I first met the man I will call Rex King^ in, probably, 1979. He had a high profile in Kung Fu circles in Sydney back then. He had definite skills – plus a stocky, muscular physique with very powerful kicks. Great hair.
I saw him break untreated weathered house bricks, taken from a nearby building site, with his knife hand – “karate chop” – on several occasions.
One of his ex-wives told me how he had been challenged by the head of a karate school, after they both appeared at an event. Rex tried very hard to convince the guy to back out of it, but when all peaceful options were exhausted, Rex ducked under the guy’s first punch and put him on the floor, gasping in agony, with a punch to the groin, not dissimilar to a move performed by JCVD in “Wrong Bet.”
He had studied both Kung Fu and Traditional Chinese Medicine in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and had excellent credentials from those he studied with. He was a consulting acupuncturist, and definitely knew his TCM theory very well.
I took a three week trip through Asia with him, and perhaps twenty other people. He certainly had contacts everywhere. I was involved in a friendly contest of Taiji push hands on a Taipei rooftop one nigh,t in a visit to a Kung Fu school there, and managed to hold my own, with Rex coaching me from the sideline, much the same as a BJJ instructor might coach a student during a tournament match.
I made some good friends there.
That Rex had real skill was not to be denied.
The Name Game
Rex King was not his real name. But it carries the same aura of charisma and “born-to-ruleness” as the “real” changed name he gave himself. Not the name his parents gave him.
There are legitimate reasons for changing one’s name. A guy I trained with before I met Rex was Michael Coxhead. Married and with a child on the way, he changed his name to Michael Quinn to spare his kids the totally predictable nicknames with which they would be branded all through school, and possibly beyond.
There was nothing wrong with Rex’s original name, other than it lacked the gravitas with which Rex wanted others to view him, and presumably with which he viewed himself. Something more befitting a natural scholar and leader.
So he became Rex King.
Pre-Rex
I had started Kung Fu in Canberra in 1977 with the excellent Dan Croft*, a teacher of Kung Fu. He had excellent skills, a deep well of knowledge, and was extremely generous to me with his instruction.
I did not enjoy my life in Canberra as a public servant, my first job out of university. I found it a cold and unfriendly place. I despaired at my own apparent inability to make new friends. After a holiday in the South Coast of New South Wales, during which I made many new friends and even scored a sweet holiday romance, I concluded that my social isolation had been the result of Canberra, not me. I worked hard to pay off my debts, built up some savings, and moved back to Sydney.
I had given up on Canberra, but not on martial arts. I knew I would miss Dan and his excellent tutelage and example, but didn’t realise how difficult finding another competent instructor in Sydney would prove.
In the days before the internet, one had books, magazines, and the Yellow Pages. Finding information about martial arts schools relied on these sources exclusively, unless you were privy to some word of mouth. Dan gave me a few suggestions, but for one reason or another I found these unsuitable.
My First Time
I became interested in Rex’s academy, which was advertised frequently in magazines and had a prominent advertisement in the Yellow Pages. I fronted up one day and spoke to one of his senior students. During that conversation, I noticed, behind him, sitting at the desk in the little admin space at the school entrance, an attractive girl with long dark hair, dressed in a black uniform, repeatedly rolling a 64 sided die made of red plastic, and consulting the Yijing / I Ching about the result after every roll.
The I Ching, or as I’ll call it from here on in, the Ching, is an ancient Chinese philosophical and divinatory text, dating back to before the time of Confucius. It’s highly revered and taken very seriously by its adherents, which included the seminal psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.
A flippant use of the Ching, especially rejecting the initial reading and trying again in the hope of a more auspicious outcome, might often result in Hexagram 4, “Youthful Folly”, basically the Ching saying to you, “Take me seriously, idiot.”
I have been but an occasional and sceptical consultant of the Ching. I ran into “Youthful Folly” on occasion. I may have deserved it.
Shortening the thing’s name from I Ching / Yijing to Ching, as I just did. might earn such a slap in the face. I’d imagine using a 64 sided die of red plastic, because more traditional methods of consultation took too long, might you one as well. But, here she was, rolling the dice. I could have asked her about it, but doubted she would have deigned to talk to a mere prospect off the street such as myself.
These days, I might have asked her why she was wasting her time with that, and not hitting a bag or wrestling.
Training at Rex’s
The training was intense from an exercise perspective. We would do a warm up and some stretches, then a truckload of calisthenics, pushups, situps, leg raises, squats, squat jumps, etc. etc. Then, dressed in black kung fu pyjamas, coloured sashes, and feet bare, we would run “three times around the figure eight”,around and between two odd shaped city blocks, concrete and bitumen, along heavily trafficked streets, cars and pedestrians. Occasionally people in cars would give us the finger, or insinuate we looked like dicks. Imagine!
We’d line up outside the school and await a senior student’s order to ascend the staircase. I remember once a non-running senior student, Chris*, known for his “old school” attitude, stuck his head out of a window on the second story where the academy was and berated us at the top of his voice for our indiscipline, talking amongst ourselves while awaiting the call. Not like we were making a whole lot of noise. I had always thought that Chris was wound a little too tight.
So eventually we’d go back upstairs, and into the training hall. We’d all line up, and after a suitable period of suspense, Rex King would stroll into the class, black uniformed, hands clasped behind his back, a leonine full head of blond hair, a look of inscrutability on his face, and an aura of mystery around him.
He would take us through basic XingyiQuan techniques. In the order of the Sheng, nourishing cycle of the Wu Xing, the five elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine. A complex business it is, but essentially each element leads into, or checks (via the Ko, or checking cycle), one of the other elements. Similar in intent, though much more complex philosophically, to the various angles of attack and defense, in the Filipino martial arts. Not that complexity is necessarily the same as superiority, where martial technique is concerned.
The concepts, theory, and philosophies of Traditional Internal Martial Arts are precisely ordered, at the same time simple and profound. One can marvel at their brilliance and symmetry.
Actual fighting however, is chaotic, and ugly.
We would occasionally practice the twelve more advanced animal forms of XingyiQuan, the circle walking and palm changes of BaguaZhang, or the twenty four movement Short Yang form of TaijiQuan.
I got to learn a great deal about traditional Chinese medical theory, through Xingyi practice, and as part of a inhouse course on acupressure massage lasting several months, led by Rex’s offsider, Rob, a friendly chap with a sense of humour that made learning the fairly dry conceptual material a lot more entertaining than it would otherwise have been.
We also studied the Yijing and its eight trigrams for Baguazhang, and the use of various herbs, elixirs and the like, intensively, if not all that deeply. Also dived into Taoism, Buddhism and other Chinese cultural practices.
How to deal with a prospective attacker lining you up for the “interview”, pre-fight strategies like the “fence”, the legal ramifications of self defence, how to really hit hard, effective combinations and the like, were not so often discussed.
Consumer Affairs
A fair number of the student body could be described as hippies. There were several Orange People, followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho, amongst the student body.
Hippies or not, a few senior students decided that Rex was jamming their capitalist sensibilities by withholding information, and was not teaching them fast enough. Arguably, correct.
The logical next step, apparently, was to report him to Consumer Affairs (now called the Department of Fair Trading).
Did this work? Amazingly, no!
The ingrates were all immediately and unceremoniously shown the door. We were told they had “resigned”, not a particularly applicable description, really. “Cast into Outer Darkness”, perhaps.
Word had it that they subsequently took up with a more senior disenchanted former student of Rex – and there was an impressively long list of those – who at that time billed himself as a “Master of Oriental Exercise”.
Forget all that fighting malarkey. That’s not what the internal martial arts are about at all.
Into the Bizarro Dimension
Things occasionally took a more savage detour into the Bizarro dimension.
Rex enlisted the more senior members of the group into a special program. We were to undertake a strict diet – no meat, dairy, or gluten (bread, wheat products, etc.). No black tea or coffee. No alcohol.
Ever try buying lunch in the city under those conditions? I was pretty lean to begin with and looked like a concentration camp survivor at the end. And – I cheated. The guilt was crippling. Well, a little bit.
I almost forgot – no sex. My then girlfriend and I were having challenging times. mostly due to my association with Rex, who she had hated at first sight. This particular edict went over, as Keith Moon said to Jimmy Page about his new band, “not like a lead balloon but like a Led Zeppelin.”
No self relief, either.
This regimen went on for about a month, though it seemed like a year. Rex then counselled the male and female participants in separate groups.
My fellow male students and I were each given a medicine bottle of brown glass, and told to produce a specimen of the particular male bodily fluid to do with reproduction therein. The bottle was to be labelled with our name, kept in the freezer at home until it could be transferred, with all possible haste, to the communal freezer in an ancient refrigerator at Rex’s academy.
We were not informed as to what the ultimate purpose of the exercise, or even the next step, would be at the time.
Female students had something different to do. Obviously. Not one would tell me what it was. The most subtle and oblique questioning immediately crashed into a wall of secrecy and suspicion.
The bottles sat in the fridge, completely undisturbed, for months, becoming progressively more encrusted with ice. There were a couple of power outages, and all the labels came off the bottles, so one could no longer tell which bottle belonged to whom.
The subject of the bottles and their purpose was not raised or discussed again. Ever. No one wanted to out Rex as forgetful, and by association make themselves look stupid or ungrateful.
Eventually, the school moved premises, and the entire fridge, with the bottles, disappeared en route, as if into a wormhole.
I still have no idea what this was all about. Had Rex read an article in a magazine about sperm banks and decided to diversify his business, then gone off, or forgotten the idea, after having enlisted others to it, because some other brainwave or academy crisis took precedence? Not an unusual business strategy, where Rex was concerned.
Who really knows? I’m not even sure Rex knew what the ultimate purpose of this incredibly strange endeavour was.
Was I gullible? Totally. Embarrassed? A bit, but on balance it still makes for a great story more than thirty years later.
Friction and Disappointment
I had kept up a friendship with my excellent first instructor in Canberra, the aforementioned Dan Croft. Dan ran an annual camp, for decades, to which he had invited martial artists of all styles from all over. Karate, Hapkido, various styles of Kung Fu, etc. I attended a number of times, and students of Will Mason, head instructor of another popular Kung Fu school at the time, and personal friend of Dan, were also regular attendees.
One year, I took along a few of Rex’s guys, and all went well.
Dan and some of the others were amused by the primitive version of crop circles, we left in the frost around a group of trees, performing Bagua circle walking practice early one morning.
I performed a demonstration of Xingyi’s cycles of attack and defence, with another Rex student on the Saturday night, which seemed to go over well enough.
I was all set to take a second group the next year, and put in some effort to set this up, informing Dan of likely numbers, to allow for catering, etc.
In the meantime, Will Mason had been arrested, and spent some time in jail for offences not publicly discussed. I would be breaking a confidence to give details, suffice to say they were of a political rather than straight criminal nature, and may have even been seen by heroic actions by some, one man’s terrorist being another’s freedom fighter, etc.
Will Mason lost few of his former friends in martial arts as a result, and went on to head at least two prominent overarching Australasian martial arts and Kung Fu organisations. He continued his associations and friendships with many high profile local and overseas martial artists. Those in the know definitely did not see his conviction as reason to discontinue their associations and friendships with him.
Rex had a different attitude.
He seized on my casual mention that some of Will Mason’s students would be at the camp, with a “gotcha!” twinkle in his eye.
He explained that he and his students could not possibly be seen to be associated with any taint of criminality. our going to Dan’s camp was out of the question! The other former prospective attendees all nodded sagely at me, backing Rex. We couldn’t be seen to be associating with the wrong element.
Support a brother martial artist going through hard times? No, we had too much class for that.
I had to let Dan know, and I paid his expenses for our late withdrawal from the camp from my own pocket. Not a huge amount of money, but this was probably the beginning of the end for me. The hypocrisy had become personal.
I did not mention to Dan the reasons why at the time, but he was still understandably pissed off.
He was a lot more pissed off, but not with me, when I later told him the real reasons for our cancellation, after I had ceased my association with Rex.
I was starting to fall into a spiral of disenchantment. A spiral into which one fell progressively faster as one came closer to the centre.
Linear Bagua: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Baguazhang is best known for its circular stepping and practice walking a circle. We would begin sparring matches by walking around the shared centre of a circle, coming closer and closer like two black holes about to collide in interstellar space.
There is also a linear form of Baguazhang, which Rex claimed he had never taught to anyone before. After a few lessons, one of the senior students, who was either being gradually pushed out by Rex, or slowly coming to the decision to leave himself, asked a question that Rex took exception to. Rex then told us that he had misjudged our readiness to receive this information, and he would let us “season” for an indeterminate while longer, until we were possibly experienced enough to be properly ready. Everyone stared daggers at the hapless questioner, but it wasn’t his fault.
Relationships, Toxic and Otherwise
Rex seemed to view the relationships of his students with their significant others as a challenge to his authority. He certainly seemd to find many pretexts to drag me away from home on dubious errands. I can remember at least two marriages broken up during my time there, though to be fair one was where one partner ran off with another student. And also to be fair, one or two breakups might be on the cards statistically. But being part of Rex’s academy certainly didn’t make for easier times at home.
He had two ex-wives and four kids, two from each marriage, when I met him.
When the school moved and the fridge with the bottles disappeared, Rex had hooked up with a Japanese Jiu Jitsu black belt, Wayne*, and the arrangement was that they would both run classes there and apportion the rent accordingly.
Wayne was a nice man with his heart in the right place. I took a few of his classes and talked to him a fair bit.
Wayne also had a smoking hot blonde girlfriend who I’ll call Janice*. Rex also ran his acupuncture practice out if the new premises, and hired Janice to be his receptionist and admin person.
Fast forward a couple of months. Rex has stolen Janice away from Wayne, his business partner. I heard later that he eventually married her. Wayne, the poor bastard, never knew what hit him. He was a dead man walking for weeks, until they dissolved the partnership, and I never saw him again.
Awkward. Really, REALLY awkward.
The End of the Line
Rex had obviously read or studied the “work” of some dodgy sales “gurus”, because he got the student body together one night and encouraged each of us to pledge to signing up a specific number of new students in the next month. This was written down, presumably as a means of either increasing the cash flow and number of new innocent minds file for indoctrination, or as yet another example of our frequent failures to live up to Rex’s standards … standards which he finagled us into setting for ourselves.
I said I’d commit to two new students, with my fingers crossed behind my back.
I had already decided I would be gone by the time the ledger was tallied.
Commitments made, there was then the option of kicking on at the school, by paying two dollars to watch a video, which Rex had got a lackey to hire from the local Blockbuster, and shown to the group in violation of copyright law.
I went home instead, and never went back.
Rex called me at work, about seven in the evening, a few months later. I was working late, taking steps to succeed in a career that had until then been barely puttering, because most of my energy was being sucked away by Rex, like that of a hapless binary star into its partner black hole.
He asked for Dan Croft’s phone number. I gave it to him. We made no small talk. I think my voice would have sounded so icy, his phone hand would have been getting frostbite.
All this finished for me over thirty years ago.
Closing Thoughts
I married my Led Zeppelin girl, and remain with her today, after nearly thirty four years of marriage. I absolutely made the right choice there. Because that’s what it would have become, a choice – real life or Rex.
Rex promoted dependence, not self-actualisation. His whole shtick was that I’d have to wait, invest in loss, prove my worth, train hard, and put up with whatever he decided was necessary or appropriate, no matter how preposterous, for as long as he decided it would take. If you were a good enough student/supplicant, you could eventually become a disciple.
Good instructors will feed you all the knowledge you can handle. They will not try to blur useful distinctions between training and the rest of your life. They want you to become a thoughtful and creative adult, who can learn to teach themselves and their own students, eventually. Not a disciple subject to an instructor’s grace, direction and whims.
Rex had the possibility of becoming a cult leader, but his lack of organisation, and his train wreck of a personal life, would have been too distracting for him to really follow through. There’s plenty of precursors there, though – the promise and withholding of information as a carrot and a stick, the treatment of the student body as a pack of lovable but intellectually challenged children, hinting at new levels of performance and understanding that we were never quite ready for, etc.
I can’t really go as far as to say Rex King was evil. Weighed down with some significant issues? 100%. Would I talk to him if I ran into him in the street? Probably … unless he’s read this blog.
Had I remained his disciple, would I have eventually broken through to the other side, received the sacred teachings, finally mastered the power of chi, achieved enlightenment?
No. I’d still be waiting.
Names changed to protect the innocent – *
Names changed to protect the guilty – ^