Roughly four years ago, I was invited to the black belt class in the Tyrone studio. Master Josefik felt I was ready and that I needed a more advanced education for my black belt test. After some thought, I agreed.

Next Tuesday, at 6:45, I walked into the studio. I got ready and waited until the youth class ended at 7:00. A few minutes later, the class was called to line up. I got in line where I was supposed to. It wasn’t very difficult to figure out where I was supposed to be. I was the newest student in class and the lowest ranking. I took my place in the back line on the far left side. But instead of doing any physical exercise, a practice test was announced.

I was surprised, and disappointed, but I went with it. Everyone sat down and was handed a test sheet and pencil. The test was 100 questions long, but we had the entire 1:15 minutes of class to complete it. Everything counted towards our final score, even our name. There was an easy point. The next question though, I regrettably did not know. It was our gup/dan number. I had to skip over that. The next few questions were easy. They were simple questions based on common knowledge that any high ranking student would know. “Where was our art originated from?”: Korea. “Who founded the World Tang Soo Do Association?”: Grandmaster Jae C. Shin. This was question four.

The fifth question is where my mistake happened. The question was: “What is the name of our art?”. The answers were: a) Ho Sin Sul, b) Tang Soo Do, c) Taekwondo, d) Karate. You would think it would be impossible to miss this question, based on the answer to the previous one (which I got right). I don’t know what went through my mind, but I chose answer c) Taekwondo.

The rest of the test passed uneventfully. I did poorly on the test due to my lack of historic and terminological knowledge. I made no worse mistakes, thankfully. When Master Josefik found this out, he took my practice knife (soft rubber knife) and wrote “Taekwondo” on it. It was only natural that he would use a black permanent marker to make the word stand out against the silver blade for eternity. “So everyone will know it’s his!” he announced. Taekwondo became my nickname. The only way this name would go away was for me to achieve black belt status, which happened about one year later.

The word Taekwondo will live in infamy as my favorite mistake ever made. This experience taught me to think very carefully about some things you do. Because if you don’t it could lead to unpredictable, annoying, and/or dire consequences. So remember, look before you leap. Or in the words of Robert Frost:

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”
Robert Frost