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Traditionally speaking, there’s really no money in teaching
martial arts. The martial arts teachers of yore often derived their
livelihood from the benevolent offerings of their students. There
are exceptions of course. During the 1960s when Asian martial arts
were just beginning to gain popularity in the West, the late Bruce
Lee was known to charge $275 an hour for personal tuition in his
newly created fighting system of jeet kune do.
In my years of involvement with the martial
arts, I’ve met fellow practitioners who have tried to make a
career as professional martial arts teachers. Sadly, less than a
handful of them managed to eke out a living from that occupation.
Perhaps the Philippines’ economic condition contributed a lot to
their failure. In a third world country such as ours, people would
think twice of investing their hard-earned money to martial arts
education, which is often deemed a luxury.
In addition to teaching martial arts fulltime,
martial artists tend to enter related career paths, among them are:
professional tournament fighter, tournament referee, stuntman and
martial arts choreographer, martial arts seminar lecturer, security
specialist and martial arts writer.
I could count with the fingers of my hand the
number of my stories on the subject that have yielded revenue. One
fellow martial arts writer penned a book that has caught
international attention, but still, he admits that it’s no path to
riches. I have also known a few martial artists who ventured into
publishing martial arts literatures even if it meant operating at a
loss. For all of us, the whole thing is a labor of love.
Things are a little better though for those who
migrated to the West, the United States in particular. Unlike in the
Philippines, a number of markets in the US are open to enterprising
martial arts experts. Martial artists armed with solid fighting
skills and marketing savvy are known to thrive in America’s
martial arts seminar circuit.
To the best of my recollection, only one of my
martial arts colleagues made a killing in a martial arts related
career. He’s now working in some hellish war zone in the Middle
East as a security specialist. And multiplying the duration of his
stay in that hellhole with his monthly salary, I estimated that he
already made over a million pesos by now. I got an interesting
comment from him though when I asked of the opportunity he would be
able to use his martial arts skills in that environment, “Very
little chance,” he says, adding, “What we’re always watching
out here are the rocket-propelled grenades. Man, life in this job is
like playing Russian roulette everyday.”
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