While the influences of hapkido have been written about, this book is the first to tell the story of the man who created it and where he learned the thirteen arts that he used to create hapkido, particularly Tae Kyon and Aiki-Jujitsu.

GRAND MASTER BONG SOO HAN has long been known as "the Father of Hapkido" and the first martial arts master to appear in an American film, Billy Jack, where martial arts fans could go crazy while martial artists first memorized the single most famous line in martial arts film history:

"I'm gonna take this right foot and I'm gonna whop you on that side of the face."

The response to the movie was so huge that the next year GM Han appeared as himself in the sequel, The Trial of Billy Jack, where on the American big screen was first said in English, HAPKIDO, by the man who created it.

And the martial arts world was never the same as each art and each school tried to figure out how to do a spinning heel kick that was part of the secret Korean Buddhist temple fighting art of Tae Kyon. What took 1400 years to perfect was taken directly from the temple and joined with Yong Sool Choi's Hapki Yu Kwon Sool in 1961. The modern world's first famous mixed martial art which is hard, swift, linear, and soft, sudden, and circular.

662 pages