How Ben Richardson became the Sensei he is today
When I was a young boy, I used to watch kung-fu movies with
dad on a Friday night. We watched all sorts of cray ones, flying ninja,
demons, guys with secret death touch techniques, cyborgs and all sorts. My
favourite, though and the person responsible for starting my journey into
martial arts was Bruce Lee.
I just thought he was incredible! Every movie had something
amazing in it and I wanted to have skills just like him. He seemed a little
more real, a little less fake than the other movie stars and my dad told me he
was the real deal too. I started with Karate after nagging my dad relentlessly
to take me to lessons, back then it was pretty much the only thing on offer,
but most clubs wouldn’t let children join until they were 12.
Luckily, we found one that said 9 years old was ok! It wasn’t
until I reached university 10 years later that I discovered that Bruce
Lee did Jeet Kune Do not Karate! Ha-ha! I was so naïve back then. As
luck would have it, the gym I worked at in Uni had a JKD class run by a
visiting Canadian PhD candidate who just so happened to own the Toronto JKD
Academy. He had trained for years and was amazing to me. He mentioned a guy
call Inosanto, who had was Bruce Lee’s student and training partner, and I was
mightily impressed.
After I
left Uni I moved to Oxfordshire and alongside my own Karate training I started
travelling to London each week to train at the Bob Breen Jeet Kune Do &
Kali Academy. It was pretty famous then, and people from all over Europe would
come to train with the man certified by Dan Inosanto!
This was a great period of growth for me and after a short
while I achieved my blue belt under Bob’s tuition and guidance. That was when Bob
encouraged me to start teaching JKD at my small class in Abingdon.
I kept training with Bob in London and achieved my Black Belt
in September 2007 (the fastest progression to Black Belt in the Academy’s
history… just saying). Later that year I was on a plane to the US and the
homeland of JKD, California, to train with legend in the art, Paul Vunak,
famous for teaching the Navy Seals unarmed combat.
My journey to Sensei has been exciting and thoroughly fulfilling. Thinking back to when opportunities for youngsters wanting to take part in martial arts training were few and far between has made me so proud to offer the skills training in the range of disciplines we do here at the Abingdon Dojo. I wonder how their journeys will take shape, as they start out on our Kickstart programme!