Contents

CHAPTER 1
Childhood, College,
Army, and Ed Parker  1

CHAPTER 2
The Dragon Enters:
Meeting Bruce Lee  19

CHAPTER 3
Drugstores, Backyards,
Chinatown, and a Game of Death  27

CHAPTER 4
Farewell to the Dragon:
The Death of Bruce Lee  39

V
CHAPTER 5
A Lifetime of Seeking the
Truth About Martial Arts  51

CHAPTER 6
Learning at the Feet (and Fists)
of the Master: Experiencing Dan Inosanto
the Martial Arts Teacher  65

CHAPTER 7
Growing Up Inosanto:
An Interview with Diana Lee Inosanto  107

CHAPTER 8
The Innovator: Contributions to Martial Arts,
Pro Sports, Law Enforcement,
and Elite Unit Training  121

CHAPTER 9
Ready, Roll ’Em!: Dan Inosanto
and the World of Action Films  145

CHAPTER 10
An Artist by Any Other Name  159

APPENDIX
Martial Arts Instructors of Dan Inosanto  163

Bibliography  179

Index  187

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

VI
 C H A P T E R 1

Childhood, College, Army,

and Ed Parker

S ebastian Inosanto had no idea when he sailed to the

United States from the Philippines during the early
part of the 20th century that he was embarking on a course
that would produce one of the world’s most gifted martial
artists and teachers—his son Dan Inosanto.
It is a little-known fact that Filipinos were great sailors and
navigators who accompanied many of the world’s most
famous explorers on their journeys. Like his ancestors,
Sebastian Inosanto was a man of action and adventure. Born
in 1889 in the town of Limbaco-Akalon on the island of Panay,
Sebastian was a medal-winning saber-fencing champion and a
scholar. True to his adventurous Visayan heritage, he was
eager to see the world and meet the challenges it offered.
As luck would have it, young Sebastian was one of about

1
250 young men the U.S. government picked to journey to the
United States to study American culture and living after the
Philippines became a “protectorate” of the United States in
1898. The hope was that these young men would return to
their homeland to spread the American way of life. Such men
were called pensionatos.
Fortunately for the martial arts world, there were two
events that kept Sebastian Inosanto from returning to the
land of his birth. The first was his meeting, falling in love with,
and marrying a beautiful young Filipino-American woman
named Mary Arca. The second event, a little more well
known, was World War II. Because his country was occupied
by the Japanese, and because his knowledge of agriculture
was vital to the U.S. war effort, Sebastian Inosanto remained
in the United States until his death in 1989, one month short
of his 101st birthday.
Men of action and adventure often become leaders of oth-
ers. Sebastian Inosanto was no exception. After settling in
Stockton, California, he became one of the first Filipino farm
labor contractors in the United States. Although most people
think Cesar Chavez formed the first farm labor union, accord-
ing to Dan Inosanto, the elder Inosanto, and others formed
one before Chavez. This was a period of U.S. history when
labor unions were denounced as communist-inspired and
were subject to government-approved sanctions and some-
times big-business-sponsored violence. In recognition of his
efforts in the labor union movement, Sebastian Inosanto and
eight others received certificates signed by George Meany, the
legendary labor union leader and former head of the
American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AFL-CIO).
The traits that define the famous martial artist Dan
Inosanto did not come only from his father’s side of the fam-
ily. Every bit as adventurous as Dan’s father was his maternal
grandfather, Pepe Arca, a lay minister and a former member

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

2
of the famed Filipino Constabulary—the Filipino equivalent
of the Green Berets and Royal Canadian Mounted Police
combined, which was involved in the pacification of the
Philippines after the U.S. takeover at the turn or the 19th cen-
tury. Pepe Arca and Dan’s uncle Vincent Arca, an ordained
Methodist missionary, accompanied the first Filipino workers
who went to plantations in Hawaii.
In time, the Arcas moved to California, where Dan’s mother,
Mary, was born. From his mother Dan Inosanto inherited a
keen analytical mind, the ability to conceptualize information
and theories, and a lifelong desire to seek and acquire knowl-
edge. A brilliant student with a genius IQ of over 160, Mary
Inosanto completed her high school education in only two and
one-half years, graduating as valedictorian of her class at age
15. After she’d taken the time to raise her children, Mary
Inosanto went to college to study education. She graduated
from the University of the Pacific in only two and one-half years,
earning straight A’s except for a B in physical education. This
“slip” in her grades came at a time when Mary Inosanto was in
her mid-40s, competing against women less than half her age.
From his mother Dan also learned to respect and revere
women. In the Filipino culture, in contrast to other Asian cul-
tures, women are not considered subservient to men. In fact,
female members of almost all tribes in the Philippines were
warriors and fought alongside their men. One day when Dan
was a youngster and walking with his mother, an Asian man
was rude to her because she seemed be occupying a less than
subservient role than what was normal for a woman of Asian
decent at that time. Mrs. Inosanto informed the man that she
was not Chinese or Japanese, but Filipina, and in their cul-
ture, women were equal to men. If this man had pressed the
matter further, he might have learned that Mrs. Inosanto also
knew a thing or two about martial arts, which she had stud-
ied later in life.
During harvest time, Stockton, California, where Mary

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

3
and Sebastian Inosanto lived, was home to more Filipinos
than any other part of the United States. The Inosantos made
their contribution with two children: a daughter named Lilia
and a son named Daniel, born on July 24, 1936. The
Inosantos lived on the south side of Stockton, which was con-
sidered by some at that time to be a tough, lower middle-class
area. Living there, young Daniel did not think it was so tough.
He liked his neighborhood, where he learned a lot about the
different cultures and types of people living there.
Dan has happy recollections of growing up in this neigh-
borhood, and even 50 years later he can remember the names
of his friends and their ethnic heritages. Filipino kids named
Carios, Valez, and Samporna, and Italian kids named
Ponticello played with first- and second-generation European-
American children with names like Webster, Holstein, or
Dofflemyer. As a Filipino with a little Spanish and Chinese
thrown in, Dan never encountered any prejudice on the south
side. The only place he faced prejudice was on the north side,
and even then, while he knew it existed, he couldn’t relate to
it because he had never experienced it before.
Sebastian, an intelligent man who spoke English, Chinese,
Spanish, and 12 dialects of the Filipino language, was also a
graduate of the school of hard knocks. He knew that for a
small Filipino-American kid to survive on the rough and tum-
ble streets of the United States of the 1940s and 50s, his son
would have to learn how to take care of himself. Luckily, Dan’s
first martial arts teacher lived very close to the Inosantos.
When Dan was 10 years old a close family friend, Vincent
Evangelista, lived with Dan’s family during harvest time, along
with his wife and his brother John. The Evangelistas helped
raise Dan, and he considers both Vincent and John his
“uncles.” Vincent, whose wife was Japanese, was a practition-
er of the martial arts indigenous to the Philippines and one of
the first non-Japanese to train at the Kodenkan in Japan. A
U.S. Army Ranger hand-to-hand combat instructor during

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

4
World War II, “Uncle” Vincent was the perfect person to teach
young Dan how to take care of himself.
During the harvest season of three summers, Vincent
taught young Dan Okinawan te and jujitsu, neither of which
Dan cared for initially. As a child, Dan didn’t see the kali
matches (stick fights) among the agricultural workers in his
town that the older people did. At lunchtime on the farmland of
the San Joaquin Valley, he would watch the agricultural work-
ers practicing with 26-inch-long asparagus knives and hear the
clang of the knives and the sticks. But as a kid, he did not per-
ceive this as combat. In fact, he would often throw rocks at
them (although he became interested when they took out the
swords and daggers). At the time, this all-American kid was
more interested in baseball and football than martial arts. But
when young Dan was in the fourth grade, something happened
that would forever change his relationship with the martial arts.
An older boy, a fifth grader, pushed one of Dan’s fourth-
grade friends. When Dan told the older boy that his actions
were unfair, the fifth grader responded by hitting him in the
face. A bad beating ensued, the first young Dan had ever
received. The only thing that saved him was that he fought
back. Dan took two valuable lessons away from this incident.
The first was that if you give up and don’t do anything in a
fight, you are going to come out of it in bad shape. The other
was that all of us are human and all bleed just the same. He
learned the second lesson when he chose to fight back and hit
the older boy, who had begun laughing as he cut up Dan’s
face by dragging it along the gravel playground.
It would be nice to say that the education system of the
day was advanced enough to punish the bully for his mis-
deeds. Unfortunately, that was not the case; both boys
received corporal punishment. This experience, along with
the fact that Dan was smaller than most kids his age from
about the seventh grade onward, played a strong part in his
desire to become proficient at defending himself. In addition

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

5
to his summertime lessons with Uncle Vincent, Dan read the
Charles Atlas self-defense book that was offered for sale in
comic books and explored the sport of boxing.
Dan was introduced to the “sweet science” of boxing in
the fifth grade at the YMCA, where boxing was part of the
boys’ program. Sometimes the kids would play volleyball or
slapball, and sometimes they would box. The instruction was
rudimentary. Basically, the kids were shown a jab, a cross,
and a hook, and then they would put on the 16-ounce gloves
and go at it.
As he got older, Dan Inosanto was subject to the same
insecurities that most boys of smaller stature endure around
puberty. Because he feared being beaten up, he overcompen-
sated. Simply put, he set out to show the world that he could
do whatever bigger, more physically developed boys could.
Unfortunately, in the seventh grade this overcompensation
resulted in a chip on Dan’s shoulder, and he overreacted to
any insult, however slight. This led to a number of fights at
school, and he spent a lot of time in the principal’s office.
(Dan remembers this as the “juvenile delinquent” stage of his
life and says he would like to relive the seventh grade if he
could.) If it had not been for some pivotal events that
occurred in Dan’s eighth-grade year, the internationally
famous martial artist might have taken a different path and
ended up in jail—or dead.
Dan was lucky enough, however, to have some special
individuals act as his mentors when he entered the eighth
grade. His teacher, Mrs. Conroy, made it clear to him early on
that she would not tolerate his inappropriate behavior or
allow him to become a juvenile delinquent. Equally impor-
tant, she gave the young boys goals to strive for to keep them
from getting into trouble. It worked. Under her guidance, Dan
received his school’s citizenship award at the end of the year.
(Later, after he had graduated from college, he would go back
to see her and thank her for helping turn his life around.) Dan

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

6
was also exposed to some caring playground coaches who
helped turn the adolescent into a model citizen and star ath-
lete. Former San Francisco 49er “Tiny” Campora, triple-A
baseball player Grant Dunlap, and coaches Carl Pergoy,
Frank Boyle, and others all had a positive effect on him.
During Dan’s eighth-grade year, one event occurred that per-
haps contributed more to the creation of the Dan Inosanto we
know today than any other—a brush with death.
Today, some say Dan’s lifelong quest for knowledge in and
out of the martial arts reflects the adventurous spirit of the
young boy still present in the man. However, in this case, the
cockiness of youth almost resulted in his death. Thinking he
knew the terrain, young Dan left his Boy Scout troop while on
a camping trip in Yosemite National Park and got lost in the
snow. Although he found his way back some time later, this
brush with death left a great impression on the young man.
No longer was he the cocky troublemaker. From then on peo-
ple saw a shy, perhaps even somewhat withdrawn, Dan. Few
knew it at the time, but Dan Inosanto became a born-again
Christian during this period of his life.
While his zeal to show the world that he could do what-
ever the big boys did no longer displayed itself in antisocial
behavior, it didn’t go away. Sports became the battleground
for demonstrating his physical prowess. In high school his
favorite sport was football, and he was the leading rusher for
his team in his senior year, though he weighed only 113
pounds. Dan jokingly remembers that they used to lie about
his weight in the high school football program, listing him at
125 pounds. It was worse in college, where he was listed as
weighing as much as 155 or 165, when he weighed only 125
pounds. His light frame was brought to his attention in a
painful manner in high school when he tried to adopt the run-
ning style of larger, older running backs. One day, as he
picked himself up off the ground after being creamed when he
tried to blast through the line, his coach told him to use his

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

7
speed and not try to be a power runner like the fullback he
was emulating.
His mother was concerned that he was too light for foot-
ball in high school. While she saw every high school game he
played and once flew to see him play a college game in
Spokane, Washington (a game he remembers his team los-
ing), one has to wonder how many times she hid her eyes
when a couple of behemoths tackled her little boy. Dan was
recruited and was offered scholarships to play football at the
University of California, San Jose State, and Stockton College,
but chose Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington,
because, at first, he did not want to play football in college.
He went to Whitworth to run track, which he did, but the grid-
iron bug hadn’t finished biting him. He decided to play foot-
ball in his junior and senior years.
Being small had taught Dan how to deal with fear, which
he did by being fearless, especially in football. Track and foot-
ball taught him that techniques were the key to competing
with others who were much bigger. In addition to what his
coaches were teaching him, he began to research other ways
of doing things. It was then that the researcher in Dan
Inosanto was born—the researcher who would devote his
adult life to studying and examining countless forms of
unarmed combat from around the world. His research into
athletics paid off. He won his college track conference sprint-
ing title with a 9.5-second run in the 100-yard dash, and in
his senior year he was the leading rusher for the football
team. Dan graduated from Whitworth College in 1958 with a
bachelor of arts degree in physical education.
His interest in martial arts did not diminish during his col-
lege days. He took up judo during the summer of his fresh-
man year in college. His instructor, Duke Yoshimura, the
coach of the 1952–1954 national championship judo teams,
lived next door to the Inosantos and ran the Stockton Judo
Club. During the summers of his sophomore, junior, and

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

8
senior years in college and during his graduate studies, he
continued studying judo under Yoshimura, ending up a fourth
kyu. A fourth kyu may seem a lowly grade to a casual observ-
er, and so it seemed to Dan as well. He wouldn’t realize how
good the judo training was under Yoshimura until 1960, when
he went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as an enlisted man and
defeated black belts.
After graduation, Dan was not satisfied to rest on his lau-
rels with only one academic degree. He entered the
University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and earned
his master’s degree in physical education in August 1959,
passing both the oral and written exams with flying colors. He
wrote the agendum for the master’s program, and his subject
was the martial arts as a physical education activity.
Having earned two college degrees, Dan sought a new
outlet to challenge him both physically and mentally, so he
enlisted in the army. By the late 1950s, most young
Americans had been raised on war movies about life in the
military. Movies such as The DI or Battle Cry with Aldo Ray
and Tab Hunter showed spit-and-polish, tough-as-nails drill
sergeants screaming, “Wake up, soldier, get outta that bed” or
“Wipe that smile off your face” at recruits. Dan Inosanto
knew what to expect from the army. But did the army know
what to expect from this skinny little guy from Stockton?
When Dan joined the army, he signed up for one of its
toughest units; he became a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne
Division, the Screaming Eagles. Originally, he’d opted for the
paratroopers because the recruiter had told him he would be
able to go to Germany. Luckily, he ended up being stationed
at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for his whole tour. If he had been
sent to Germany, he would never have had the exposure to
the martial arts that he got at Fort Campbell.
Fort Campbell was not only the home of the 101st
Airborne Division, but detachments of marines, navy, and reg-
ular army as well. It was also a transit base for returning armed

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

9
forces personnel who had studied martial arts in the Orient. In
addition to being a jeep driver and clerk/typist, Dan was also
a member of Strategic Army Corps (STRAC), the army equiva-
lent of the air force’s Strategic Air Command. It comprised four
battle groups, which were rotated every month so that one
company was always on 24-hour alert. The battle group on
first alert had to stay in the barracks in case the unit was called
out. At the time, Dan liked being part of an “elite” unit. His
experience with the intense training and pressure that come
from being part of an elite unit would later prove to be a bonus
for students and instructors from elite police and armed forces
units from around the world (including the U.S. Navy Seals,
the U.S. Marine Force Recon, the Canadian Joint Task Force,
the French anti-terrorist commando units, and police SWAT
teams) who would come to Dan for instruction.
In contrast to Dan’s neighborhood in Stockton where
Filipino-Americans were a large part of the population, on the
base Dan found himself to be the only Filipino-American
enlisted man. Although there were a few Filipino-American
sergeants, the division between them and Dan was greater
than any that existed between Dan and his buddies, who
reflected the American melting pot. While he did not person-
ally experience any racism in the army, he did see white sol-
diers joking in a politically incorrect way, suggesting that the
black soldiers had to sit in the back of the bus.
At Fort Campbell, Dan and another soldier were involved
in a confrontation that turned physical. The soldier had stolen
a small container that Dan used to carry a bar of soap. When
Dan found it, with his serial number partially scratched off,
he pointed this out to the soldier, but in gesture typical to his
personality, told the soldier to keep it. Embarrassed at being
found out, the soldier denied taking the container and fol-
lowed Dan into the barracks to press his point. When the
confrontation became physical, Dan used a quick sidekick to
end the matter (Inosanto interview Toronto 1998).

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

10
 Discussions around the barracks often were about which
fighting style was best. Boxers would say it was boxing,
wrestlers would favor wrestling, karate men lauded karate,
and so on. One day, one of the guys said that he could defeat
all comers of any style. He was put to the test, and he sur-
prised everyone by choosing the deep end of the swimming
pool as his “arena” to prove his prowess. The boxer, the
wrestler, the judo man, and others each tried their hand
against the soldier, and each got “drowned” by this guy. It
turned out that this soldier was a water polo player, and in his
element he was unbeatable. This experience stayed with Dan,
who uses it to this day to explain that every fighting system
has both its strong and weak points (Inosanto interview
Toronto 1998).
One place where the men were judged solely on their abil-
ity to back up what they said was in the base gymnasium.
Martial artists and boxers would assemble in the gym and
then go off and practice. Dan initially tried boxing—going
down to the gym, putting on the gloves, and sparring. To his
broken nose collection (the first few having been acquired in
football), Dan added one from this gentlemanly art. Other
additions to the collection would come later while training
under different people. (To this day, Dan cannot breathe at all
through one nostril.)
After his experience with boxing, Dan sought out a judo
instructor at Fort Campbell, and he was fortunate to meet
Hank Slomansky. Slomansky, a chito-ryu karate instructor,
was also Elvis Presley’s first instructor. Slomansky had
trained in Japan and had given a good accounting of himself
in tourneys in Japan, where the competitions are held over
a couple of days. Tragically, Slomansky would later be killed
in Vietnam.
Martial arts at Fort Campbell were organized under
Slomansky simply because he was the best fighter. The
Korean, Japanese, and Okinawan instructors would rotate,

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

11
but they were all organized under Slomansky. Slomansky’s
method was stoic, strict, and spartan. He ran his classes just
like boot camp. Students stood at attention, at parade rest, or
at ease when they received their instructions. The students
never questioned his methods.
Dan’s group studied karate three to five times a week
under Slomansky, and the training was very tough. They did
shoulder rolls on dirt, gravel, concrete, and wood floors.
Typical of karate training in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
the instructors would jump on the students’ backs to check
their stances, and punch or jump on their stomachs to test
their conditioning. What was not typical was that they never
pulled their punches at Fort Campbell. (Dan did not fully
understand the concept of “control” as it applies to karate
sparring until he got out of the service. He still remembers get-
ting butterflies in his stomach before every class, a feeling he
would never have with any martial arts classes after that.)
This type of training led to a very thick medical record for the
young soldier while he was in the service—including his hav-
ing to get 20 stitches to close a cut over his left eyelid that left
it swollen for six months.
Always searching for training methods that would make
him a better athlete, much like he had done in football, Dan
learned some kung-fu moves from a small Chinese-American
soldier and exchanged techniques with other soldiers who
had studied other martial systems. As in other sports, he pre-
ferred to do his own investigation rather than listen to some-
one else telling him he should discount something or other.
This would eventually lead to his researching different martial
arts systems when he got out of the service.
Shortly before he left the service, Dan watched and was
very impressed by a brown belt kenpo stylist who was beat-
ing second- and third-degree black belts. Dan asked where he
was from and was told the karateka was “an island boy,”
meaning he came from Hawaii. Because he liked the way the

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

12
mobile brown belt moved, and because he thought the style
would suit someone small like himself, Dan decided that
when he got out of the service he would try kenpo. After being
discharged from the service in 1961, Dan landed his first job
teaching school in Lapuente, California. When he got to Los
Angeles, he went looking for a kenpo karate school for self-
defense and conditioning purposes. In Pasadena he met Ed
Parker, the father of American karate.
Parker, a native of the state of Hawaii, founded the first
commercial karate school in the western United States in
Provo, Utah, in 1954. A kenpo karate student of William K.S.
Chow, he left Hawaii in 1951 to go to Brigham Young
University in Utah. After graduating, Parker moved to
Pasadena and opened a karate school in 1956. As an author,
actor, and stuntman, Parker worked on many television and
movie projects. During his lifetime, Parker put on karate
demonstrations for President Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper,
and Mae West. Celebrities he instructed in the art of karate
included Elvis Presley, Blake Edwards, Nick Adams, Robert
Culp, Robert Wagner, Audie Murphy, Joey Bishop, Warren
Beatty, Frank Lovejoy, and author Joe Hyams.
After seeing Parker, a solid, six-foot 200-pounder who
moved lightning-fast for his size, Dan determined that kenpo
was a good, innovative system that was way ahead of its
time. Dan was very impressed with Parker’s power and the
fluidity of his hand techniques. He had never seen anything
like it before. When Dan came to Parker, he was more com-
fortable with kicks. However, by the time Dan had earned a
black belt, Parker had introduced some of his personal
moves and Chinese hand techniques to make Dan a more
complete fighter. According to Parker, “Danny was a very
good student. He was also very observant and absorbed as
much as he could from everyone he came into contact with.
I gave him little bits and pieces, then let him figure the rest
out for himself. Being an educated kid, everything soaked

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

13
in.” (Inosanto and Sutton 1980: 14) This statement about
Dan’s zeal to learn may explain why Dan was able, during
the same time period, to continue his studies with Filipino
kali masters when students often quit studying out of frus-
tration over their way of teaching, which is to overload a stu-
dent with information to create frustration and confusion so
that he or she strives to achieve clarity and eventual mastery
of the techniques.
In 1962 Dan met someone who would play a key role in
his life: Sue Reveal. Sue was a student at Ed Parker’s dojo,
and in time they became friends and began dating. They were
married in 1964 and had two children, Diana Lee and Lance.
The same year he was married, at the age of 28, Dan was
awarded a first-degree black belt (shodan) in kenpo karate
and joined Parker’s cadre of instructors. In fact, Dan was fea-
tured in one of Black Belt magazine’s “Instructor Profiles” as
a “roving instructor” for Ed Parker.
One of Dan’s students was Larry Hartsell, recognized as
the premier JKD fighter of the Chinatown era of the 1960s.
Hartsell, a highly sought-after grappling instructor these days,
was then considered a kicker and not a grappler. In fact,
according to Dan, Larry once broke another student’s jaw
with a jumping, spinning back kick.
The type of karate practiced in North America during the
early to mid-1960s has often been somewhat romanticized.
When asked today about his experiences in what has been
termed the “blood and guts” era of karate in America, Dan
responds in a honest and philosophical manner. While
acknowledging that the training and competition were rough
and tough in those days, he feels that if people are honest,
they will admit that the technology of martial arts has
improved since then and that the caliber of competitors is
much higher today. Sparring, while admittedly tough in those
days, is nothing like shoot wrestling or Muay Thai sparring
today, he notes. However, he is quick to point out that he still

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

14
Dan and his daughter Diana Lee Inosanto, 1968.

Dan with his son, Lance Inosanto, Christmas 1972.

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

15
Dan at the zoo with his son, Lance; his father, Sebastian Inosanto; his first wife, Sue Reveal;
and his daughter Diana Lee.

Dan with friends and family at Tokyo Flora restaurant, Redondo Beach pier, April 8, 1977.
Back row: Sebastian Inosanto, Diana Lee Inosanto, Sebastian’s wife (Dan’s mother), Mary
and FMA/JKD instructor Richard Bustillo. Front row: FMA master and healer Sam
Tendencia, Rose Lucaylucay, Filipino boxer Lucky Lucaylucay, and Dan.

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

16
Dan’s first wife, Sue Reveal, with children Lance (age 8) and Diana (age 12).

remains impressed with the skills that were displayed by the

competitors of that era. He was impressed with the timing of
shotokan’s Frank Smith and the skills of fellow kenpo stylists
Steve Sanders, Bob Cook, and Scotty Loring. However, the
fighter he was most impressed with was Mike Stone, the for-
mer light-heavyweight point karate champion, who Dan says
possessed incredible fluidity.
During Dan’s competitive days, there weren’t the number
of karate tournaments that we see today. During 1962–1963,
Dan was involved primarily with interschool tourneys.
Parker’s people from the Santa Monica school would do bat-
tle with the Pasadena school, or with Dan Ivan’s group or
Chuck Norris’s students. During 1964–1965, Dan competed
on the California and national karate tournament circuit. He
placed fourth in the lightweight category at Ed Parker’s first
Long Beach Internationals in 1964, and in those days there
were only two divisions. He also placed second at the 1965
Western Regional Karate Championships in Salt Lake City,

CHILDHOOD, COLLEGE, ARMY, AND ED PARKER

17
after which a photo of a pensive Dan Inosanto was featured
in Black Belt magazine.
There are several reasons Dan appears so introspective in
that picture. Dan had begun to be put off by the karate scene,
feeling that tournaments and the training for them were not
based in reality. In addition, Dan was increasingly disen-
chanted with the rivalry between martial arts styles. At that
time in Los Angeles, cross-training in other systems was taboo,
and the practitioners of most styles stayed in cliques. This was
a departure from his experiences at Fort Campbell, where the
people he had associated with shared their individual knowl-
edge from different arts.
This experience of intercommunity prejudice greatly
affected Dan, his personal quest for knowledge, and his later
teaching style. (Those who have studied with Dan know he
feels that knowledge can be obtained from every experience
in life, and that a martial artist should not forego personal
growth through blind allegiance to a particular instructor or
style. This is why he encourages his students to cross-train in
other disciplines and with other instructors.) The soul-search-
ing karateka in that 1965 photo was affected by one thing
more than anything else. Earlier that year, Dan had met the
person with whom he is most associated as a martial artist—
the person who would completely change his views about
martial arts. That person was Bruce Lee.

DAN INOSANTO: THE MAN, THE TEACHER, THE ARTIST

18