08/23/2026
A great speech by Grand Master Ted Sumner:
For those who were not at the 2026 GOE/HOF below is the address I made to the Banquet Attendees. For those who never met Al personally it might be illuminating.
The Legacy of Al Tracy
We have reached a point in time where there are students, even a few black belts who have never met Al Tracy, much less trained with him. Therefore, I feel it time to inform, enlighten and acquaint those members of our organization with the founder of our system.
Al was born in the deepest, darkest days of the Great Depression and raised in humble circumstances. He recognized at a young age the immeasurable value of education. Facing often difficult and sometimes heartbreaking adversity Al drove himself and his brothers on never losing sight of their goals.
Al and his brothers, while students at Pasadena Community College, began training with Ed Parker in Kenpo Karate in 1957. During a turbulent time following the split between Ed Parker and James Wing Woo, Al studied with Jerry Driskoll in Mas Oyama’s KyokushiKai for a year. And while Kenpo became a treasured passion, it was initially merely a means to an end. Al and his brothers had been excellent debaters in high school and college and as members of the debate team won many awards. And as excellent debaters they saw a natural path to careers in the practice of law.
In 1962 they moved to San Francisco to attend the University of California’s prestigious Hastings Law School. They opened a Kenpo Karate School in the City with the intent that the income from the school would finance their education at the Law School. A few difficulties aside, everything was going according to plan. Among their many students were Redd Foxx of Sanford and Son and Monty Budwig, the bass player with the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Monty created the T and Dragon logo with an old license plate and a pair of tin snips. In addition, Bruce Lee was frequent visitor to the Tracy’s dojo which was locate on Ocean Ave in San Francisco’s “Sunset” District.
But something happened along the way. Anyone who knew Al Tracy knows that he could never look upon a problem or condition without conducting a detailed analysis of the situation and then formulate a solution, repair, improvement, reorganization or reconstruction. I never came to Al with a problem, personal or professional, even as a teenager, that he did not stop what he was doing and give his full attention to the formulation of a satisfactory resolution.
It was only during these times of problem solving that the full measure of his powerful intellect was brought to a laser focus with an intensity that often bordered on obsessive.
At other times, as anyone who has ever engaged Al in conversation knows, he would never allow a subject to be changed, but would rather add the new topic to ongoing discussion often juggling four or five subject matters at once. As an adroit lateral thinker he would dart back and forth commenting on one topic, then another while maintaining complete continuity of thought, until finally concluding the discourse on each subject in detail.
So what happened that such a determined march toward a clearly defined objective could be so radically re-directed. To anyone who truly knew Al Tracy the answer is glaringly apparent. Though the teaching of Kenpo was intended to simply provide the means to pay for their education in the Law, Al could not leave such a perfect composition as Kenpo to continue to be taught in the woefully imperfect fashion by which it had been imparted to him and his brothers.
Al knew that though he could not change the physical demands of the Art, he could create an instructional schema whereby the knowledge and skills of Kenpo could be effectively transferred by any competent Kenpo instructor to any motivated student. This determined belief then became the corner stone of what would become the Tracy System of Kenpo. This exigency, this imperative that not just Kenpo but the educational process of teaching adults in general be drug into the 20th Century then became the immovable object that was to redirect the irresistible force driving Al and his brothers forward.
Law School would have to wait. The Tracy Brothers were about to make history. And along the way revolutionize the learning processes by which adults would soon come to be educated throughout Academia. The Tracy brothers were about to challenge the way the martial arts had been taught throughout Asia for thousands of years.
First off they organized the material into courses. They assigned specific material to be required and learned for the individual course and upon satisfactory completion and testing of the students abilities and knowledge of the required material a promotion would be bestowed with awarding of a diploma and a belt. Not unlike a college or university.
Up to that time belt promotions had been the arbitrarily subjective judgment of the Master Instructor. Now there were specific requirements that had to be met. And Al always emphasized that we “charge for the course, not for the test”. Charging for a belt test has never been tolerated in Tracy Kenpo and to my knowledge the only time anyone has ever been deranked and expelled from the Organization is for charging for tests.
Next they codified and documented the educational content. The requirements for each course were written down and explained in minute and exacting detail. Very much like college text books.
But an educational offering this comprehensive would require an instructional methodology such as had never before been seen. The first step was to realize that educating adults would require an entirely different set of skills and abilities than the standard pedagogic methods. Knowing we were only one generation away from the entire educational offering being entirely administered by non English speaking instructors they understood that Tracy Kenpo instructors would need to be intelligent, well trained, and thoroughly fluent in their ability to verbally articulate all aspects of the art.
Knowing full well that before most adults will invest their time and energy in the effort to learn something, they must be assured of the relevance and value of the knowledge and skills being taught. At this point they brought in some big guns. Tom Conner, Bob Roberts and Hal Bowen, experts at motivating adult learners were enlisted to help hammer out a systematic mode of instructional procedure that would thoroughly inculcate the student with the absolute necessity, urgency and absolute indispensability of not just learning, but mastering the information and skills. This process was taught and studied by every Tracy Instructor.
Grandmaster Tracy believed that techniques alone do not define a martial artist. Character does. He often emphasized that our true legacy is not what we gain from Kenpo, but what we give back—through our teaching, our example, and the students we leave behind. Those words continue to resonate throughout the Kenpo community today.
After the death of Ed Parker Kenpo remained polarized. In 1999 Al made the grand gesture to bring Kenpo and all the Kenpo related styles together in unity to share our various art forms, ideas and view points and interact in harmony. This was accomplished at the first Gathering of Eagles in Las Vegas and repeated again in 2001. And then in 2007 Al, seeing the need for some form of recognition for the unique and beneficial contributions that Kenpo Instructors bring to society he formulated this institution…The Kenpo International Hall of Fame. With the exception of a little interruption during COVID these ceremonies have taken place every other year up to tonight.
But the final jewel to the crowning achievement that would become the Tracy System of Kenpo was the Business Plan. I could go on but let me just say that it was the most masterful amalgamation of the philosophies of Sun Tzu, John D. Rockefeller and P.T. Barnum that has ever been actualized. So successful was the Plan that its elemental components have come to be the framework of the educational offerings of many of the nation’s University Business School. So extensively was the Tracy Business Plan put into use that in the modern world of business it is simply viewed
as Common Sense, to be disregarded at your own peril.
The number of our schools grew and they flourished across the country. At one point Fortune 500 reported that we had per capita more under 30 year old millionaires, some of them still in their teens, running Tracy Schools than any other industry in the world. But the wealth and opulence had it’s dark side. A few school owners were seduced by the easy money of allowing their school to be used as a pick up and drop off place for illicit drugs. The constant in and out foot traffic initially drew little suspicion from the police. At one point a couple of young school owners ran afoul of their criminal cohorts and were murdered, shotgunned to death in their own schools. The word immediately spread that Al Tracy had had them assassinated for not paying their Franchise fees on time. Although he had nothing to do with it Al was quite content to let that rumor stand. As he told me
“nobody has been late with their Franchise fees since then.” But the simple fact is that up to development of the Tracy Business Plan even the best instructors could not make a living teaching martial arts. The business plan changed all that.
Now then, the one aspect of the martial arts that Tracy’s did not dominate was in Tournament Competition. Tracy fighters were tough, but because we were entirely indoctrinated in the self-defense dogma, we found ourselves consistently disqualified. *** Insert story about Japanese dominance and judges and Parker’s Internationals opening it up to all styles *** So Al, never one to waste resources and energy reinventing the wheel when it is not necessary went out and hired the greatest fighter the world has ever known. So thoroughly did he dominate Tournament Competition that to the day he died whenever someone mentioned the “World Champion” everyone knew you were talking about Joe Lewis.
Joe came in and changed our fighting and training style such that we began to win in Tournaments. Our fighters became dominate and feared. And then, as if the fates could just not let history go by without adding what I call “The Tracy Touch”, Al and Joe developed the Checkered Gi. ***Give history***
At this point most people would say that Al Tracy had had an extraordinary lifetime of accomplishments. But Al Tracy was not finished.
With the advent of multi media, even before the Internet, Al began to make Kenpo course training available on video tape. For the first time people in remote locales with no Kenpo School anywhere near could learn the Tracy System. Instructional manuals, videos and later DVD’s were available for not only those without instructors but for all students to use to augment their learning. No longer did the student have to wait for their next lesson to ask their instructor a question. Martial arts instruction had taken another giant leap forward.
One would never know by looking at his desk, but Al Tracy had a very organized and orderly mind. He did not like details left unattended. He was very dissatisfied with the condition of our Kenpo historical lineage. We had always relied on stories, rumors, tall tails. Al wanted substance. In the early 90’s he enlisted, no less a personage that myself, to employ my investigative skills and experience, to get to the bottom of our history and establish the facts.
With the able assistance of one of my students and some old friends in Naval Intelligence and the CIA, I was able to obtain the myriad document that gave us the exact people and events that led to our Kenpo as we know it today.
At the time of his demise Al was planning an extensive historical offering in both a written book and audio and video. He also had plans to complete the circle by bringing into the system to be taught with the lethal Kenpo art, the non lethal Shoot Fighting techniques of Bart Vale as well as the Healing Arts of Professor Okazaki that I learned under the Great Professor Sig Kufferath. But the fates are not respecter of persons …no matter how grand or purposeful their plans. Grandmaster Al Tracy passed away on October 31, 2017, but his legacy lives on in every dojo that teaches with integrity, every instructor who puts the student first, and every black belt who understands that earning a belt is only the beginning of a lifelong commitment to learning and serving others.
This evening, as many of us reflect on a man we may never have had the privilege to meet personally, we have the opportunity to appreciate the extraordinary impact one individual can have on generations of martial artists. Grandmaster Al Tracy's greatest achievement was not simply building an organization—it was building people.
Ted Sumner, Judan, Tracy Kenpo
