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William Chow By QUI-GON - Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:07:04 GMT

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I've become very interested in William Chow. I read quite a bit of negative things about him but it's hard to separate the truth from fiction. I understand that he never made a living teaching his Art and may have lived in poverty. I was also surprised to find out he was 5'2" tall. I thought of him as a much bigger man physically.

Is there any good factual biographies of this mans life? I'd like to know more about how he lived and died and his training, etc. Seems like he was the real deal. I think he may have influenced alot of the early Martial Artists.


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sunfist

I met Chow when he was teaching down at the Nuuanu YMCA in Honolulu. Yeah he was around 5 ft 1 or 2 inches. No he wasn't "super guy". He was, at one point, heavy on the bottle, and students could sometimes smell liquor on his breath etc but so what? We weren't going to marry him. If we went to work out with him it was to learn to fight, and that he could teach.
People today seem to want to make a diety out of him, and that he wasn't. A pretty good teacher is what I'd call him. I think when people began to drift away from him was when he'd put ads in the Advertiser showing himself wearing 3 or 4 belts (no I'm serious) and calling himself a "15th degree Judan" and holder of the gold, silver and red belts. This was around '59 to '60 and in there.
Still he trained people and they like him and so on it goes. Remember, all teachers put their pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else. To "deify" Chow or anyone else is, IMO, a disservice to a pioneer.
Sunfist