I was over at Lion Books, which is a martial arts bookstore here in Taipei, and picked up a copy of a little brochure from the New Tang Dynasty Television Chinese Martial Arts forms competition.
One thing that immediately caught my eye was the prize money, $5,000 U.S. dollars for first place! I thought to myself, wow, kata competition is paying a lot better than it used to.
The comp seems to be a worldwide deal and the Taiwanese Asia Pacific Preliminary is August 2-3, 2008, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei. The American prelims are September 27, 2008, New York City.
So dust off all your old training routines and go for the Big Kata Bucks.
All the details, in english, are at:
martialarts.ntdtv.com/en/
Let me be quick to add, I know absolutely zero, zip, nada, about these folks or this comp. I picked up the brochure and looked at the website, that is the extent of my knowledge about it. I post it simply for amusement and information.
All this talk of kata comps makes me wonder if Eric Lee, the King of Kata, is still around. In his heyday he was spectacular.
Take care,
Brian