Bad Dojo: Tiger Schulmann Didn’t Get to Be America’s No. 1 Karate Kingpin Without Busting a Few Faces
April 30, 2025 at 01:41AMAs usual, David Gauvey Herbert delivers. For Esquire, he dives into the world of martial arts and tells the engrossing life story of Daniel “Tiger” Schulmann, an American MMA trainer who founded his first dojo in 1984—the year Karate Kid was released—and went on to grow a karate empire across the US through the ’90s. It’s impossible not to compare Schulmann’s personal and professional journey to a real-life Cobra Kai story.
But most black belts make terrible small-businessmen. Schools limp along with fifty or a hundred students, barely enough keep the lights on. And in the 1980s, martial-arts marketing was abysmal: an advertisement in the Yellow Pages with an intimidating headshot of the owner and bullet points of the obscure disciplines he’d mastered.
Schulmann, though, was a natural marketer with a flair for the dramatic. He held live demonstrations at high schools, strip-mall parking lots, and theaters before screenings of movies like Blood Sport and Sidekicks. Students spin-kicked cigarettes out of Mehrkar’s mouth and broke boards and blocks. A lot could go wrong. Hellman, a top sensei, once attempted a spinning round kick at a block of ice and instead sliced off a chunk of his heel. It was a punishing way to sell a handful of two-for-one class specials for $9.50, but it worked.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/29/bad-dojo-tiger-schulmann-didnt-get-to-be-americas-no-1-karate-kingpin-without-busting-a-few-faces/
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