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Story by Nate Schweber
Photos by Heather Miller
The aurora borealis is emanating from the UM Recreation Annex.
Remember the fable about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox making
the Northern Lights? Legend has it that the two goliaths
wrestled each other in Alaska, throwing their massive bodies
with so much force that mountains piled up each time one of
them crashed to the ground.
The sparring of UM hapkido instructor Alain Burrese and his
partner Thad Brinkman is almost as epic.
Brinkman, a hulking ex-football player, attacks the shorter
Burrese from behind. Just as Brinkman throws his
ponderosa-sized arms around Burrese, the hapkido black belt
seizes the giant by the forearms, grimaces, doubles over and
sends Brinkman cascading through the air so he lands prone on
his back.
If this showdown wasn't inside a gymnasium on top of padded
floors, there would be new mountains and a glow on the horizon
of the Missoula valley.
Burrese is passionate about fighting. He spent years in Korea
mastering hapkido. He also trained in judo, karate, and
taekwondo. Burrese was a paratrooper in the Army and taught an
elite class of the finer points of being a military sniper.
Burrese, who is Missoula's only hapkido instructor, is perhaps
UM's most accomplished fighter. He might also be the most
dangerous man on campus.
When Burrese and Brinkman halt their battles, they head back
to the UM law school where they're both second-year students.
Fighting is a great stress reliever, they say.
Burrese and Brinkman meet three times a week for their mid-day
battles. Brinkman says he gets informal hapkido training from
Missoula's master of the art and Burrese says he gets someone
to practice moves on for his self-defense video which he'll
shoot with Brinkman in the Spring.
Burrese's first video, "Hapkido Hoshinsul: The Explosive
Korean Art Of Self-Defense," takes up a full-page ad on
the back of this month's Paladin Press catalog. Paladin Press,
a publishing company out of Boulder, Colo., offers titles in
its catalog on everything from big game hunting to
self-defense to cannibalism as means of survival. Paladin also
sells Burrese's book "Hard-Won Wisdom From The School of
Hard Knocks."
"I used to get into a lot of fights," Burrese says.
"I fought almost every weekend."
Burrese adds that it's because of all the fights he's been in
that he earned his love for hapkido. Burrese says he prefers
it to other martial arts because it focuses on real
self-defense, not tournaments. Hapkido includes aspects of
grappling - chokes, joint-locks, and throws - as well as
striking techniques.
Burrese says it's hard to count all the scuffles he's been in,
but he estimates he's been in about 30 knock-down-drag-out
bouts in his lifetime. His fighting career reached its peak
when he was in the Army in the late ‘80s.
"You get a lot of GIs together who are all young and all
have attitudes - I had one, too - and we'd get into a lot of
fights," Burrese says. "I didn't go out looking for
fights, but I sure didn't avoid them either."
Burrese, who contends that he's "grown up," since
his days of raising hell in the army, says that he found that
the fighting methods he learned in hapkido worked the best in
real situations.
Burrese, who's been interested in martial arts since growing
up in his native Thompson Falls, was introduced to hapkido in
Helena in 1989 by Shihan Dennis Dallas. Burrese started taking
Judo in high school in 1982 and has studied martial arts ever
since. But it was under Dallas' instruction that he developed
a love for hapkido.
By 1996, Burrese was so serious about learning hapkido that he
moved to Kangnung, Korea to study it.
"The first day I asked the one English teacher I knew,
‘I want to learn hapkido, where do I go?'"
He went to the Hapkido Choiyukwan school and studied under
Kwanjangnim Kim Young-Jong and Sabomnim Lee Jun-Kyu.
Burrese lived in a small apartment, taught English classes to
pay rent and went to 11 hapkido classes a week. He was the
only American in the class.
"I was training my butt off over there," Burrese
says.
Burrese says hapkido is not as well known as Korea's other
major martial art, taekwondo. Burrese says hapkido stays in
the shadows because it's not an Olympic sport like taekwondo.
Plus, because its classes involve falling and getting thrown,
Burrese says many people shy away from hapkido because it
hurts more.
"We don't wear protective gear when we're training,"
Burrese says. "So after hitting the ground and getting
thrown around, you do get sore after a while."
Burrese says while he was in Korea, the language barrier made
the classes more difficult, but because of his background in
martial arts, he quickly grasped the concepts and movements of
hapkido.
"It's pretty amazing that when he was in Korea, he didn't
know Korean so he had to learn by just watching,"
Brinkman says. "He has a journal where he wrote down all
the different moves in English so he knows how to teach them
perfectly."
While in Korea, Burrese also met and fell in love with Ham Yi-Saeng,
a Korean woman who was also teaching English. Yi-Saeng is
still in Korea waiting to get a visa to come to Montana and
marry Burrese.
During the summer of 1998, Burrese moved back to Korea for the
summer to be with his fiancé and take four hapkido classes a
day.
Burrese's pilgrimage to study hapkido wasn't his first time in
Korea. In 1988-89 he was stationed in South Korea as a member
of the 2nd Infantry Division. While there, he went through
sniper school and graduated second in his class. Afterward, he
became an assistant instructor where he taught students to
make camouflage suits and shoot targets up to 1,000 meters
away.
In the Army, Burrese studied martial arts on his own and with
sparring partners.
When he left the Army in 1989, he moved to Helena to study
hapkido. Then in the fall of 1990 he came to Missoula to study
business administration at UM.
When he graduated in 1994, Burrese moved to Japan for a year
to teach English. He hoped to study martial arts, but he was
confined to a tiny village and could only study on his own.
While in Japan, Burrese started writing his book about hard
knocks.
When he came back to the United States, Burrese moved to Los
Angeles and was a bodyguard for exotic dancers. There he
worked alongside one of his best friends, Marc
"Animal" MacYoung. MacYoung helped Burrese finish
his book.
After spending 14 months in Korea, Burrese came back to
Montana and applied to the UM law school. He was accepted, and
also got a job at a local law firm. Simultaneously, Burrese
began teaching a hapkido class every Friday in the Schreiber
Gym.
Kim Sol, chief instructor at Big Sky Taekwondo and the Judo
Club, who also teaches martial arts at UM, says he bumped into
Burrese at judo tournaments throughout the past 20 years. Then
one day he was on the Internet in a discussion group about
taekwondo and saw messages from someone who said they were at
the UM law school and taught hapkido.
Sol contacted the messenger, and it turned out to be Burrese.
"Since he was here and he had an authentic background in
hapkido, I invited him to teach self-defenes," Sol says.
"He has a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of ability."
Sol says Burrese adds a lot to the martial arts field at UM as
well as in Missoula.
"Hapkido is a very useful aspect to any taekwondo martial
art program," Sol says. "And UM is big enough at
this point that it can benefit from exposure to these
different, innovative martial arts. Hapkido is a very
important martial art in this world."
Sol says he's encouraging Burrese to expand his hapkido
teachings, maybe even start a hapkido club.
Burrese says law school keeps him plenty busy, but he's
considering it.
Burrese says his experience with martial arts gives him
confidence in law school and at his job with a law firm
downtown.
"Martial arts can teach a lot more than just how to
fight," Burrese says. "It teaches discipline and
determination; it teaches fellowship with the people you train
with and it teaches responsibility for when fighting is not
appropriate."
Burrese says when he graduates, there's a strong chance he'll
move back to Korea to be near his fiancee's family. He wants
to use his law degree to work internationally.
Though he's as prepared as one can be for a fight, Burrese
intends to limit his melees to his sparring matches with
Brinkman and focus on teaching self-defense.
"I teach a very strong avoidance message," Burrese
says. "People do die; people do get hurt seriously in
fights. It's not worth it."
And that's an idea big enough to light up the sky.
This article was featured in the Wednesday, November 17,
1999 Montana Kaimin, the University of Montana newspaper.
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