Not many years ago, perhaps much less than you can imagine, taekwondo was a completely unknown sport, which is ironic because we have to accept that although the nickname of "the most practiced martial art in the world" nobody will ever take it away and it is the little star that this discipline has (I put "discipline" because I do not want to enter into the debate about sport/martial art/way of life... At least today), it is not the same to be popular than to be mainstream.
Let's take the odious example of soccer, because the comparison is always present. A long time ago I understood that taekwondo will never be at that level in the collective unconscious, in fact and although many people from remote places are a star in their country thanks to the way of fists and kicks, we are far, but very very far, as a community, to achieve something like that. And although this Korean activity is one of the least divided of all the arts, it also has its niches and its irreconcilable differences, at least in practice, among the great family of practitioners worldwide, and that is the issue: I don't know, nor have I ever known of any soccer player who boasts that he does practice real foot ball and that everyone else doesn't, or that the soccer you see on TV is not real soccer, or that the old school soccer was better, or that technological incorporations have made it more and more boring, or that... Well, if you are reading this, you already know what I am talking about and you can complete that sentence.
The problem with taekwondo, whether they practice some branch of the sport, inside a cave by candlelight to connect with themselves, or write the word with a hyphen in the "do" is that we are so many and so varied that we will never agree on fundamental things... And that's okay. We will never be as popular as soccer either, not even if something were to happen tomorrow and all the footballs in the world were to disappear... And that's okay too.
We do not need to be observed by the great mass of people worldwide, nor do we need to be all day, or every day in the news or sports newspapers, but what we do need are spaces, indeed, I think it is essential that there are spaces where people talk about this sport / martial art / way of life and the more the better, because just as the community is diverse and with diverse interests within the same world of taikuondo, we must appeal to that diversity as a strength and not as a weakness.
Kickwire Taekwondo appears from that need to have a space (another one) where all those people, both those who dream of the Olympic rings, as well as those who just want to better themselves day by day or simply understand why their teenage son is attracted to something that comes from the Far East and it is not any musical style or exotic cuisine. With luck and the favor of your attention, this space can become the path that we can all walk regardless of their interests.
I thought long and hard to start this project, literally years, and I had to get out of several bubbles of my comfort zone, so like a white belt who ventures into his first tournament and they put him with a blue belt because he was the only one of his age and height, I start this: excited, but scared to death and wishing I wasn't here... Although anyone who has experience in combat knows that this feeling is removed with the first kick and this is the first kick (I have not removed it).
The path I am starting today is against the current, not only because of my history and the decisions I have made throughout my life (although that is another story and should be told on another occasion), but because the very nature of taekwondo and all the diversity it contains makes such a path uphill, like everything in life, well... You have to face and know how to reconcile not only styles, but idiosyncrasy and also politics and bureaucracy, which is not something new, only with a different approach.
I thank all of you, dear three or four readers, for accompanying me on this path. I hope that you like this new project, that you enjoy it, but above all that it will be of some use to you and I hope that one day, some of you will still be here when, along this path, it will be my turn to become a black belt.
I leave here a bunch of links to all the social networks of this project, I would appreciate if you follow me in all of them, yes IN ALL, please. Remember that always the best way to support this kind of projects is to share our work, tell a friend and if you don't like it, recommend it to an enemy.
See you on the road...
Powerful!