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Kemal Shaheen Sempai Shodan-Ho |
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I was born in 1975 in Coventry but managed to escape to Suffolk when I was less than two years old. As a young lad I was fairly active, swimming competitively for the local town and playing a number of racket sports including squash and badminton. However, I felt that I had yet to find an activity that I was really passionate about. And then, on the occasion of a friend's tenth birthday party, I had what some people might refer to as an epiphany moment. My friend had hired two videos out – one of which was Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. The film credits had barely started rolling and we were already trying to pull off some of the moves. One poorly executed flying kick off the sofa later (narrowly missing a lamp and my friend's head) and I decided that I needed to take a more systematic approach to practicing the martial arts... I joined the local Karate club (a competition style also called Isshin Ryu) and soon realised that I was not about to become Bruce Lee over night – studying the martial arts is a slow (and frequently painful) journey but one with multiple rewards if you stick with it. Not long after I was awarded my blue belt (following a grading by Ticky Donovan the then England Karate Team Coach) our local club began to fall apart and I became quite disillusioned – I left hoping that it wouldn't be long before I resumed my training. |
At the age of twenty-six I was living and working in London. I remember the day very clearly when I began to turn things around. It was about 3pm on a Sunday afternoon and my flat mate and I had already sunk a few pints and five or six JD and Cokes. The new guy who had just moved in was meeting us down the pub before he went off training (Kempo Jujitsu under Hanshi Browne). As he arrived I had another moment of clarity. I extinguished my umpteenth fag of the day and said to him "next time you go training you are going to drag me along – it will hurt but don't let me give up".
It nearly bloody killed me…but two years of training in a discipline which was very different from the competition Karate that I had done before and I was hooked. When I moved back to Suffolk I knew that I would have to find a similar discipline - an organisation where the training was hard and the rewards were measured in blood, sweat and tears. I went along to a few different clubs but they were not really what I was looking for. And then I stumbled across Sensei Trevor who was running a dojo in Norwich and the rest, as they say, is history.
Who knows what might have happened if I had been less impressed with Bruce Lee and more taken with the other video that my friend had hired out... Conan the Barbarian?
Kemal Shaheen Sempai currently teaches at the following Dojo's: