Picture the most famous singer on Earth in an Army uniform, standing in a rented house in a small German town and learning how to throw a punch from a German man in his forties.
That was Elvis Presley in 1958 and 1959.
The Army had drafted him and shipped him to West Germany. Off base, he lived in a house in Bad Nauheim, and that’s where a man named Jürgen Seydel started coming by to give him lessons. Seydel is often called the father of German karate. He’d opened what’s described as the country’s first karate club just a year or so earlier.
Elvis got hooked fast. On leave in Paris, he reportedly squeezed in private lessons with a Japanese teacher, Tetsuji Murakami, at one point training for days on end. Back at the house, he and his Army buddy Rex Mansfield toughened up their hands so they could break boards.
The Army sent him home in March 1960, and the hobby came with him.
That same year, at a karate demonstration at the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, Elvis met Ed Parker. Parker came from Hawaii and is known as the father of American Kenpo, a style of karate he spread across the country. The two hit it off, and Parker stayed in his life until the very end.
Years later, Parker sat down and talked about the man he’d trained.
Ed Parker interview about Elvis Presley
Parker didn’t hand out the black belt himself. He pointed Elvis toward a tough instructor named Hank Slemansky, who put him through about six weeks of hard testing. Before 1960 was over, Elvis had his first-degree black belt.
Fake celebrity belts were floating around back then, and Slemansky didn’t want his name on one. So he made Elvis earn it. According to Parker, Slemansky’s verdict afterward was blunt. The kid wasn’t pretty, he said, but he was tough.
After that, karate leaked into everything. You can spot it in some of his ’60s movies and in a fight scene on his 1968 TV comeback special.
But the real show came in the 1970s.
On stage in Las Vegas and out on tour, Elvis would drop into a fighting stance in the middle of a song and fire off a chop or a kick while the band kept pounding. His costume designer, Bill Belew, reportedly made the famous jumpsuits partly so he could move like that without splitting a seam. The early outfits even borrowed the look of a karate uniform, belt and all.
Somebody in the crowd caught one of those moments on film.
Elvis Karate Demo Salt Lake City, Utah November 16, 1971
In Memphis, he kept training with a Korean master named Kang Rhee, who gave him the nickname “Mr. Tiger.” Rhee promoted him to seventh degree in 1973 and to eighth degree in 1974.
Around then, Elvis paid to shoot his own karate film with Rhee and his students. He even scribbled out ideas for the script by hand.
It never came out. A chunk of the footage did survive, though, and it’s about the clearest look anyone has at Elvis the fighter.