As I sat in his immaculate living room, listening to the tale of Tim Tackett unfold from the mouth of the man himself, I couldn't help but note the parallels between his life and mine.

Both of us started our martial arts journeys in the United States before going to Asia for non-martial arts reasons. Both of us, however, seized the opportunity to train as much as possible while in Asia.

Both of us found that local masters were flattered that a foreigner had come so far because of his passion for the arts and subsequently were very giving. Both of us returned from Asia and built a career in the martial arts that did not involve teaching what we'd learned in the Far East. That's where the parallels end.

Tackett's path led him to become a prominent jeet kune do teacher, while mine led me to become the editor of Black Belt. And that is why, as I sat on his sofa, Tim Tackett was doing 90 percent of the talking and I was happy to do 90 percent of the listening.

Black Belt: Could you tell us how you got started in the martial arts and how Taiwan fit into it?

Tim: I was always interested in World War II combatives when I was a kid. There was a chief of police here in Redlands, California, named Wesley Brown who had written a book on it, and I futzed around with that for a while. Because I was in the YMCA youth circus at the time, martial arts seemed natural to me.

So you had an athletic background from the beginning?

I did. Interestingly enough, Bob Bremer, whom I learned jeet kune do from, was also a trampoline guy. He taught Bruce Lee how to do backflips and stuff. That helps you know where your body is in space.

What came next martial arts-wise?

When I was 12 or 13, a judo guy started teaching at the Y, so I began training with him. Then nine months later, he moved, and we were left with no martial arts anywhere nearby. It was a lot different then, in 1952 or ’53, than it is now. Anyway, I finished high school and went to my first year of junior college, then joined the Air Force. First, I was stationed in Louisiana, where I met my wonderful wife of 57 years now, and then I was told that we were being sent to Taiwan.

Was that a duty station you had requested because of martial arts?

No. I actually got orders to go to Fairbanks, Alaska, but my wife was pregnant, so we got out of that. We went to Taiwan instead, where I worked on a national security base where they monitored Chinese broadcasts. I met a guy named Mr. Chung, who taught a martial art called kuo shu. I also learned hsing-i, white crane and some Southern Shaolin. Then I went to a local park and met an old man named Yuan Tao, a tai chi and hsing-i teacher who had been a guerrilla general. He accepted me as a student, so I started learning tai chi from him. He thought I learned it so well, in fact, that he made me his assistant instructor.

Did that go over well with his students?

Most people didn’t pay any attention to it. It wasn’t like when kung fu came here and all this “secret” nonsense started. Then another teacher in the park offered to teach me for nothing so that I would take his art to America, so I learned more Shaolin and some chin-na from him.

I ended up working out maybe seven hours a day, six days a week — just doing martial arts. The reason I could train so much is my wife was working days teaching school while I was working swing shifts at the airbase, so I had all morning and most of the afternoons free. Because the Japanese were there for 50 years, many Taiwanese martial artists used belts.

I ended up getting a second-degree black belt. Some instructors didn’t use belts. Under them, you were either an assistant instructor or a full instructor. So I also became a full instructor in the kuo shu association.

When your tour of duty was over, did you return to California?

Yes, and I started a school. In the meantime, I visited some other schools in the area — there still weren’t many. I went to a kung fu school here in Redlands.

The instructor was actually upset that I was teaching. He said it was all supposed to be secret. I showed him a card from my teacher in Taiwan, and he ended up sending a letter to my teacher, asking why he had taught me so much. The next school I visited was Ed Parker’s. Later, some of my students fought in his tournaments.

This was at the end of 1964 and the beginning of ’65. Parker had me show him what I’d learned in Taiwan, and then Dan Inosanto, Jim Greenwald and Steve Golden took me out to lunch.

Dan Inosanto was a kenpo practitioner then, wasn’t he?

Yes. And then I saw Bruce Lee in 1967, and I was impressed. I thought what he was doing was pretty interesting, but I didn’t have time to get into it because I was going to college and trying to run my school. In 1970 I graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree and started teaching drama at Montclair High School.

The first student I gave a black belt to was a guy named Bob Chapman. One day, we went to a tai chi school to check it out. I showed the instructor my tai chi, and he said he would take us as students. When we left, his assistant followed us out.

He said, “Listen, you’re not going to learn anything from this guy — he feels threatened because you already know tai chi.” Then he asked, “You ever heard of jeet kune do?” I said, “Yeah, Bruce Lee’s thing.” And he said, “You know Dan Inosanto?”

I said that I knew Dan pretty well. Then he said, “Here’s his unlisted phone number. If you’re interested in jeet kune do, give him a call.”

So I called him up and Dan was like, “Timmy, come on down! It’s not too big a deal — bring some boxing gloves.”

That could be ominous. (smiles) Bob Chapman and I went down to Dan’s backyard, where he had a little school. My first class there I fought full contact — against Bob Bremer and Daniel Lee. I didn’t do terribly bad, but I didn’t do that well, either. Once I started doing [JKD], I realized that it was so much better than what I knew. That’s when I began throwing away things that didn’t work.

And you stayed with it.

I just stayed with it. It became what I wanted to do. I never taught it commercially. The whole thing of it was, nobody was doing this stuff for a living.

Bob Bremer was a crane operator. Jerry Poteet was a carpenter. Richard Bustillo worked for Continental Airlines. I was a schoolteacher. But I really enjoyed teaching JKD. I guess people started hearing about me because Mito Uyehara, founder of Black Belt magazine, approached me and asked if I wanted to do a book on hsing-i.

So I wrote a big book, which ended up getting cut in half and then they lost the second half. Years later, it was found and published, so I ended up being the author of volume one and two of that. Then I did some other books before coming back to my home at Black Belt to write my two Chinatown Jeet Kune Do books.

People started coming from Europe to train with me, and I would go there during the summer when I was off. Eventually, I retired from teaching high school and got tired of traveling.

Basically, I retired from formal teaching — and was inducted into the Black Belt Hall of fame. You have to retire to do that, I think.

How important was training in Asia in your life?

It was something special for me. What was really interesting was how open everybody was. They were worried their arts would die out and were happy I was going back to America to teach them.

There was none of that nonsense I heard over here with the Chinese saying, “You can’t teach Caucasians.” In Taiwan, they would come up to me and offer to teach for free! I got into the respect that was always present in the martial arts community in Taiwan.

When you met a teacher, you would do this and that. When you became a teacher, you didn’t call yourself sifu or print business cards that say “sifu.” You’re somebody else’s sifu, not your own sifu.

Also, in Taiwan, there was no such thing as a master. There was only instructor and full instructor.

Would you recommend to people that they spend time in Asia, if possible?

Yeah … but I don’t know what it’s like now. I don’t know if it’s different. I don’t know if they still have all those fascinating martial arts because the world seems to have gotten [obsessed with] MMA and everybody talks smack about everybody else.

Overall, what role do you think your experience as a schoolteacher had in your being able to convey the essence of JKD to your students?

When I was teaching high school and later directing plays and stuff, I found that passing along information was very easy for me. Often at training events, Dan Inosanto would say, “You go ahead and do most of the talking here.”

You had the ability to break down the material into something that’s appropriate for the age and experience of the student and then present it in a sequential and logical manner. Is that hard to find in the martial arts in general and JKD in particular?

Some people might have trouble getting across their message because they can’t communicate well or they lack patience. It can be hard — either you can do it or you can’t. I don’t know if you can learn how to do it.

I do know that the teacher-education courses I had to take were a bunch of nonsense. My seventh year of college was a waste. I didn’t learn anything in “teaching theory and practice.”

Are there any things that jump out from your early days in the martial arts that, at this point in your life, make you say, “Why did I spend my time doing that? It’s not important. It wasn’t important then, but I thought it was.”

One of my students, Mike Blesch, wrote an article on it, and we have it on our website (jkdwednite.com). It’s called “The JKD Filter.” It’s a way to look at techniques and say this is good and this is not so good. I don’t regret having learned anything because I eventually learned how to get rid of it. The process of throwing away is essential.

Do any examples come to mind?

There are a lot of stances and a lot of techniques. One of the problems I find in any art, even JKD, is that you start studying with a teacher and everything you learn is of great value at all times. Then you start working with a guy like Bob Bremer and find out that some things don’t work. That’s when I said, “Why am I doing stuff that doesn’t work against this particular thing?”

For example — and I still teach this because I think everybody should learn it — in JKD you learn the progressive indirect attack. You throw a feint and then you maybe do a high finger jab and a low hook kick. At first, you go, “OK, that really works well against a blocker and a runner.” So it’s really cool, especially if you know your opponent’s a blocker or a runner.

Then I tried to use it against Bob Bremer, whose idea was, as soon as you move, he does a stop-kick and then hits you. By the time I did my feint, I’d been hit. It made me wonder why I was doing that. If I tried a high feint against a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy, I’d be on the ground. On the street, I would be foolish to try it.

So I still teach it, but I break it down for my students: This is when you use it, and this is when you don’t use it. If I know the guy’s a blocker, hell, it works really well. However, if the guy’s a JKD practitioner, it doesn’t work. It wasn’t designed to work against JKD; it was designed to work against other arts.

Does it take a certain level of experience and maturity in students to be able to learn something, to figure out how to do it well and then to realize that it might not be for every situation?

Exactly. It’s very difficult. And it’s difficult to throw away stuff. When I started JKD, we would say, “What does this art do? How does this guy move? This is what I would do against somebody doing Thai boxing.” It was all what you would do against somebody who knows this and that. It was a constant analysis.

If you go to a new school and start learning the art, you don’t necessarily buy the whole program, but you certainly should try to learn everything the guy’s teaching you. The problem is you don’t want to throw it away because it’s impolite.

So you have to develop a process for yourself: Here’s what I learned, here’s how I’m going to test it against different opponents, and if it doesn’t work for me against certain opponents, it’s gone.

A technique has got to work against anybody who’s unarmed. It all goes back to watching Bruce Lee in Longstreet — it’s all in there! To touch me, you have to move to me. To move to me, you have to give me your leg. That’s why Bob Bremer would do the leg obstruction.

Then you have to ask yourself, “How do I attack somebody who intercepts?” Once you start figuring out ways to attack that kind of opponent, you have to test everything the same way. You have to be constantly thinking about what works against any opponent. You have to analyze everything.

Is there a preferred way to avoid opening yourself to a counterattack?

You have the advantage if you don’t attack, but then to function, you have to control the distance. If your opponent is too close to you, he has the advantage. If he’s far away, you’re not as vulnerable. What does that mean? You have to use footwork to control the distance so you can see the technique coming.

This is why we work an awful lot with the hammer principle. Basically, it’s a move in which the opponent steps back and tries to attack by dropping his hand and coming at you, and you look at it and think, I can see that coming. You learn how to start getting ready on his preparation.

Do it long enough and you’ll start to see his intention — and that goes back, again, to Longstreet. And then you find that you can intercept opponents almost before they move, but that takes a long time. So in the meantime, you just focus on doing a few things really well.

The problem is — and [Jiddhu] Krishnamurti talked about all this stuff — you’re organizing. To get across his point, Krishnamurti would tell a story about the devil and his friend sitting on a hill when a guy comes walking down the street.

The guy bends down to pick up something, and the devil’s friend asks, “What is that guy doing?” The devil says, “He picked up a piece of the truth.” The friend asks, “Aren’t you worried about that?”

The devil says, “No, I’m going to let him organize it.”

That’s what happens — you get organized despair because you have too much, learning this and learning that. Instead of throwing away, you’re constantly adding.

A minute ago, you spoke about being vulnerable. Does JKD have an approach to confronting a grappler that minimizes your vulnerability?

You have to be able to survive in any environment, so you have to learn grappling. The thing that drives me crazy is when people say, “I don’t need to learn any kind of grappling because I’m a stand-up guy who can outbox anyone,” but you never know if you’re going to slip and fall. You have to learn, even if you don’t want to be on the ground. It’s also a given that you have to learn how to get up no matter what.

Let me tell you a story. One of the first really good grapplers I met was a judo champion in the Air Force. Once I saw him line up 10 good martial artists and have them attack. He took them all down except one guy. As soon as the judoka moved, the other martial artist would hit him in the head with a hard jab and move, hit him with a hard jab and move. The judo guy couldn’t touch him.

So it depends on the person. But even a guy who’s so good at controlling distance and hitting can fall. Or he might be too close. He still should learn grappling.

Do you think anybody is capable of learning a skill set so well that he or she can stop every takedown attempt?

No. You can learn something so well that you have a good chance, but you don’t have a 100-percent chance. Versatility is the key to self-defense. One thing I’ve noticed is that in JKD, we work hard at hitting hard. That’s why we have our strong hand forward. However, some of the MMA guys I’ve worked with — well, even at 77 years old, I hit harder than they do! They don’t have that snap, that power, in their punch.

For self-defense, you have to be able to knock a guy out. Bruce Lee told Bob Bremer that the best way to win a fight is to reach over and knock the person out. You need to have sledgehammers for hands.

That’s one thing that’s lacking in the world of strikers. One of the problems JKD practitioners face involves the straight lead punch: If you twist your rear foot to put all your weight on your front leg and do that as an attack, you might be in deep doo-doo because it’s hard to recover. But if someone is stepping in on you and you use that technique, it can be a powerful thing.

In our classes, we do a lot of drilling where a guy steps in with a focus glove and you hit them on the end of that. Then it’s two things coming together, which can generate an amazing amount of power. Once I had somebody say I couldn’t knock him out with one punch. So I had him hold a focus glove and step toward me, and then I hit the focus glove hard. He was quiet about it after that.

(To be continued.)

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