probably more systemized in the States. And so he said you know, their physicality is more of a challenge. And here in Korea he said that they're more technical, there's a greater sort of sophistication of technique because they can't rely on strength and also because of the hierarchical nature and the sort of codified nature of Korean etiquette, you know it's. There's just not that sense of testosterone and aggression in the gym that I've experienced when I've trained in gyms outside of the States, excuse me, outside of Korea, in the United States, or.
Dr. Capener:I went to a Gracie Boss school in London once, and you know it was. You know, as soon as I showed up, it was like fresh meat. These guys wanted to. You know it was a tree-pissing thing immediately and that Koreans don't do that. They're you know the way that they interact with people, especially that they don't know well, but even then, when they do know them well, they're even more careful about their behavior. So there's not that sense of aggression or you know territorialness, I guess. So that's, I think that's a plus on the Korean side and I think that they're very, very good at because they're very good test takers. Right, koreans are good test takers, so they're very good at learning a large technical vocabulary. They're very technical. That would be my answer to that.
Herb Perez:So I'm going to transition to taekwondo now because it's it's a natural evolution of, certainly, the conversation and and and your relationship with korea. When you first went to korea, um, I know that you worked at the wtf and then, over the years, served um to oversee and help evaluate the referee program and, as a member of the technical committee, focused on developing the current point system not the electronics, but certainly the way the point system has been designed. Can you share any insights or takeaways from that involvement?
Dr. Capener:share any insights or takeaways from that involvement. Well, I had an amazing opportunity. You and I came to Korea together in 1988 in January to train at the Korean National College of Physical Education and we already knew not a lot but a number of Korea's top players from our experiences on the national team international competition and we got to know a lot more through that experience. And we got to know a lot more through that experience. And then I came back in the early fall of 88 and stayed for four months just to train and I ended up going to. That's where I ended up going to Dongseong High School and meeting the man that would become my mentor in Taekwondo in Korea, the world famous coach, kim Se-hyuk, who as a high school coach created, I think, eight world champions out of high school kids. You know, just unbelievable results, just unbelievable results. I think he's been a three-time Olympic coach. He's produced more than 10 gold medals for Korea and Olympic taekwondo athletes.
Dr. Capener:But I also met, I was introduced to, the Secretary General of the World Taekwondo Federation and they were having an international symposium and they wanted me to help them with the organization of this event, specifically putting together the English language abstracts and some of the full articles that were going to be presented at the conference and I ended up meeting Kim Un-yong, who was the president of WTF, president of Kukyuan and the president of the Korean Taekwondo Association, all at the same time. That was actually the second time I'd met him. I met him on my first trip to Korea in 86. They actually took us up to the Kukyuan where we met him, and then he took us all to dinner that night with the Seoul city team. Anyway, for whatever reason, the Secretary General, who is, in my estimation, the father of Korean Taekwondo and there's a lot of, you know, if you look out there, there are a number of fathers of Korean Taekwondo, depending on what organization you belong to but he's the man that made Korean Taekwondo. In other words, he's the man that took the karate that all Koreans were doing and made it Korean by changing the sparring system into full contact, nonstop, body protector, no punch to the face, and thereby creating an original and unique martial sport that had never been seen before, and his name was Lee Jong-woo.
Dr. Capener:He was the president of the Jido Kwan school branch of Taekwondo, one of the largest of the eight Kwans in the Kwan system, you know, with students all over the world. Some of the best fighters came out of that school. Came out of that school, you know, canada benefited from his student, master Chung-Ni. He don't write from Montreal, montreal, montreal, or Quebec, montreal, montreal, right, yeah, you know, just amazing fighters, amazing school. Anyway, this gentleman, you know just amazing fighters, amazing school.
Dr. Capener:Anyway, this gentleman, you know, this giant of Taekwondo for some reason takes an interest in me and offers me a job at the World Taekwondo Federation, and I had one semester of university left, so I went back and finished it and then moved to Korea full time in the summer of 89, where I worked for the WTF for three years in the Office of International Affairs, where we continually worked on improving the referee system and we did a full overhaul of the competition rules at the same time while I was there, the competition rules at the same time, while I was there, you know, trying to improve what we would see in the sport, like fine-tuning it in the same way that you would, you know, fine-tune an engine. We were trying to get a certain kind of performance out of it right. And this continued later on when you and I were involved in 2008, 9, and 10, when we started making the gradated scoring system right. You know, two points for a turning kick, three points for a face kick. One foot goes out of bounds. It's an immediate penalty. You know things that we want to punish and reward in order to, you know, sort of engineer a certain type of outcome. So I was actually doing that in my first iteration at the WTF and it was.
Dr. Capener:It was an amazing job and I got to know really everybody who was anybody in Korean Taekwondo at the time, both among the players, because I was still training. I would go to Dongsung High School and train every weekend. I was still fighting, I fought in some foreigner tournaments here and you know I was still very, very much interested in Taekwondo as a project and trying to see it perfect itself. And you know it already had so much potential, it had already given me so many things that I really did want to do what I could to see it continue to grow and develop and improve. But the other thing that I saw from the inside was just how really unorganized it was and how dysfunctional it could be. And then also, of course, because the World Taekwondo Federation was located in the Kukyuan building at that time. That's where I worked.
Dr. Capener:I worked in the Kukyuan. Half the building was WTF and the other half was the Kukyuan competition that happened for two and a half years. Because they all probably I can't say I saw everyone. I saw 60% of the major games every year. Sometimes they would take place in other facilities, but everyone that happened in the Kukulon, which was the majority of them, I sat in the stands and watched and not one event ever went by without some massive protest of the officiating, and sometimes that could be a few water balls being thrown out of the stands at the referees, or sometimes it could be the entire military team jumping the rails and occupying the center of the arena for three hours, and sometimes it could be someone trying to decapitate somebody else with a chair.
Dr. Capener:You know, I just you know, and these were all, half the time, coaches who were, you know, high ranking masters of taekwondo. It was, it was. I realized that, you know, it didn't have a philosophical governor on it, there was um, you know something was wrong, something was missing and this. And clearly, you know, sometimes the cheating was very subtle and done, you know, in a very sort of sophisticated or devious manner. Sometimes it'd be watching and it'd be like man, that guy just back, leg round, kicks, kicked this guy three times in the stomach, sounded like a cannon going off and he can't get a point. The fix is just in on this. Right, everybody in the arena knows it. They're going to take the booze, they're going to take the protest, they're going to take the fist fight whatever comes. But there was really no way to overturn any of these decisions. Right, that was one of the big problems with our sport for years. So you know, I saw just how deep that disease went into the you know the nervous system of taekwondo.
Dr. Capener:And so when Secretary General Lee left his position in 93, I had already started graduate school, but he had kept me working there. And he came and he told me. He said I want you to leave with me because I don't know what will happen to you if I'm not here. He said I can't protect you. And I said do I need protection? He goes you absolutely need protection in this world. You can't survive without it. He said I can take care of you and protect you, but I don't know that my successor will be able to do that. So let's leave together. And I said I'll be honored to you know you've, you've given me this amazing opportunity. I had so much. I've learned so much. Um, you know, I'll go on and I'll try and make my contribution another way, and that's when I went into sport philosophy with the intention to try and figure out a way to solve some of these problems.
Herb Perez:I actually didn't know that last part and I know we've talked a lot about the other problems and um, and there's a lot more we could get into with that. But as somebody with your experience an extensive experience in in virtually every different arena within the movement inside of Korea I mean serving at that level Do you see areas where the sport is currently facing difficulties?
Dr. Capener:You know, at this point I question whether taekwondo actually even exists. You know, there's something they call taekwondo, where they have these competitions and people wearing a semblance of a taekwondo uniform, although it's not like, not, it's white and there's a belt on it, but other than that, you know, I'm not sure what it is and they use their feet and their fists. But for me the resemblance ends right about there. For me, the resemblance ends right about there because, you know, once in a while you still see something that looks like a roundhouse kick, but more and more you don't. A back kick that has the technical objective of speed and power and destructive force does not exist. Well, it exists, but it sweeps across the, the body protector there, by closing the sensor and giving them a war, like a little pellet coming out of the, like an erratic experiment. You know, hit the pedal and get the pellet, um and I.
Dr. Capener:I I'm not, you know, I'm not Albert Einstein, but even if I were, I don't think I would be able to discern any real, coherent strategy. And it seems like, you know, you just pick up your lead leg and jump around, pushing with it until and if you, and if your volume of of this sort of pushing is enough. Eventually an opening will be created. But that's so far from the strategy and tactics of the sport that I did that. I just don't see that they're the same thing. So for me I don't consider that sport any longer to be taekwondo as I conceive of taekwondo. I know that's pretty harsh, but when you give the identity of your sport and its teleology right, its intended outcomes, over to a machine and there's no longer really any human input in how techniques are rewarded, then this is what you get. You get machine taekwondo, where the machine is telling you what is taekwondo and what isn't, and no longer are we the practitioners of it. We have no say in it. We have no say in it. That machine determines everything.
Dr. Capener:And I felt sorry for Korea in the previous Olympics because they didn't get a gold medal. And they didn't get a gold medal because I know the two coaches. We both trained with them. They're our generation. They were both national team members, top players, and they were still actually teaching Taekwondo. They were actually still making their players do Taekwondo and went to the olympics and tried to do taekwondo and they lost.
Dr. Capener:And of course the shit hit the fan in korea and you know the whole, and now korea's sort of starting to dominate again because they've realized that they can no longer do classical Korean taekwondo. They have to do this new machine taekwondo, you know. But you know, taekwondo is very well supported here. So once they made that psychological shift, then they're going to be good at it. But you know, I meet, I meet Taekwondo people from my generation all the time and I and I ask them what's going on? You know what? What are you guys good with this? And no, of course they're not. Nobody is. They're embarrassed by it and they're angry about it, but, um, nobody, I guess, as of yet nobody has had the courage to mount a revolution of any significance and I I think that's one of the problems and certainly has been a long-standing problem in korea.
Herb Perez:Um, and that's at level, even at the highest government level. There seems to be no ability for the president of the country to survive. But that's a different conversation and I had another question on this topic, but I'm sure it'll come up when we talk about this next subject, because you've brought it up, and that's most sports evolve. If you watch basketball, it's evolved. If you watch boxing, it evolves. Judo's evolved. Jiu-jitsu evolves every day. Taekwondo, I posit, is de-evolving. It has lost its core purpose, its core philosophy and its core strategic dynamic and it's not even as good as bad point karate. So with this de-evolution, are there any specific improvements or modifications you think that could help revitalize it?
Dr. Capener:You know, here's the thing. The original designers, lee Jong-woo and the people around him, woo Moon-kyo, the vice president of Kukkiwon and vice president of World Taekwondo these guys decided that they wanted a combat, fighting martial arts sport, where they're going to take these techniques that are actually designed to inflict damage and you're going to compete them and see who possible how do I want to put it? You know, making it impossible for the opponent to continue the fight by knocking them out, or, you know, breaking their ribs or whatever you know. And so we trained in a lot of things and obviously physical conditioning and tactics and all that, but we kicked.
Dr. Capener:Every time we kicked, we kicked as hard as we could. There was no light kicking. There was no point in that right, you know. It got to the point where people kicked so hard. You know, you and I were at the 1997 World Championships together and we watched the Taiwanese bantamweight literally kick himself out of the tournament. He kicked so hard that by his third or fourth fight his feet were about to come off, and that was good news for whoever was next in the pipeline because he so brutally decimated. You know so in warfare strategy they say that quantity has its own quality.
Herb Perez:Right, so like you can have.
Dr. Capener:You know, I'm following the war in Ukraine quite carefully now and they talk about how the difference in the quality of Russian versus Ukrainian forces. But the fact that Russia has this huge advantage in quantity and they acknowledge strategists acknowledge that quantity is its own quality at a certain level. And so power too. Right, power is not the only thing. There's technique, there's strategy, there's footwork, there's all that. But at a certain point power has its own quality that can compensate for deficiencies in other areas.
Dr. Capener:We both competed together with Patrice Remarque and you know, to be honest, he didn't have the most precise or even aesthetically beautiful technique. His technique was based on basically one thing I'm going to kick as hard as I can and you're not going to be able to endure it, to stop it. Maybe you can for one, maybe for two, but by the time they hit you three times, you know you're out of bounds and you've got a warning, and even if I don't score a lot of points, I'm going to eventually just beat you down and win. You know that wasn't my approach, it wasn't your approach, but it was an approach. And so you know, power was integral to the identity of the sport and to its. It was one of its central strategic practices. Right, you know, I wouldn't say completely, but if you replace that with something that's still it's like, it's still hard to wrap my mind around. That's why I hesitate to describe it. It's not even. The imperative now is not even to hit the opponent, it's to hit them in a way that you close an electrical circuit, you know. So it's a kind of it's a kind of gaming, the system outcome right. And I think once we lost power, this was inevitable. So I think once we lost power, this was inevitable. Once we lost power, gave the decision-making as to what a point is over to the machine. This was going to be inevitable.
Dr. Capener:How do we fix it? You know this is a long, complicated argument. I'll try and make it brief and concise. We have two problems. One is that the way that the sport is scored now has decimated his technical system. The precision, beauty, intricacy of technique is all but gone. The strategy has become so simplified as to almost I would argue there isn't much strategy. And so then you get what we see in the competitions that nobody wants to watch.
Dr. Capener:But there's another problem, and that's the the fact that we have to acknowledge that we're at this point because we couldn't officiate our own sport, we weren't honest enough. Um, we, we, the, the. The adoption of the electronic body protector was the result of one thing, and that's that we couldn't root out the cheating in our sport, that we didn't have enough honest people either in the organization or in the referee pool, that we couldn't guarantee that all of our outcomes would be fair. So we had to give that role to a machine. It has these tenets. There's a great deal of rhetoric about character improvement and all this, and we have to live with this shame. And it's a shame, it's a stain. We have to live with it. We're living with it. We're admitting that we can't as people, we can't do that. We can't officiate ourselves. So I would say that you know, taekwondo has two things to do. One is recover its technical system and two is recover its honor. How do we do it?
Herb Perez:And I think that's the next question, which is do you envision the role of the WTF or WT, whatever they call themselves these days? How do they, what's their responsibility to course correct, and whose responsibility is it? And what would the top priorities be if you were advising them again?
Dr. Capener:well, first of all, a love of the sport that was created through decades of of innovation and and inspiration and experimentation. And then to take that, because nobody, nobody I haven't heard anybody yet try and make the argument that this version of the sport that we do is more interesting, more aesthetically pleasing, more effective for anything other than closing electrical circuits. Closing electrical circuits, you know, people who are implicated in the sport financially say things like well, they both have their good points and their bad points, but if you push them to articulate what those are, you'll find that they can't. That's as far as their argument goes I have yet to hear. The only one you can make is that there aren't. You don't see so many fights about cheating anymore, not so many protests. Okay, but we both know that they still can and do cheat. That's just not with points anymore, now it's with warnings, but the incidence of that has gone down by quite a bit. So, okay, but that just makes my point for me that that's because we were corrupt, we couldn't fix it ourselves.
Dr. Capener:But beyond that, when I say, alright, well, what's better about you know the, the optics of the sport? Is it cooler? Is it? Is it? And are they doing cooler stuff, are they? You know? Have they like now you watch? You watch basketball evolve. They had to instill a three point line and now people, people shoot three pointers from five feet behind the three point Like now.
Dr. Capener:You watch basketball evolve. They had to instill a three-point line and now people shoot three-pointers from five feet behind the three-point line regularly. They just keep getting better Gymnastics tumbling. What used to be a .2 difficulty move now is every six-year-old kid can do. You know you have
Dr. Capener:to. In every sport the bar is getting higher and higher for technical excellence, you know, and people say, well, these athletes are such, these players are such great athletes. Yeah, I'm sure they are, and nothing against the athletes at all, they're just doing what they have to do to win. I just feel sorry for them that they came into the sport at this point in time. Now maybe they love it, and I don't have the right to say that. But nobody to my ears yet has been able to provide a reason why this version of taekwondo is better, other than the lack of
Dr. Capener:protests. So clearly it's not. It's not. Clearly it's a defeat on two fronts. Clearly it's a defeat on two fronts. And so the WTF is the one that controls this. The WTF makes these decisions, the president of the WTF and of course they have to go through the General Assembly to make big changes. But that's politics and we both know how that works. We both saw that game played at a much higher level in the Olympic movement. That can be done. Where there's a will, there's a way. You do the politics right and you can do whatever you want with the rules. We both served on committees that did this. You look a little blurry, is that just me?
Herb Perez:No, it's blurry. I'm trying to unblur it, it's okay.
Dr. Capener:We got great sound.
Herb Perez:I don't know.
Dr. Capener:Did you just rub Vaseline on the camera lens or something, I think?
Herb Perez:I have to get this close.
Dr. Capener:Yeah, you know, like I don't have any, you know I don't have any skin in the game at this point, so I can pretty much say what I want. And here's the deal. These decisions were taken by people that never did taekwondo. You know they can profess their love for taekwondo, and they do it all the time, but why would you love something you never did? That just makes no sense to me. You know, that's like me saying you know, I, I love playing the guitar, like guitar playing is. You know, that's what I live for, except I've never picked up a guitar in my life. This is nonsense. So you know, to see, these aren't losses to those people. What we're talking, what I'm talking about, those aren't losses to those people, what I'm talking about. There's no emotional attachment to any of these things. They see the decrease in protests and the decrease in the noise as a win. The IOC doesn't perceive Taekwondo as corrupt anymore. That's the win, that's all they care about, and they're willing to sacrifice the sport itself to get that outcome. That is a lack of leadership, it's a lack of vision and I would say it's a lack of ability as a leader. Now is there a perfect electronic solution out there that can give us all of our desired outcomes Maybe, I don't know. But even if there is, that doesn't solve the problem of how to recover our honor. So you know, there are a lot of people that I like and trust in Korea that say we should go back to the human scoring system. I think we could have and I think we were on the right way there.
Dr. Capener:There was a really good PhD dissertation written out of Korean National College of Physical Education by a former coach of the school, professor Moon, and he talked about professionalizing the referee corps. Make it professional, something that judo has done. You have to have had a certain level of experience as as a player. Then you know you don't have to pay your own airfare to go to places. You know you've got a, you've got a budget for this.
Dr. Capener:The WTF's been getting over on its referees for years, and so you get people who are refereeing um, you know many of them for their love of the sport and commitment to it, but a lot of them also are there because they want to be part of the game. You know they want to be part of the fun. They didn't have any notoriety as a player and so refereeing is a way to, you know, be part of the international scene. You know, be part of the international scene. But one of my jobs when I went back and worked for the WTF from 2007 to 2010 was I did a referee evaluation at two world championships Beijing and Denmark. Beijing and Denmark. My job was to literally sit down and watch matches and make a record of problems referee problems and I had, by the end of was formatted so that I could categorize the problems that I was observing and then I could later on sort those into different categories and figure out ways to change the referee education system.
Dr. Capener:And you know, just what I encountered over and over again was just incompetence, just a lack of knowledge of the sport. You know, if you haven't done it, if you haven't fought up to a certain level, you are always reacting. You're always just reacting to what you see. But you know coaches, and if you've ever been to a top one of these top level tournaments or you've ever coached, you know that they see it shaping up, they see it coming and they're trying to convey that to the player, and the player does too. That's what makes tactics possible, right? If I do this, I anticipate this reaction and based on that reaction, I can do this and based on that reaction, I can do this.
Dr. Capener:And that level beyond one step is not. You don't see it in the current game. That's why I say that you know it's so dumbed down and it's lost so much of its intricacy and sophistication and interconnectedness that this sort of predictability is gone. But you know, you and I can watch and we see that point happen before it happens, because we see that the conditions are right for they're possible. Only these outcomes are possible in that moment, in any given moment, because of how space opens and closes right. So we're ready to see the point, or you know, the knockout or whatever, and people that didn't compete at that level they are I don't know in real time how far behind that, but they are reacting only to what they see. And it takes the brain a moment to register that, to interpret it and then to send the signals down for whatever, whether you're scoring the point or whether you're calling a break or whatever's happening.
Dr. Capener:And our referee pool just did not have consistently the level of competence to score the game. Now, that's fixable if we would have professionalized our referee corps like judo did. But I guess somebody decided it would be easier just to give this over to a machine. And you know, with that decision, you know, I mean it's almost like you know, it's a kind of a weak and pitiful version of you know, the great cautionary tales of surrounding AI that began back with Frankenstein, of surrounding AI that began back with Frankenstein and then in the modern age we saw it in the Terminator, right, when you create a machine and then the machine takes over the functions of the human being and then the machine eventually decides that it doesn't need the human anymore, right?
Dr. Capener:So we've hit that sort of dilemma inflection point. We've hit that sort of dilemma inflection point and there's just no. They just keep trying to make the machine better and they don't. They can't, for whatever reason, I don't know why. I can't imagine that with our level of technology, we can't create a machine that can score this game better than the machines that they have now, one that can read power, one that can differentiate between a real tech, one technique and a scorpion kick or a whatever bucket kick or whatever great names they have for these techniques, um, zigzag kick. So, yeah, that it is ultimately a failure of leadership at the very top, based on I'm not sure what, but for sure competence is one of the main factors.
Herb Perez:Lack of competence- brings us full circle to many more questions on different topics for the next time that we speak. But on this particular journey and this particular topic, we both have realized over the years that the simplest solution you know Occam's razor on this would have been to fix the cause of the problem, which was the referees, who were incapable, unwilling or unethical, and had that happened then there wouldn't have been a need for the machine. And many other sports that have had similar problems whether it's figure skating, gymnastics, diving, which is subjective sports, or boxing, which went to a machine for a bit realized that the best way to score the match was to fix the humans as opposed to trying to use a machine to make it equally as unfair for everyone. There is a version of the machine that would be better and it would have to be power-based and not contact-based. And when we were in the room talking about the contact-based approach, the idea was that they didn't want an arm hitting the chest protector ironically and scoring a point, and what they didn't listen to, which we both said if you could kick somebody hard enough in the arm and it scores a point, then that would be a point, because it should be a power-based solution and there are power-based solutions that things like scorpion kicks and wiggle waggle kicks, or foot farting, as I like to call it, wouldn't work or function.
Herb Perez:And the unfortunate part and the fortunate part is it is fixable by entrusting humans and then educating the humans better, professionalizing them and, quite frankly, punishing them if they can't be ethical or such. But you and I have talked about this and maybe this is a great way to wrap up this section of it is to what degree do we, or should we, be embarrassed by the fact that, as a sport that professes as a martial art, that professes to have tenets that rest upon pillars of honesty, humility, truthworthiness, moral and ethical parameters, that we can't manifest them in our scoring system or in our ability to compete? So to what degree could we call upon that portion of what we do as a partial solution to this?
Dr. Capener:well, that's, that's the other sort of tragedy of modern Taekwondo. All the things that are included under this poor manteau of Taekwondo are all together supposed to somehow compensate for the weaknesses of each other, right? So people are saying well, you know, true, taekwondo is found in traditional Taekwondo. Taekwondo is found in traditional taekwondo. Uh, you know poomsae and and you know self-defense oriented taekwondo, which is one of the biggest um non-sequiturs that you could ever encounter. Uh, because the, the constituent elements of that mode of Taekwondo are still almost entirely based on techniques that came from Japanese Karate. There's nothing Korean about any of that. Korean Taekwondo comes from the sparring system, and I'd be happy to debate that point with anybody, anytime, anywhere. You know all the stances, all the blocks, all of this was done first, and probably better, by the Japanese. And so to say that that's where Taekwondo's spiritual essence lies? Well, if Taekwondo's karate yeah, you know dare solve that conundrum first it has.
Dr. Capener:You know, historically it comes from the fact that it comes from kendo, it comes from sword fighting, when, you know, during the Tokugawa years and after, dueling was outlawed, so you couldn't actually cut anybody with your sword anymore. So how do you practice? Well, okay, what did we do when we fought. We did this, these motions, right. So then they made these pot and then it made sense because they had no other way to practice, until they decided to make a bamboo sword, a sword that they could hit each other with and not kill each other. And then what happened? It became a sport. That's the natural progression of martial arts.
Dr. Capener:There is no effective martial art out there that doesn't have a very powerful sport element where its essential techniques can be competed, but basically at full speed and power right. That's why things like aikido, hapkido, a lot of the chinese martial arts that don't have sparring systems, nobody takes them seriously. So you can't. You know that side doesn't solve. You know, you and I have had this conversation ad nauseum about the forms we have to learn for our high-down promotions, right, and one of them includes pushing the rock. Why in God's green earth am I pushing a rock? You know what does that have to do with anything related to self-defense? Oh well, you know you're focusing your energy and that sort of esotericism should have gone by the wayside long ago. And the fact that people bring that up as a philosophical substitute for what can happen in sparring is just absurd.
Herb Perez:Well, I've taken way too much of your time and we're going to have another conversation about the true beginnings of taekwondo and the history of it. I want to save that for another conversation.
Dr. Capener:Let me just tie that one off. And the question was you know what's the solution? Right, that you know judo doesn't have these problems, that you know judo doesn't have these problems. And judo came up with, I think, probably the best articulation of a philosophy for a martial arts sport. It's encapsulated in eight Chinese characters that maximum efficiency of energy and technique and then mutual benefit and prosperity. Like I need you and you need me, you can't do a combat sport without a partner or an opponent. So there's a social element to that, there's a technical element to that.
Dr. Capener:You know Taekwondo went this other way. You know very Chinese way of you know perseverance and integrity and all these things that I got that in Boy Scouts. I'd do the same thing in Boy Scouts, right, that doesn't derive naturally from a martial art. That's why judo's thing is so bright. Our stuff, could you know that could be the tenets of anything. Like I said, the tenets I learned in Boy Scouts, I think, cover all of the Taekwondo tenets.
Dr. Capener:So what do we do? We have to find a way to give some sort of moral weight and ethical weight to the way that we do our sport. And for that you know I have some ideas, but that requires people who actually did Taekwondo to get together and lead the sport and make these things, you know, mandatory, essential. If you get caught violating the ethics of the sport as a referee, you don't referee anymore and I saw refs that everybody knew were bad refs in that respect, never punished, allowed to, you know, and and people in in korea, korean taekwondo has this problem in spades and the same guys are still around for generations. You know guys that went to jail or back. You know in high posts, I don't know. You know how do we fight that? How do we create a coalition of people that have the integrity and the intelligence and the technical experience to lead our sport? That's our challenge.
Herb Perez:And I think that is the future or not the future. And if it's not the future, then what we knew as Taekwondo and the thing that was evolving, that was difficult to keep up with and difficult to do, certainly has gone by the wayside. And there's no doubt, at least in the united states, when I talked about this with juan moreno the sport is being led by second and third and fourth rate coaches and administrators with no history, or at least a lackluster history, if even there are any left, with no desire to change it, because they haven't met a plane ticket or a meal that they didn't like. And this was a problem that we had when I was at the Olympic Committee as well. And so until we get people that are passionate about the sport, willing to give their time and energy to change it, and then willing to stand up and revolutionize and have a revolution to stop the de-evolution of taekwondo, we will find ourselves having the good fortune of having to compete, at one of the greatest times in the sport and greatest errors, with the greatest athletes and competitors that I've ever seen and have ever seen since, because I don't see that currently, and that's because the sport doesn't allow for it and it doesn't require it. So why learn taekwondo? Why do taekwondo? Why do taekwondo? Why kick hard if you're not going to be rewarded for it?
Herb Perez:And I don't blame the athletes, because their job is to win and we all want to win and we'll do what's necessary to win. But I do blame those that have, quite frankly, responsibility and pick the fruit from the tree. Frankly, responsibility and pick the fruit from the tree. It's their turn to be the torchbearers and the bringers of light, to continue that legacy and not to take the meals and the plane tickets. And that's not just in the United States, that's across the world, because we as one country, and certainly the least powerful country in the WT, can't change it by ourselves. But we need to find people that are willing to take up that cause and perhaps make those changes. I'm not sure that there is a change that involves technology currently that could be balanced with a human element. I think the sport needs to go back to the human element, judging it, and you have to correct the humans, and I think that's the quickest way back to center and we are certainly drifted far off center again.
Herb Perez:But in closing I want to thank you for all your time.
Herb Perez:I know it's a different time in Korea, obviously, and hopefully, I'll be there shortly. I look forward to seeing you again, and I look forward to hearing about your book and everything else that you continue to do and evolve, and I think that people should understand the level and the depth that you have applied your craft, and that's academically and it's spiritually and physically, and we didn't speak much about your education in taekwondo in Korea, but there was so much that you taught all of us, especially me, about the concepts that I use daily. The next time that we speak, though, I want to talk about the process, the goal-oriented and process-focused approach that you use daily. The next time that we speak, though, I want to talk about the process, the goal-oriented and process-focused approach that you use, and then certainly catch up on what used to be a controversial topic as to where Taekwondo started, came from and how it evolved to be what it is, but again, thank you, and we look forward to hearing more about your continued journey.
Dr. Capener:Well, that was great. Thanks. I always, you know, love the chance to talk with you and I want to say that I think you're you're doing a really good thing with this platform. You're doing a really good thing with this platform. I look forward to the next episode. Everyone that you've done has been amazing and, and I think, very, very necessary. Yeah, I'm not sure what the solution is. It would require a coalition of of willing minds and people ready to expose themselves, because there is a lot of inertia and a lot of institutional sort of friction that would be hard to break loose. It would require a lot of money too, which that's another one of our challenges. But keep up the good work and again, it was my pleasure and my honor.
Herb Perez:Thank you, thank you, see you soon.
Dr. Capener:All right Over and out.
Herb Perez:Well, like I said, that was going to be an amazing episode. Dr capen joins us in our quest to find a better solution for the problems that we experience, not only in life philosophy but, more importantly, in the sport that we love. Today, he shared his thoughts on the origins of the problem but, more importantly, some of the solutions. In later episodes, dr Kaepernick will share his thoughts on the origins of Taekwondo and then on these specific problems and how we as a group can overcome them. Again, this is the Masters Alliance Podcast, uncut. I am Herb Perez and keep listening and sharing your thoughts with us as we explore this journey together on how to bring Taekwondo back to the center.