The new 13-year-old and I went to a tae kwon do tournament on Maui last weekend. We had a great time.
Our dojang is headed by the McCutcheons, a husband & wife team, both black belts, with about 300 students in two locations. He loves to spar & coach while she loves to run the business (and to tell him where to go coach). It's a fun show to watch and a great marriage/business example for families to emulate. They're raising three kids (all future black belts & Olympians) and she's even considering homeschooling (they offer two TKD classes in the middle of the day for HS families).
Maui's Kiffman TKD has started an annual tournament. The Kiffmans are a lot like the McCutcheons and she's really grown the business in the last few years. Their inaugural tournament got a lot of help from McCutcheons but they went way beyond them in some areas-- they invited teams from Germany and the Philippines, the Maui mayor got roped into free publicity, and their website allowed online registration with PayPal. So our dojang has a lot to learn from theirs, and the two island's tournaments will only get better from competing with each other. While you might expect more of a militaristic version of the Karate Kid movies, this is actually a great family-oriented gig.
Our kid still can't believe that she scammed her parents into a neighbor-island trip with McDonald's dinner and her own hotel room. (You parents will appreciate that a kid's own room is in your best interests, not theirs.) But with apologies to JB, when you hit Kahului on a Saturday night and have to dodge the sidewalks as they roll up at 8 PM, you begin to realize that you're in a really small town. I know that this is the pot calling the kettle black, but it was tough to find an alternative to leaving our kid alone in the hotel room with her own personal Nintendo system.
It turned out that a Saturday-night state amateur boxing tournament was being held at the same place as our Sunday TKD tournament. It had kids from about eight different clubs, including a number of girl's matches, so we went to see why my old boxing habits are so bad for TKD.
First she was amused by the hype. The announcer was a local version of the "Let's get ready to rrrrrrrrumble!" guy complete with rumpled black suit, shaved head, slimy pencil-thin goatee, and cool heavy-framed black glasses. The hardest-working man in the room was the DJ with his 10 megawatt sound system. It's a stark contrast to a TKD tournament where the only noise you hear is the kihap yells & impacts.
Then there was the crowd-- this was apparently the big place to be on a Kahului Saturday night. Even for a beach community the display of gold jewelry & goatees (mostly male), short/tight skirts (mostly female), with cowboy boots & cleavage (both genders) was surprising. The ringside ($10 extra) eye candy was especially compelling and I expected pugilistic displays to be just as prevalent in the crowd as in the ring. Apparently the real action was out in the parking lot with the beer, cigarettes, & local constabulary.
Aside from the shows, the boxing was pretty educational too. Our kid understands how to throw a good right hook now, which for a southpaw is difficult, and she sees how it can really break up an opponent's offense. Somehow that's never come across in the dojang over the last 18 months but it only took about 30 minutes on that Saturday night. We watched for a couple hours before she decided she needed a good night's sleep for the big match tomorrow (how many parents get to hear that from their kid?!?).
But the most educational moment of all was between rounds. While the two teenage girls were getting coaching tips in their corners, another teenage aspiring supermodel (10 cents a dozen on Maui) would slither through the ropes wearing a tight sarong & swimsuit top and sashay around the ring holding up the number of the next round (on the back of the card were ads for Maui's finest cement, trucking, & paving companies). As you might expect from a hormonally-challenged group, this generated some competitive attention.
So I turned to my daughter and asked "Hey, if you could be in the ring right now, would you rather be the girl with the gloves getting the crap beat out of her, or the girl holding up the sign and getting all the applause?" The answer was immediate: "Gloves." I asked her the same question about every other teenage girl on our street, and it appears that we only have one girly girl in the neighborhood. Our grrrrrrls tolerate her because she loans out her cell phone, and maybe someday she'll be loaning out spare boyfriends too. ("Eeeeeeuw, gross, Dad!") It'll be interesting to see what kind of lifestyle our kid carves out for herself, but hopefully she won't have to use a right hook so often.
Airfare/car rental package-- $350
Hotel rooms- $200
Tae kwon do tournament-- $65 each (pain & bruises no additional charge)
Boxing match-- $20/ticket
Two bronze medals-- adults $4.50 each, valuable treasure to a kid
Four fast food meals in two days-- eeeeeeeuw, gross, $50
Free tournament locker rooms with showers-- wonderful!
Catching an earlier flight home on a school night-- $25/ticket
Quality butt-kicking time with your daughter-- priceless.
Our dojang is headed by the McCutcheons, a husband & wife team, both black belts, with about 300 students in two locations. He loves to spar & coach while she loves to run the business (and to tell him where to go coach). It's a fun show to watch and a great marriage/business example for families to emulate. They're raising three kids (all future black belts & Olympians) and she's even considering homeschooling (they offer two TKD classes in the middle of the day for HS families).
Maui's Kiffman TKD has started an annual tournament. The Kiffmans are a lot like the McCutcheons and she's really grown the business in the last few years. Their inaugural tournament got a lot of help from McCutcheons but they went way beyond them in some areas-- they invited teams from Germany and the Philippines, the Maui mayor got roped into free publicity, and their website allowed online registration with PayPal. So our dojang has a lot to learn from theirs, and the two island's tournaments will only get better from competing with each other. While you might expect more of a militaristic version of the Karate Kid movies, this is actually a great family-oriented gig.
Our kid still can't believe that she scammed her parents into a neighbor-island trip with McDonald's dinner and her own hotel room. (You parents will appreciate that a kid's own room is in your best interests, not theirs.) But with apologies to JB, when you hit Kahului on a Saturday night and have to dodge the sidewalks as they roll up at 8 PM, you begin to realize that you're in a really small town. I know that this is the pot calling the kettle black, but it was tough to find an alternative to leaving our kid alone in the hotel room with her own personal Nintendo system.
It turned out that a Saturday-night state amateur boxing tournament was being held at the same place as our Sunday TKD tournament. It had kids from about eight different clubs, including a number of girl's matches, so we went to see why my old boxing habits are so bad for TKD.
First she was amused by the hype. The announcer was a local version of the "Let's get ready to rrrrrrrrumble!" guy complete with rumpled black suit, shaved head, slimy pencil-thin goatee, and cool heavy-framed black glasses. The hardest-working man in the room was the DJ with his 10 megawatt sound system. It's a stark contrast to a TKD tournament where the only noise you hear is the kihap yells & impacts.
Then there was the crowd-- this was apparently the big place to be on a Kahului Saturday night. Even for a beach community the display of gold jewelry & goatees (mostly male), short/tight skirts (mostly female), with cowboy boots & cleavage (both genders) was surprising. The ringside ($10 extra) eye candy was especially compelling and I expected pugilistic displays to be just as prevalent in the crowd as in the ring. Apparently the real action was out in the parking lot with the beer, cigarettes, & local constabulary.
Aside from the shows, the boxing was pretty educational too. Our kid understands how to throw a good right hook now, which for a southpaw is difficult, and she sees how it can really break up an opponent's offense. Somehow that's never come across in the dojang over the last 18 months but it only took about 30 minutes on that Saturday night. We watched for a couple hours before she decided she needed a good night's sleep for the big match tomorrow (how many parents get to hear that from their kid?!?).
But the most educational moment of all was between rounds. While the two teenage girls were getting coaching tips in their corners, another teenage aspiring supermodel (10 cents a dozen on Maui) would slither through the ropes wearing a tight sarong & swimsuit top and sashay around the ring holding up the number of the next round (on the back of the card were ads for Maui's finest cement, trucking, & paving companies). As you might expect from a hormonally-challenged group, this generated some competitive attention.
So I turned to my daughter and asked "Hey, if you could be in the ring right now, would you rather be the girl with the gloves getting the crap beat out of her, or the girl holding up the sign and getting all the applause?" The answer was immediate: "Gloves." I asked her the same question about every other teenage girl on our street, and it appears that we only have one girly girl in the neighborhood. Our grrrrrrls tolerate her because she loans out her cell phone, and maybe someday she'll be loaning out spare boyfriends too. ("Eeeeeeuw, gross, Dad!") It'll be interesting to see what kind of lifestyle our kid carves out for herself, but hopefully she won't have to use a right hook so often.
Airfare/car rental package-- $350
Hotel rooms- $200
Tae kwon do tournament-- $65 each (pain & bruises no additional charge)
Boxing match-- $20/ticket
Two bronze medals-- adults $4.50 each, valuable treasure to a kid
Four fast food meals in two days-- eeeeeeeuw, gross, $50
Free tournament locker rooms with showers-- wonderful!
Catching an earlier flight home on a school night-- $25/ticket
Quality butt-kicking time with your daughter-- priceless.