Loaded gun on the passenger seat, he steered the car like he steered his life. With resolve and grit at every turn. Dawn gleamed off the wet streets of Athens. It was midsummer and the city’s water trucks offered residents a cool start to their day.
He yearned for her endless touch. For her hair. For the reprieve in her big eyes. He had made peace with his burning passion for her.
He knew still, the days together, the days he longed for, the ones the Athenian dawn promised, were but a fool’s errand. For he was not a dreamer. Or a fool. He was a doer.
His name was Bill Zachopoulos—Master Bill.
He was my karate teacher.
I thought about Master Bill as I listened to firefighter Danny speak in the video below.
My karate teacher could’ve been a firefighter.
Danny—a black belt in martial arts.
I still remember the first day I walked through the dojo doors at 15, the mirrors on the left, the Athenian heat and the pride of being his student. Master Bill commanded respect. He demanded loyalty. He was built like a rock. There was a photo of him, at a demonstration, half a dozen or more students punching, kicking him at once. While he stood there.
Not a rock.
A mountain.
He didn’t feel pain.
Or did he?
I don’t know. I can only imagine Master Bill as I remember him.
And the love story—I learned of it after we parted.
His was the iron resolve, gripping the wheel—knuckles on top. He had punched through foe and brick and poverty alike, but his love for her, it had him pinned down.
His was but a shadow of his former self, boxing with the retreating night. Playing hide and seek with the memory of his beloved—22 years his junior, she had captured him entirely.
His gaze darted at the grenades by the gun.
The traffic light changed.
Victory would be his.
He was not used to defeat.
He’d last thrown a grenade in the military some 40 years earlier when he enlisted in the Hellenic Air Force. He was 17 then. The middle of six children.
The middle is the road most overlooked.
Two grenades. Two lovers’ hearts. To be detonated a little after 5AM. The ladder, strapped to the car top, rattled.
He parked in an empty lot. He didn’t flinch or wait, but stepped out. The morning breeze sang through his salty hair. But its sea-bound touch was never enough. He took a sip of water which like dew caught in his beard. He got busy unfastening the ladder.
He arrived in the US in the 60s with a zeal to learn martial arts. He fell in love with the form after his aunt sent him a martial arts magazine and a postcard. He was 14. The postcard he discarded, the magazine he kept close.
Once he arrived in upstate New York, he committed to his heart’s obsession. So he’d commute 43 miles to the dojo each day. The distance didn’t matter because he had done the hard part: he’d traveled from Athens to America. On his own. Like so many Greeks before him.
That summer morning, while he propped the ladder against her three-story family home, he wasn’t thinking about his time in America.
He wasn’t concerned about the karate empire he had single-handedly erected upon his return to Greece. He wasn’t thinking about his legacy.
He was thinking about her.
He called his style Okinawa Karate. He opened 120 schools across Greece. I’d met him. The man with the gun and grenades. I trained under him at his main dojo in Athens from ‘93 to ‘95.
How could I have known about his obsession with her. About what he would do in ‘98, three years after I saw him last, before I myself flew to America to pursue my obsession with the movies.
When he met her in 1990, he had been widowed, and was a single father of two children. But I didn’t know anything about his personal life. I knew everything about the legend he was—Master Bill—and that was enough for me.
After practice at the dojo in the evenings, mom put our kimonos to dry, mine was drenched in sweat and during cold weather it froze over.
We didn’t have a dryer.
But we had karate!
A year into training under Master Bill, I showed up with a buzz cut, and lots of skin on the sides. He pulled me into his office. I was shocked as he berated me:
“What would others think if they saw you train here looking like this? Like a skinhead.”
I had brought humiliation into his dojo.
Master Bill trained self-defense instructors for the Greek military academy, police, and gendarmerie. I saw how others treated him, and by proxy his influence on me grew. He was larger than life. He had become one of the most prominent and controversial figures in Greek martial arts history, holding a 10th Dan black belt in Karate and a 9th Dan in Ju-Jitsu.
To this day getting my black belt under Master Bill’s guidance is one of my proudest achievements. I was only 17. If I could get a black belt, I could do anything. It gave me the confidence to conquer Hollywood. (Pictures below.)
He dismounted the ladder, walked around the weathered car hood, opened the passenger door and picked up the gun and grenades. He turned and vanished into the new dawn. He didn’t lock the car.
None of the accolades mattered. None of the young boys his karate system had turned into confident, capable men were there to bear witness to his broken heart.
He was alone.
His pulse steadied as he readied for the fight of his life. Not in a dojo somewhere Greece or America, but in an unassuming suburb of Athens.
They had been apart for two years. He propped the ladder, climbed over the balcony and entered the house. He wasn’t after her. He would never hurt her.
He blamed her parents and brother for the breakup. They had turned her against him. She lived on the ground floor. The rest of the family—upstairs.
Was she there?
He didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
Her mother heard the balcony door force open and screamed: Βοήθεια! Help!
Her brother ran in, brandishing a knife.
The gun went off.
Wounding a sister’s keeper.
The two victims darted down the stairs. He gave a possessed chase.
Pulled the pin.
Threw a grenade.
It rolled.
Exploded in the house of memory. The family pictures on the wall shattered and fell.
Fragments injured her mother and brother. Fragments where children were once born and raised, in the hope to one day love, and be loved.
Police sirens blared below, lights mixing in with the Athenian dawn.
He threw the other grenade off the balcony.
Jumped.
Fired his gun at the police.
Ran to the parking lot. Euphoria lifted him up, while he ducked down by his car, waiting for the commotion to pass.
What were you feeling Master Bill, in those moments of self-reckoning?
What thoughts circled over you?
Like vultures picking at your heart.
He was spotted and tackled by a single policeman. Decades of martial arts evaporated in the heat of blind passion.
Handcuffed forever, his face reflected in the wet road, there, where his eyes finally met dusk disguised as dawn.
Master Bill was sentenced to 19 and a 1/2 years in prison. He died of a heart attack in 2003.
Rest in peace, sensei.
We’re not invincible!
We’re only human.
I share the story of my late karate teacher with many questions left unanswered.
How could a person with a legacy to be envied, commit a crime so shocking?
Did he confide in his friends about his heart’s desire?
The unattainable woman.
The love he never had—a grenade.
After the breakup, he had attempted to burn down the family shop and country home of his beloved. He posted derogatory fliers in her neighborhood. I have a hard time picturing my karate teacher, design, print and distribute such fliers.
I wonder if Master Bill could’ve benefited from therapy.
I write this with humility as I go through therapy myself. I’d been resistant for a very long time until recently.
How long can one wrestle dusks and dawns on their own?
Did he ever confess?
I didn’t know the man without the black belt.
Can we truly know another?
It’s up to us to open the door.
With my newest doc we opened a door, to talk about suicide and mental health in the fire service. To meet a culture where vulnerability has been historically a man’s Achilles heel.
Imagine walking into a dojo or a firehouse, telling your Alpha mates you’re in therapy.
You don’t.
You suffer silently.
Master Bill suffered so.
Only if someone had his back…
My mother, my sister, my wife, and my friends have mine.
Who has yours?
Bogdan
P.S. If you haven’t yet, check out Lance’s videos on Instagram here and get ready for some more Danny videos this week.
Next week, Clay has prepared a new article for you!
