56 years ago in a tiny town in Korea, a small boy walked into his first martial arts class. Two hours later, he walked out with the course of his life set. Though only ten years old, little Chul Woo Jung knew then that the martial arts would be his life's dedication.
Grandmaster Jung was born in 1938 to a poor farming family in Chunbuk, South Korea. At the age of ten, he witnessed a group of men assault another man and kidnap the man's girlfriend. The experience deeply affected him and inspired him to begin study of Tang Soo Do. During this time, Grandmaster Jung's family continued to suffer from extreme poverty; however, this did not deter him.
We did not have enough food and I often went without eating for two or three days at a time. This made me smaller and weaker than most of the other students. Therefore, I decided I must train twice as long and twice as hard as other students to make up for my body's weakness.
At the age of twelve, he received his black belt in Tang Soo Do. Having taken the philosophical teachings of humility to heart, he did not even tell his family or friends about it. He simply continued with his studies.
By the time he was fifteen, Grandmaster Jung was undergoing the kind of training that would give most people nightmares. He would rise at 3:30 in the morning and run four miles up a mountain, then practice for four hours before returning home for breakfast at 8:30. He would then go to the gym, return home for dinner, and train for four more hours at night, leaving only a few hours per day for sleep. Incredibly, he did not think of this grueling schedule as being difficult.
If you don't love the martial arts, then you will find your training hard. But if you love martial arts, it is not hard. I love martial arts, so my training was easy.
Grandmaster Jung's mental and spiritual training was also intensifying during this period. His master felt that too much of his mind was being occupied by thoughts of women, and so he was ordered to shave his eyebrows in order to eliminate this distraction. While most of us would be extremely reluctant to follow such an order, Grandmaster Jung accepted it without question.
Shortly thereafter, at the age of eighteen, he was sent to a Buddhist monastery for a year. There he had the solitude necessary to focus intensively on his mental and spiritual growth through extensive meditation practice. He also used the opportunity to expand his knowledge of So Rim Kung Fu learning under Master Lin Poom Zhang of the Korea Kung Fu Association. Throughout the next ten years he returned periodically to the monastery for extended periods of intensive study.
Such efforts were not wasted, and at the age of twenty-one, Grandmaster became the youngest Korean to attain the level of fourth-degree black belt.
He enlisted in the South Korean army and was made company commander, in charge of teaching Tae Kwon Do to all new recruits and teaching black belts to be instructors. Upon finishing his tour of duty, he returned to his hometown of Chunbuk and opened his own school.
Operating a martial arts school in Korea at that time was not at all like operating a school in America. The Korean Mafia did not approve of his school because it was in competition with their schools. One day some members of the Mafia paid his school a visit. When he refused to give into their demands, they attacked him. When it was all over, several members of the Korean Mafia were in the hospital and Grandmaster Jung was not harassed any further.
Finally, in 1963, Grandmaster Jung decided it was time to test his skills in international competition. He entered and won the first international Tang Soo Do championships in Seoul, South Korea.
From there he went on a tour of Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and the Philippines, where he won the 1969 World Karate and Tang Soo Do championships. When he retired from competition in 1969, he had competed in seventy tournaments, and incredibly, was undefeated in all of them.
Grandmaster Jung returned home a hero and took a position teaching martial arts to the Second and Seventh Infantry Divisions of the United States Army stationed in Dongduchun, South Korea. He continued in this capacity until 1978, when his teacher, Grandmaster Hwang Kee, ordered him to move to the United States and open a school in the Denver area. Grandmaster Jung readily agreed, feeling that this was the perfect opportunity to share the traditional approach to martial arts with another culture. In March of that year, he and his wife moved to Aurora, Colorado.
Grandmaster Jung found that opening a school in America was considerably easier to do than it was in his homeland. In Korea, one needed to obtain a license and be at least a fourth-degree black belt in order to open a school; in America, there were no regulations involved. Four months after arriving, he opened his first school in Aurora. Within six weeks, he had 63 students, and within four months, he had over a hundred.
He remembers the feeling of his first students reaching black belt fondly. "I felt like now I have more family here; I liked that," he recalls. Many students had problems with alcohol, drugs, street fighting, and other such difficulties, which he refers to as the "happy-sick" state. These behaviors were not so prevalent in his culture, where many people were too busy trying to make enough money to be able to eat to become "happy-sick." He was glad to be able to provide his students with an alternative to such self-destructive life-styles. Today, he is doing just that for students at his schools in Boulder, Broomfield, and Littleton, Colorado.
Grandmaster Chul Woo Jung is a ninth-degree black belt, having studied and practiced martial arts in Korea since the age of 10. Some of his many accomplishments include becoming the youngest Korean to attain the level of fourth-degree black belt at age 21, being appointed head Tae Kwon Do instructor during his tour of duty with the South Korean army, and going undefeated in 70 tournament victories during his years of competition from 1963 to 1969. Grandmaster Jung began teaching martial arts in Denver, Colorado in 1978, and operated schools in Boulder, Broomfield, and Littleton untill his retirement in 2004.
After Grandmaster Jung retired from the martial arts, he granted master Kevin Lees Presidency of his association. Under Master Lees' supervision, Sun Bai Nim's Erik Brechun and Marek Chromik maintain instruction in the Denver metro area and Newport, Rhode Island.