JL: What is your background in the martial arts? Give us the full history.
DB: I initially got into martial arts because my father was a boxer and he was also at that time involved with, I guess you would call it gangs. And there was a lot of rivalry then, so he wanted to make sure that I was able to fight too, so one of the big things was for him, when he came home from work, to show me a little bit of boxing. That was further perpetuated by my brother, who was quite a few years older than me. He and his friends always had bets that, “my little brother can beat up your little brother”, so every Friday like clockwork, they’d put all the little brothers together and make us fight.
Then the “Asian persuasion” of the martial arts really took course, and my father decided to put me into that. I started in Japanese Shotokan, which lasted for a short while before that school made a transition to a hybrid system which combined Judo, Karate, and some forms of Chinese martial arts. I also studied Hung Gar. We moved several times and I ended up in Redlands, California which at that time was literally in the middle of nowhere. There was one Karate school. So, I trained on my own for a very long time and I actually used textbooks to draw material from.
I started formal martial arts training again in the military style of Ji Do Kwan, which is a little bit more hardcore form of Tae Kwan Do, it’s not the sport form that most people practice now. The instructor was a former… they called him the “Ghost” at the time, or the James Bond of Korea. He was a tough dude. It was fun to be able to work with him because he pushed me, probably harder than he should have, but I kept it to myself.
One of the guys I was training with was reading books and found out that Tim Tackett lived here in Redlands. So, he tried to call Tim a few times and I remember Tim hanging up on him, telling him, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t teach Jeet Kune Do.” So I said let me try. I called and said “Mr. Tackett, my name is Dennis Blue and I’m currently taking Tae Kwon Do and I’m really interested in further educating myself and progressing my martial arts skills, and I’m wondering if you’d grant us the opportunity to come up and train with you.” And he said “Oh sure, we meet on Wednesday’s at 7 o’clock, come on up.” I started with Tim in 1977 and I’ve pretty much stayed with him for a long very long time. I did leave a couple of times for a while, I was in the service, got out, went back a few times, got into law enforcement for a very short period of time, but in the interim, whenever I had the opportunity, I came back to train with Tim. And Bert Poe was there, so I got a lot of combative training during that time. Later on down the road I started teaching on my own and started going down to the Inosanto Academy where I was watching some of the classes that Dan Inosanto was teaching. During that time Eric Knaus, Marc Denny and those guys were there. Burt Richardson was there. Brandon Lee was there. I got to work with those guys a couple of times, got to watch them work out. And that’s when the Dog Brothers started their deal. So, I was there when they first started out which was really cool. One of my students at that time was working out with them. So, I got a lot of stuff out of that.
Also at that time, I picked up a lot of students because Tim was only teaching classes on Wednesday’s. So I got people like Erik Paulson, who I was going out to Palm Springs and Palm Desert to train. Also, Bruce Wilkerson and a couple of other guys I trained with 2 or 3 times a week.
Over the years, due to relationships, whether they were with friends or with women, I managed to be around Thai’s a lot and so there was a phase where I was hanging around Saekson Janjira and I picked up a lot of the Muay Thai from there that I was bringing back to the school that I had at that time. We had a class just for the Muay Thai.
One of the girls I was going out with had uncles who were eskrimadors and they taught me a couple of things here and there. Barry Dixon was also a Doce Pares guy and he showed us a couple of things.
I try to pick up as much to refine my skills as possible, because I feel that as I have gotten older, I am not physically able to do some of the things I used to be able to do. However, because of the biomechanics that I had developed in the platform early on, I still have some of the residual results from the physical training that I had then. Now I’m a little bit smarter about how I train.
JL: How has your approach to martial arts changed over the years?
DB: I have a lot more insight about “combativeness” as it were. It all starts with your ability to adopt a particular attitude. You can have all the skills in the world and all the knowledge in the world but if you do not have the attitude that allows yourself to understand that in a confrontation that is going to require me to survive, to try to save my life or the lives of people around me, I’ve had to have already made up my mind that there’s a great chance that I am not going to come out of this alive, but I’m going to do the best that I can.
I firmly believe in the use of implements. Sharp objects, blunt objects, projectile weapons, chairs, whatever. And to me that’s JKD. Whatever it takes for you to survive. I’m not so much big on the idea of being a “winner”. If I survive, I’ve won something.
JL: Does it come down to training with emotional content?
DB: Emotional content is crucial. Being aware of your own state of mind is critical. Again, there are a lot of people that want to do martial arts, they want to get out there and spar, they want to roll around, but they do it with the mentality that they’re going to walk away from it unscathed. I like to take it three steps further. What if during the course of that you’re fighting with this guy and six other guys jump in? It’s not the same ballgame.
JL: Many people want to learn that, it’s very difficult to teach…
DB: If you have a solid foundation, and I’m going to use the term platform rather than foundation, if you have a platform that’s very flexible, that allows you to choose and take materials that you can apply to any given circumstance, you have a great start. But if you’ve been trained in one system, and it’s designed to fight people who are doing your system, when you run into someone who’s system is designed totally different than yours, you’re going to have an issue. If you’re not diverse, if you’re not a knowledge seeker you’re going to be left in the dust, like when BJJ came out. It caught a lot of people off guard who were stuck in the format that “I’m this or I’m that”. They categorized themselves to do one thing, so that’s what they became and that’s all they could do. They couldn’t do anything else.
Another misnomer is the term “Mixed Martial Arts”. Real martial arts involved everything. What essentially happened is someone said “well I’m not that great a puncher so I’m not going to punch in my system, I’m just going to go in and try to throw that guy down”. They limited themselves because of a talent that they did not possess, so instead of further developing it to where they could use it in association with the other material that they had, they threw one part of the pizza away and now you have half a pizza or maybe a third of a pizza left and it’s not the same thing as a whole.
JL: Reverse evolution…
DB: Yeah, that’s a good term. For me JKD is using whatever I can, whether I’m pulling a sidearm or using a knife. That to me is JKD. There is a basic platform, footwork, basic strikes, but I think a lot of people limit themselves to the kickboxing aspect of JKD, which is a training tool, or drills to develop rhythm, speed, and certain attributes. They need to move beyond that in terms of how they train it.
JL: Can you talk a little bit about your military career?
DB: Yeah, very little. (laughs) I was in the Army, I admit it.
JL: What was the time frame?
DB: I initially went in, in 1979. When I got out, the papers will argue, but it was somewhere around ’84 or ’86, depending on you know, whatever… but I did a lot more believe it or not, outside the military than I did in the military. There are PCC’s, which are Private Civilian Contractors, and PMC’s, which are Private Military Contractors. I did that and I also tried Executive Protection for a while. Prior to that, when I first got out, I actually went into Law Enforcement with the Sheriff’s Department for a very short time and it got very political so I got out of that.
I drew a lot from the military, despite the fact that it wasn’t a clean break when I got out. We both left a bad taste in each other’s mouths. I still love my country. I still love the military. I hate what they’ve done to it. It’s become such a litigious society that even in law enforcement or the military you cannot defend yourself anymore. You become the bad guy if you defend yourself. Like in the military now, in some situations you cannot fire back until fired upon? Let’s see, so if that first strike is mortal, how am I going to fire back?
JL: What is your personal philosophy on how Jeet Kune Do should be taught? How the training should progress, going forward into the future.
DB: As an instructor, I think the instructor themselves should be a perpetual student. They should never, never stop learning. Whether it’s JKD or any other form of martial arts, you should never stop refining yourself. No matter how good you think you are, you should never stop trying to get better, and how you measure better is debatable. If you’re not giving your best all the time, you’re not going to put out your best all the time.
