Bryan Sparks

I am not a vio­lent per­son. Despite my skill at mak­ing oth­ers want to hit me, it has always been more my style to ignore insults and walk away from phys­i­cal con­fronta­tions. My quick wit has been a tremen­dous advan­tage to me in talk­ing my way out of poten­tial trou­ble. However a few years ago, I found myself prepar­ing to be (painfully) thrown out of a pub by some very large men who worked there. These men were smart enough to see that, if they did not inter­vene with what was hap­pen­ing in our cor­ner of the bar, some­one would have ended up hospitalized.

Luckily, no punches had to be thrown. The “other party” (oddly, a friend of one of my men­tors) apol­o­gized, and we all went on drink­ing and hav­ing a good time. As the evening con­tin­ued, it was obvi­ous that he could tell I would not have hes­i­tated to fight him had he not spo­ken up when he did. And I wouldn’t have: he had been try­ing to make an ass of Bryan sparks.

Bryan sparks is one of my best friends. In fact, I could go so far as to say that Bryan is just about a brother to me — right up there in the Mike Healy cat­e­gory, which means a lot to any­one who knows me well. There is nobody I can think of whom I respect and count on more.

To shed a lit­tle light on my fierce loy­alty to and pride in know­ing Bryan (even in the face of emi­nent phys­i­cal pain), let me give you a lit­tle back­ground. No need to reach for the kleenex though — this is a Taido web­site, not a long-distance call­ing plan commercial.

A History Lesson

Bryan sparks began Taido in 1985, about a year after my father and I. I’m not sure exactly when it was that we met, but it was prob­a­bly after Bryan made pur­ple belt, because white belts had sep­a­rate classes at that time. We quickly dis­cov­ered that we were both very good at a lot of the same things and enjoyed most of the same Taido games. We became friends.

For a lot of years, we prac­ticed together and hung out at Taido. We did demon­stra­tions and com­pe­ti­tions together. We would spend a lot of our free time at the dojo mak­ing up new hokei, and with Amir and a few other kids, we also used to make all kinds of tenkai and other rou­tines for prac­tice and fun.

In junior high school, Bryan joined the same Boy Scout troop I was in, and we started going on camp­ing trips and doing a lot of other stuff together. (don’t worry, this isn’t one of those sto­ries where we find out that we’re in love and have to hide our feel­ings for each other from an uncar­ing soci­ety that doesn’t under­stand… No, this isn’t that kind of story at all.) Between Taido and Boy Scouts, we saw each other at least four times a week through that period.

In high school, we both made black belt about a year apart. In fact, we were the first black belts to begin Taido as chil­dren and not quit yet. Though Mitsuaki tech­ni­cally prac­ticed Taido before either one of us (I mean, it was his father’s school — he lived there), he didn’t make shodan until 1994 because he took a lot of breaks for school sports and such. I think Bryan and I share the record for longest con­tin­u­ous period of Taido prac­tice in American Taido.

In 1993, we went to Japan together as part of the US team in the first Taido World Championships, and Bryan was the youngest com­peti­tor in the adult divi­sion. I don’t think either one of us will ever for­get all the stuff we saw, expe­ri­enced, and learned for the first time on that trip. Used panties and beer being sold in vend­ing machines makes a strong impres­sion on a sixteen-year-old. After return­ing to Atlanta, we both tried study­ing Japanese in school so we could bet­ter com­mu­ni­cate when we had inter­na­tional Taido events.

During my last year of high school, Bryan and I decided that we wanted to spend some time exper­i­ment­ing with tech­niques and prac­tices that were too “hard­core” for most peo­ple at the honbu dojo. So we started a church. We called it “church” because we met at my high school fields every Sunday morn­ing. For a few hours, we would run, jump, climb, and do incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous things on stairs. A few times, Chris Healy or Brendan Dumont would come by too, but for the most part, it was just Bryan and I invent­ing drills, exper­i­ment­ing with new tech­niques, and basi­cally play­ing with any­thing related to Taido we could think to try.

Upon grad­u­a­tion, I headed to Georgia Tech to study physics, and the next year, Bryan fol­lowed. Well, I doubt he went there to fol­low me, but he did enroll the year after I did. When I found out that Bryan was com­ing to Tech, I knew that we had to start a Taido club together. At that time, nobody in America had suc­ceeded in oper­at­ing any Taido classes out­side of the honbu dojo for longer than a cou­ple of months. As far as I know, only two peo­ple were actu­ally even allowed to try.

It took a lit­tle con­vinc­ing, but even­tu­ally Uchida told us to go ahead. Of course, he also promised to help us. (Which never hap­pened. Let me be very clear about this — nobody ever helped Bryan and I set up, man­age, or teach at Tech except in the roll of assis­tant until Chris vol­un­teered much later to become the num­ber two instruc­tor while Bryan was in Colorado. Ignore any­one who tries to tell you dif­fer­ently. I did all the admin­is­tra­tive stuff; Bryan did all the tech­ni­cal Taido stuff. We were a team of exactly two mem­bers, and I’m really tired of hear­ing about cer­tain peo­ple try­ing to take credit for “help­ing [us] get started.” It just is not so.) Though we started out with only one stu­dent, the two of us man­aged to build the club up to a respectable size. Now it is in its tenth con­tin­u­ous year and enjoys a good rep­u­ta­tion for qual­ity Taido. We’re kind of proud.

Unfortunately, Tech wasn’t the right school for me, and I had to drop out, though I still taught Taido there. Bryan, on the other hand, grad­u­ated in four years — a pretty dif­fi­cult feat at Tech. They tell every­one in ori­en­ta­tion that their chances of grad­u­at­ing at all are two-to-one against, and even then, it usu­ally takes five or more years because the course load is just too dif­fi­cult for most stu­dents. Bryan doesn’t like for peo­ple to think of him as a “smart per­son,” but what he did at Tech was one hell of an aca­d­e­mic achievement.

Even before that, Bryan was doing things I had failed at. I gave up the Boy Scouts because of pol­i­tics (pol­i­tics! In the freak­ing Boy Scouts! Long story, but you’ll just have to take my word for it that I really tried to make things work out), but Bryan made it to the rank of Eagle. For those of you who don’t know, Eagle is the high­est rank in the Boy Scouts — their black belt, and very few peo­ple ever achieve it.

He was also able to do back hand­springs and flips long before I could, and was always stronger than I. Come to think of it, his tech­niques were always bet­ter than mine too. How’d it come to be that I’m the one rec­om­mend­ing him for promotions?

Anyway, when Bryan grad­u­ated and moved to col­orado for work, it hit me pretty hard. We had always been a team, and I was hav­ing some per­sonal issues out­side of Taido that made it dif­fi­cult to keep my act together. I had almost decided to close the club before Chris told me that he would pick up the slack. When Bryan “secretly” came back to Atlanta, I felt relieved even before he announced that he would be back at Tech with us. I just knew that things were going to work out for the best. And they have.

Since then, Bryan and I have done a lot together. Our mutual love of beer led us to invent the “Guinness milk shake” at Taido’s sum­mer camp in 2002. We’ve been a teach­ing team for many Taido events and worked together on many Taido projects. We’ve done so much together, and some­how, we still man­age to like each other. At least, I think Bryan likes me.

Cult of Bryan

A lot of peo­ple don’t know this, but Bryan is the Laughing Buddha of Taido in the US. Seriously, he has all the impor­tant qual­i­ties of an enlight­ened master -

• Friendly and hon­est to all: check
• A lack of attach­ment to mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions: check
• Absolute absence of van­ity: check
• The abil­ity to laugh at his own mis­takes: check
• A love of authen­tic good times: check
• Lack of con­cern for wealth or fame: check
• Experience with altered states of con­scious­ness (while drink­ing): check
• Ability to snap you out of it when you are fool­ing your­self: check

In fact, I was at one time tempted to start a cult around Bryan for my own finan­cial gain, but in his wis­dom, Bryan moved to Colorado before I could get the ball rolling. By the time he came back, I had taken up drug run­ning and pros­ti­tu­tion as alter­na­tive meth­ods of income gen­er­a­tion, and I haven’t looked back. Thanks to Bryan, i’ve been able to find and achieve my great­est dreams.

I Love You, Man

Some folks mis­take Bryan’s unas­sum­ing demeanor for pas­siv­ity or a lack of per­sonal moti­va­tion, but you don’t grad­u­ate form Tech in four years with­out going into debt unless you have some seri­ous drive. You can’t run a busi­ness unless you know how to set goals and work towards them in a step-wise fash­ion. Groups of ded­i­cated stu­dents do not just form around any­one — Bryan has got some seri­ous man­age­ment skills, even if he is incred­i­bly good at hid­ing them from most of us.

Actually, Bryan has a lot of the same qual­i­ties that I see in Negishi, my other Taido best friend. Which is why I rec­om­mended Bryan for 3dan a cou­ple of years ago. I know he thought it was too soon (he spent seven years at shodan, and I only allowed him to remain at 2dan for six…), but when I was con­sult­ing with some other folks about it, they all had about the same thing to say: “You’re telling me that Bryan is still 2dan? How’d we let that hap­pen?” Needless to say, I had no prob­lem find­ing sup­port for my campaign.

It’s because he’s so often qui­etly keep­ing his com­mit­ments and doing con­sis­tently good Taido that peo­ple tend to for­get about Bryan and his con­tri­bu­tions. However, once peo­ple remem­ber that he’s still around, doing his thing, they want to sup­port him, because it’s hard not to respect the kind of per­son who takes care of busi­ness so reli­ably. At the risk of gush­ing just a lit­tle bit, any­one I know with any sense at all loves Bryan sparks. It’s just impos­si­ble not to with­out hav­ing your head up your ass.

And so lately, as I’m start­ing to think about leav­ing japan and head­ing back the the good ol’ U S of Andy, i’ve been look­ing for­ward to get­ting to be part­ners again with Bryan. I’ve (as always) got lots of plans that I want to try, and I know I can trust Bryan to tell me which ones are fea­si­ble and which ones may as well be acid-trip mate­r­ial. However it all goes down, I at least know that I can count on him to work with me on build­ing this Taido thing in the right direction.

That, and to buy me a beer when I’m short on cash.