A Fork in the Road

There I was, working full time as a Bartender/Supervisor at Jack Astor's Bar and Grill on Dundas in Missisauga, and training as a green belt at least 5 days a week at United Martial Arts Mississauga with Mrs. and Mr. Kersey as my instructors.  I was starting to find my feet as a fighter thanks to Friday night's sparring sessions and sparring seminar invitations from Mr. Kersey.  He also taught most Bo (staff) classes and I was very exited to be learning not only traditional but also more modern Bo techniques.

I was getting in decent shape too, pushups and situps were no longer a problem and I often thought about or even practiced martial arts when I was not at work or the club.  A few months had passed since I had dropped my resume at United, so I was very surprised when the club management called me up one afternoon out of the blue and asked if I'd still be available to work for them.
What an opportunity!  I was elated at the prospect of working in the arena I loved and with people I respected and wanted to learn from!  All silver linings have clouds however, and when I sat down with the club manager I learned that I would be taking a severe pay cut.  While bartending wasn't the most glamorous job, it was a good way to earn quick easy money.

I took some time out to think about it.  This was a fork in the road.  One path led to the same thing I had been doing for a couple of years with a carreer as a restaurant manager and a comfortable standard of living.  The other path led to improved fitness and immersion in an atmosphere that would help me become the best black belt I could possibly be and financial cutbacks.
 
What helped me make the decision was an interaction I had a few weeks before the club offer.  I was supervising the floor at Jack's one night when a waitress asked me to visit an unhappy table.  Long story short, the grandmother of the family wasn't happy with the meal, and the son made it his personal mission to ruin my night.  The offer of a free round of drinks and buying the grandmother's meal wasn't enough for him, and he did the whole, "What's your name, position and the name of your boss."  routine, threatening to write a letter to head office if he didn't get a better offer.  With my manager's backing at the time we bought the whole table and they still left unhappy.  I knew we had been taken advantage of and blatantly disrespected, and was very frustrated at the injustice of it all.

With that experience fresh in my mind I called the club and asked when they wanted me to start.  As it happened, I would be working Tuesdays through Saturdays doing the intro sessions and signing new members up to the program.  I stayed on at Jack Astors part time for a little while, until I went on holidays for a long weekend to visit my parents who had a beach house in Massachusetts.  Though I had booked the time off, the new bar manager put me on the schedule anyway.  So, that was the end of my Bartending stint!  It was real, it was fun, it was real fun, but I was glad it was over.

Back at the club, I was doing about two intros a day, and whenever there weren't intros Mrs. Kersey welcomed me on the floor to be a "Leader" - a kyu belt teaching assistant.  I had also started helping out around the club as a handyman, hanging wall plaques, changing neon lights, repairing holes in the walls (the Kerseys often did high school self defense courses, and of course, boys will be boys) and the like.  I was getting to know other club regulars that didn't attend the classes I normally did.  Reema, our Receptionist, and other students, Abe, Cliff, Lindsay, Ryan, Scott and Steve as well as the Mullings family.  These people would stay on with the club for as long as I did and longer, and though I didn't know it at the time, I was lucky to be surrounded by such quality individuals.

Krista and Brandon Kersey

Head Instructors of Mississauga and Millcreek respectively

Sometime around then I had progressed from Green to Green Stripe, which can be thought of as a senior green belt.  The curriculum was similar; Won Hyo was again our Kata, the routine (spinning hook kick, shuto, jump front kick, a couple of blocks in front, horse and back stances) was the same but done on the other side, and instead of self defense drills we had sparring drills, all of which I already knew thanks to my early start.

I recall Mr. Kersey starting to talk about "Millcreek" when I was a green stripe belt.  I didn't know what he was on about at first until it became apparent that He was going to be leaving the Mississauga club and opening another United Martial Arts with the same club manager.  It was to be about 15 minutes away (depending on traffic) from the Mississauga club. 
It was shortly after I graded for Blue belt that the Millcreek location opened.  I would be there Tuesday through Thursday and at the Mississauga club Friday and Saturday, and I'd often go to  the Queenston club (our parent club in Hamilton, Mr. Flood's club) for sparring classes on Sunday.  The clubs also introduced a new Cardiovascular Kickboxing program that the manager had purchased from one of the well established Martial Arts clubs in the Hamilton area.  This meant that we all became significantly busier learning to teach and promote the new program.

Things were not going very well for me financially at the time.  I was sinking too much money into my car, which was going on 11 years old and in need of constant repair, plus the cost of upkeep, insurance payments, ahhh! It was all getting to be too much.  I noticed the car was really labouring to get up the big hill on the bridge in Hamilton, but I had absolutely no spare money or even room on the credit card to fix the problem.  This was going to come to a head, and soon...

Yours on the journey,
J.