The University of Mississippi Athletics
Tae Kwon Do Team Pins Olympic Hopes On This Week's National Tournament
Oct. 21, 1999
UNIVERSITY, Miss. - This weekend The University of Mississippi's football team and its fans take a break, but its Tae Kwon Do Team is doing anything but resting.
Oct. 20-24 will mark this sport club's seventh visit to the U.S. Tae Kwon Do Union's (USTU) National Championship tournament, held this year in Pomona, Calif.
Tae kwon do is a martial art developed in Korea and is known for its dramatic flying and spinning kicks. The name comes from the Korean words tae (foot), kwon (fist) and do (way). The fundamentals of the sport are learned through a series of patterns of combined moves, free sparring, knife-defense techniques and two-person controlled sparring.
Like any good coach, head instructor/team member Larry D. Weeden focuses on one contest at a time, but he and the other 20 Ole Miss team members can't help catching a little Olympic fever. Tae kwon do is now a "full medal" sport in the Olympic Games, and the first medals will be handed down next summer in Sydney, Australia. Weeden wants to see Ole Miss students on the U.S. team.
First things first, however. The Ole Miss team, led by Weeden and club instructor Sung Yol Ra (a 17-year-old freshman accountancy major), needs to place in one of four top slots in this weekend's tournament. Then they face the Collegiate Team Trials, followed by the World University Games and finally a shot at the U.S. Olympic Team.
"We usually train for one or two months before a competition, and God has sincerely blessed us with much success," Weeden said. "We have a few National Championship and maybe some Olympic contenders. This is great!"
While not lacking for enthusiasm about all these hurdles, Weeden expresses concern about financing all the travel involved. The team is constantly raising money for tournaments. "We are given a budget of $2,000 from the Turner Center (Campus Recreation), and it is costing us a little over $10,800 to compete in California this year."
Despite the cost of tournament bids, Weeden still manages to find scholarship money for team members and he has twice taken students on spring break trips back to Alexandria, Va., for advanced training under his own instructor, grandmaster Yoo Jun Saeng. Yoo gave Weeden permission to establish the Ole Miss Tae Kwon Do Club in 1992, after he came to the University to major in political science and Spanish.
Weeden, who is now a graduate student in political science, said tae kwon do's emergence as an international sport came about primarily through the development of the World Tae Kwon Do Federation. Inaugurated in 1973, the federation set out to bring together the many diverse schools of the martial art.
Although the name "tae kwon do" is barely 50 years old, the origins of the art reach far back into Korea history. Practitioners wear a uniform of loose white cotton pants and a kimono-style top, tied at the waist with a belt indicating rank. At competitions, participants are judged by how well they perform the patterns and by contests of free sparring.
The results of the Ole Miss team efforts at this week's USTU National Championships can be accessed on the Web at www.ustu.com.