2007 Good Will Tour post review

As I mentioned before, my family was honored with the opportunity to participate in the 2007 Goodwill Tour. The demonstration started at 7:00 p.m. but we were supposed to arrive at 5:00 p.m. to begin practice, warm up and hang out. Amazingly, we arrived at Paramount Theater in Cedar Rapids at the appointed starting time. The kids were really good the whole evening, from the time we picked them up through the 2 hr ride from our home to Cedar Rapids, to the 2 hr practice prior to the actual start of the demo, they did great. More importantly my wife and I did great ;-) Anyway, the demo started and the US team was the first out on the mat. The mats were really slippery. They are those interlocking mats and I thought surely someone would fall down on them. But they didn't. My feet were sweating. Our team did really well, broke some boards, and my family did Chun-gi and that went over really well. Tiny Tiger was really nervous, but she came through the whole thing really well.

The North Korean Team did exceptionally well. Very acrobatic breaks, powerful breaks with concrete and brick edgers that I had not seen people use before for breaking. Usually we use a concrete paver, and they did too, but they also used an interlocking brick edger that I know is really hard. They did not "peg" the concrete so the blocks were directly on top of each other. It looked very impressive. Also, I had never seen the type of board they were breaking. It is 1/4" thick, springy pine. Small boards edge glued together with a stamp burned into it of a fist. I would have liked to have had one as a souvenir but they were all cleaned up after their demo. They also broke some 3/4" pine which is what we generally use. Anyway, they were just like the video. Very crisp, very polished, very professional. They were there just to do Taekwondo. No politics, thank goodness, nothing out of the realm of the art. And very serious for the most part.

I was mildly disappointed that we did not get to interact with them at all after the demonstration. It seemed like a perfect time, in my opinion, for athletes to communicate, even if we don't speak the same language. It is usually enough being in close proximity to others to understand that we are each friendly and have a common bond.

Anyway mild disappointment aside, we really had a good time, the demo was amazing, Grandmaster Jung, Woo Jin is an amazing fellow and we should all thank him for his work on bringing this fantastic opportunity to all of us. His perseverance and dedication to his goals in something that we should all strive to model our own lives after.