Are there secret moves in Kenpo? Well yes and no. If I teach Delayed Sword to a white belt, I think we can say yes, there are secret moves, because I won’t burden a white belt with anything other than blocking, kicking and stabbing with knife in hand. But if I review the technique with the brown belt, we’ll get a lot more.
But what I teach, or what I know, is not exactly what others are talking about when they refer to the secrets of Kenpo. They’re talking about Ed Parker and whether he had any secrets. Well, same answer. Yes and no.
Over the years, countless “secrets” have been revealed to me by high-ranking Kenpoists and Ed Parker himself. None of these secrets gave me superpowers.
In my experience with Ed Parker, every secret he shared with me was always directly linked to his satisfaction with my progress in Kenpo. If I had studied and practiced what he had taught me in our previous meeting, he would have shown his appreciation by showing me something else in the next lesson. Sometimes they were called secrets and sometimes they weren’t.
I also believe that Mr. Parker used secrets as a learning tool. All teachers can try it and see how it works with their students, because it works for me. Below is the story of a secret movement, taught by Ed Parker.
You see, he specifically told me that this movement was secret.
I’m at Mr. Parker’s house, going through the forms (kata) when he said he wanted to show a «secret» move in long form 3. Oh man, my excitement level was through the roof! It was nice enough to just be at Ed Parker’s house, but he was going to pass on one of the secrets of kenpo to me! Oh!
Once this amazing secret was revealed and the class was over, I headed straight to the Pasadena studio to practice Long Form 3. The last thing I wanted to do was risk forgetting the secret move on the way home and Pasadena was the closest place to practice.
Now I’m on the mat, very discreetly, and I’m going over the secret move that Mr. Parker taught me when Frank Trejo came to me and said, «Who showed you that?» I said, «Mr. Parker showed it.» Then Frank said, «This should be a secret!» I replied, «And that’s what Mr. Parker said when he showed it to me, Frank. With that, Frank said, «F@#k! ”And he left.
I practiced this movement for years, without showing it to anyone, because I didn’t know how big the secret was. I mean, Frank was really upset when he found out what Mr. Parker had shown me, so who would I tell such a big secret to?
Years later, I was reading the Long Form 3 manuals when I came across the secret of the Long Form 3 right in front of me! I laughed and wondered when did Mr. Parker decide to reveal this ancient secret by putting it in the manual?
Since there are many versions of the manuals, I began my research to see when he changed the manual to include this secret move. I started with the manuals that Ed Parker Jr. put together after Mr. Parker’s death, thinking that perhaps Edmund Jr. had inadvertently, or on purpose, included the secret in his version of the manuals.
And there was the secret. So I checked the 1987 manuals, which are the last ones to be supervised and copyrighted by Mr. Parker, and that was there too. Then I checked out the early manuals from the 1980s, put together when Ed Parker went from the 32-technique system to the 24-technique system, and there it was. What?
With only one version left, I looked at the manuals from the seventies and there was the secret. The great secret that Mr. Parker showed me in the mid-1980s had been right there in front of me since I began practicing Kenpo in 1972. I had never seen it because I had never taken the time to actually study the manuals.
I bet Mr. Parker was secretly laughing as he told people the secrets that had always been in the manuals. I have to admit, it’s a great way to get your students to remember something. Tell them it’s a secret and they’ll never forget it. Translation of the text by Rich Hale, president of the Ohana Kenpo Karate Association.
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