Dojo Wars
A karate power couple in 1960s Chicago battle for the soul of the sport — and try to save their own.
On the night of April 24, 1970, a historic karate brawl broke out in Chicago between senseis and students from rival dojos (karate centers). The fight was not for an audience or a trophy. No one had seen anything like it outside of the movies. One thing was certain: Not everyone was going to get out alive.
Editor’s Note: some names have been changed to protect privacy.
They were introduced as the Dragon Lady and Count Dante.
Christy Carter, a 22-year-old Playboy Club bunny, sat next to John Keehan, 29, one of the country’s best known martial artists, on the set of The Chicago Show, a local televised program, in 1968. Christy wore knee-high boots and a V-neck with trumpet sleeves, her hair styled in a Jackie Kennedy bouffant. John, or Count Dante, wore a silk nehru suit. He had curly dark hair, a villainous widow’s peak, and a neat goatee.
In front of Christy was a stack of planks. “Look, what’s this?” Asked Christy, pretending that she just noticed them. A newspaper reporter once described her “soft, pretty little hand” as looking like it had never touched a dish. Now she swiftly brought it down and chopped the boards in half.
The guests were promoting the art of karate, then spreading across America. In addition to touting Christy’s black belt skills, and John’s eclectic mastery of martial arts from around the world, they were advertising a no-holds-barred tournament.
Among the mobsters, entertainers, and revolutionaries who dazzled 1960s Chicago, the pair was unique. Martial arts had taken off in America, stoked by military veterans like John who brought training and interest from abroad. It was a so-called “progressive era” in the sport, according to karate historian Dr. Jerry Beasley, when Americans mixed fighting styles and developed their own. Chicago became the epicenter. The first World Karate Championship, which John helped organize, was held in their city. The next year, Elvis Presley chased away ruffians with karate in the film Roustabout. Karate was cool. So were Count Dante and the Dragon Lady.
“Christy is lovely to look at.…Don’t get fresh, tho, unless your next of kin has been notified,” wrote one Chicago Tribune columnist. She always had perfect tales for the press, like the time she was out walking her dog, sensed danger, and turned around to catch sight of a hulking goon coming toward her, spewing vulgarities. Few at the time comfortably frequented certain streets of Chicago after dark. But instead of running away, she charged until she stood steps from the man, looked up, and warned him: “You’re going to get it. I’m going to kill you.” He retreated, sulking back into Chicago’s shadows.
Knowing karate meant you walked around with a secret. “Karate is great for giving you confidence and courage,” Christy explained.
The Imperial Academy of Fighting Arts dojo represented by Christy and John was built on the idea that anyone could learn karate, and in the process gain self-assurance and a sense of belonging. In a time of national uncertainty, when traditional elitism wobbled, karate helped empower the underdogs of the world, not just physically but also psychologically. And John was nothing if not an underdog. But these better impulses of empowerment that fueled the movement competed with John’s deep desire to prove his detractors wrong by amassing wealth and power.
In the collision of ambitions, events would explode out of control. As Christy discovered the darkest secrets behind John’s plans for karate dominance and his unwillingness to let anything stop him, she would need to access a strength she never knew she had before it was too late for her and for Chicago’s karate scene.
Before karate entered her life, Christy was working at the Playboy Club when she came home one day to find a bouquet of roses. A card with gold print was only signed “Count Dante.” Who the hell is Count Dante?
Christy had only interviewed at the Playboy Club as a bet. But when she was offered a job on the spot, she accepted. Though cocktail bars were not her scene, the job meant belonging to something new and exciting, in this case the first Playboy Club in the country. She had been floundering. Although she was a good student in high school, her supportive working-class father didn’t push her toward continuing her education. She drifted without a plan besides the vague goal of getting married that had been passed down to her like a pair of earrings. Growing up, she was taught to value her looks above all else, particularly after her mother abandoned the family when Christy was 12.
“I literally needed to belong to something,” she recalled of starting at the Playboy Club.
Still, the role as a club bunny also left her feeling anxious and exposed. “I was always so nervous coming down the stairs… knowing they were waiting for me,” said Christy. She was tall, nearly six feet in heels, and although she never thought she was good looking, the rest of the world seemed to. She looked intimidating to the customers in her black corset, and in turn their stares daunted her. “I was never smiling because I was always terrified.” Customers weren’t allowed to touch, but they made up for that limitation with constant propositions. She discovered a talent for billiards, which became a shield for her insecurities.
Then came the mystery card and roses. The context for that bouquet had actually begun under a disco light in a high school auditorium years before. When Christy was a senior, a dashing family acquaintance named John Keehan, then in his early twenties, asked her to the prom. But he never showed up for the dance. This hurt. She had been especially vulnerable due to the trauma of her mother’s abandonment.
Christy didn’t hear from John for years after that, during which time he had transformed. He announced that he rediscovered his ancestry, namely his mother’s aristocratic family, the Dantes, who fled Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. He began wearing a cape and painted a Dante family crest on his brown Cadillac.
Christy figured out it was John who sent the flowers under his new moniker, Count Dante. When they finally reconnected, he explained he wanted to spend his life making up for that missed prom. Maybe she had found someone who really appreciated her, while at the same time he fulfilled her deeper personal fantasy that abandonment would be followed by a remorseful return. They hit up Chicago’s nightlife together. Unlike men at the Playboy Club, John wasn’t just interested in her looks; in fact, he was equally interested in his own. “He liked being scary,” Christy recalls. “But he also liked being beautiful.” He slept on a silk pillowcase so he wouldn’t get wrinkles. He often wore makeup. And she would help him shave intricate edges into his beard, dyed black from its original auburn tint.
They were regulars on Chicago’s famed Rush Street, where, during the day, John walked his pet lion cub. “It was the scene to see and be seen,” said Christy. The guys had perms, wore bell bottoms, and sunglasses at night. The girls had short skirts and low tops. “Everyone was showing off.” They would bounce from club to club, under neon lights, among gangsters and wannabes, ending up at a diner listening to Dean Martin from a jukebox and drinking coffee until the sun came up.
In the years since the missed prom, John had devoted himself to a variety of passions, including hairdressing. He opened a salon called the House of Dante. But more than anything, he threw himself into his karate. His exploration in Eastern fighting techniques began with studying Hapkido, Tang Soo Do, and Thai boxing while in the army. As a civilian, he spent much of the sixties traveling to different dojos, including training for months at Robert Trias’s Phoenix karate dojo — the first in the nation to take students. Trias looked every bit the former navy man that he was. Heavy built with a soldier’s crew cut, he taught with gravity and a respect for traditions he absorbed while stationed in Asia.
Now that John settled back in Chicago, he began opening dojos — three locations by 1969 — under the name Imperial Academy of Fighting Arts. These included a space above the famed Mister Kelly’s; the club which launched the careers of entertainers including Barbra Streisand and Richard Pryor. John lived there and Christy soon moved in, too, sharing a fold-out couch. She began learning karate. She thought the smooth motions of the martial art were beautiful, like dancing, and she took to it quickly. John gave her the sobriquet “the Dragon Lady,” a term sometimes problematically applied to Asian women to emphasize their exoticism, in this case applied to Christy (who was not Asian), while inadvertently capturing a vivacity that lay beneath her shy exterior.
Christy went to work at Imperial, crossing paths with famous star clientele including soul legend Curtis Mayfield, who trained with John. She would sign up new students while stepping over spilled sand from a kiddie pool repurposed as a litter box for Aurelia, the lion cub. The lion was sold after biting Wes Olson, mayor of Quincy, Illinois, during a photo shoot.
Karate dojos during this formative time were a far cry from today’s strip-mall inhabiting, child safe spaces. Students were usually adults seeking practical tactics to defend themselves. In a dojo on the South Side, you could find gang members training alongside cops. And the lessons were rough.
Christy gradually became a face of the brand, and her presence softened the dojo’s image. When she and John made their joint appearance on The Chicago Show, audiences loved her. The producers even offered her a regular slot, which she turned down. By demonstrating her new martial arts skills, she proved that karate could change the lives of the least expected students. She saw those from different backgrounds pulled into the practice serendipitously, finding each other at the dojo as though by cosmic chance. How could she explain a sport developed in Okinawa making its way to the streets of Chicago and binding together talented bruisers and outcasts alike? She believed the plan of the universe was like that — mysterious and flawless. There was also a more subtle message embodied by Christy: Everyone was welcome, and everyone had the potential to change themselves. Society or relatives could abandon you but karate never would.
One man influenced by John’s teaching was Jim Koncivic, a talented karateka (or karate practitioner) in his mid-twenties. The rising star was a scrapper with a youthful face that was still free of lines or scars. Koncivic looked up to John. He even resembled him, after growing a black goatee. Koncivic’s peers loved his humble levity that he combined with such aptitude for karate. Meanwhile, during a time of extreme racial tension, John liked to publicize his promotion of Black students to black belt, something he felt not every sensei, or karate master, was keen to do. Although the extent to which he surpassed others in equitable training is debated, his lasting impact on some of the most talented Black students in karate’s early American history is undeniable. For example, he trained Jimmy Jones, who became an accomplished fighter, and Jones in turn trained a young Chicago transplant named Eddie Baker. Baker and his brothers trained generations of fighters in the Midwest.
The venture’s finances were never rock solid, but the dojo gained dedicated students and followers. John really wanted the public at large to be on board, and he pushed Christy to help him realize that goal. He believed in a rawer form of martial arts than what was widely practiced: gladiators in a modern day Coliseum that would attract thousands of roaring fans. Conventional karate was judged using a point system where a combatant scored if they came close to a target area. John despised this scorekeeping as meaningless pageantry.
At one point, John advertised a full-contact tournament, which would provide a showcase for the entertainment that hard-edged karate could provide, as well as give a variety of practitioners exposure. John hatched a plan for another draw for the general public to attend: a death match between a karateka and a bull. In the 1950s, Japanese karate pioneer Mas Oyama had reportedly punched out dozens of bulls to audiences’ glee. John wanted to bring that energy stateside. He knew just the bullfighter.
Arthur Rapkin, a teenage karate newbie at the time, said he and John were both “people of crazy ideas.” Rapkin had an act impersonating Bob Dylan. He had traveled to Chicago after being kicked out of his Wisconsin dojo for brawling. John sent him down to Phoenix to train with his old teacher, where Rapkin would spar with the dojo’s chimpanzee. Back in Chicago, when John presented the idea of fighting a bull, Rapkin thought it was a great idea. Like Christy before him, the dojo allowed Rapkin to feel like he could stand out from the crowd and be seen as special. “I was being acknowledged,” said Rapkin.
Rapkin trained while John drove the bull — a massive Brahman which weighed around 2,000 pounds — around town on the back of a flatbed truck for advertisement. But the match was shut down when authorities determined it violated anti-bullfighting laws.
Christy continued to embrace her local celebrity in the role of the mysterious Dragon Lady, even leaving the Playboy Club to focus on her work at the dojo, while John expanded plans for innovative new tournaments. He next organized a full-contact, mixed-form competition called The World Fighting Arts Championship. Here a boxer might fight a karateka or a judoist or a street brawler. “UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] is what John Keehan was talking about. He was just ahead of his time,” Rapkin now says about the matches.
Christy made the rounds to trumpet the event, but subtly pushed against John’s tendency to emphasize violence. “No holds will be barred and although we don’t expect bloodshed, we want each match to end decisively,” she told the Chicago Tribune, thinking big. “We’ve issued personal challenges to [Muhammad Ali]. We’re going to march on his house. Just for fun. We really think he might want to participate.” The exiled boxer didn’t end up attending. Neither did Bruce Lee, who was also invited.
Christy socialized among the crowd of fighters and spectators, trying to raise attendees’ spirits, but nothing went as planned. Turnout was poor. And then, along with the rest of the crowd in the Chicago Coliseum, she watched as a karateka tried to break a 500-pound block of ice with his hand during an expo. It would have been a standard feat, but it was unseasonably hot that day. The ice was melting, glazing over the outside, making it harder to break. The karateka kept trying as the crowd sweated and spectators stood up to leave.
As the tournament fell apart before her eyes, Christy was witnessing another downward spiral. John was not a man who could accept defeat and regroup. He became discontent trying to chip away at the public’s acceptance of martial arts. He demanded instant success.
On this day, John had collected a fraction of what he expected in tickets. He pulled Rapkin aside during the tournament and told him to take the box office collection to the bank. “But the thing is that I don’t want you to make it to the deposit box,” said John. “You’re going to get robbed.” This way, by John’s logic, they had an airtight excuse not to pay for leasing the tournament space, or for payments they owed to vendors and participants; they would pocket it all for themselves. Success was success, even if manufactured. The Bob Dylan impersonator did as he was told. “I was the guy that followed my sensei’s wishes,” said Rapkin.
Amid her efforts at schmoozing the karate crowd, John confided the details of the fake robbery to Christy. It was a glimpse into a dangerous side of John. In learning about the robbery, Christy had a choice to make. She could step away from it all or look the other way. To give up on John meant throwing away what had become a support system — something upon which she depended. Maybe John’s decision was a temporary misstep made out of frustration, something overshadowed by the good martial arts could bring into people’s lives. She promised him she would not tell anyone.
Tournaments were not the only platform for making Count Dante’s face known around the country. John also unleashed a brilliant marketing idea: mail order karate. The concept was one of the first of its kind. John took out ads in comic books and boxing magazines: “Deadliest Man Alive… The World’s DEADLIEST FIGHTING SECRETS Can Be Yours.” It had a picture of John in a black gi, manicured beard, devilish eyebrows, holding his hands ready to strike. John, the “Deadliest Man Alive,” offered his fighting knowledge plus a membership in his Black Dragon Fighting Society for five dollars.
One photo showed John in a white turtleneck and sports jacket, his hands gently framing Christy’s face as she sits in front of him with legs crossed wearing an elegant white dress. The caption read: “The ultimate paradox. The same hands that crushed the bricks on the preceding page designed this natural, but seductive look in the coiffure and make up of this top Chicago model and Playboy Bunny.” The National Informer ran a front page story on him in 1968 titled “The World’s Deadliest Fighter Is A… Hairdresser!”
The mail order marketing reportedly made millions.
With their complementary skills, Christy and John appeared poised to remain the power couple of Chicago karate, overlooking a martial arts themed fantasia while raking in money and admiration. Their relationship also strengthened. They were trying to start a family. Christy no longer had to wish she fit in somewhere. She belonged with John and the karate kinship around her. In her unique, if highly eccentric, role, nobody could say she was just a pretty face. She showed off a flair for promotion that winked with self aware humor, and a business savvy.
If she had managed to compartmentalize John’s staged robbery, Christy had underestimated one of the core motivations behind it — the absolute refusal to lose, even if it meant cheating — and how it would continue to resurface with a vengeance. She saw value in karate and how it helped those at the Imperial Academy of Fighting Arts. But that value was not enough for John. He also had to one-up other Chicago dojos. If any other dojo surpassed their success, it seemed, he felt he would turn from Count Dante back into a forgettable everyman.
There were at least a couple dozen dojos in the city at the time, from various YMCA startups to the more colorfully themed shops that rivaled John’s Back Dragon Society. For example, a series of academies under the same ownership advertised a connection to the Green Dragon Society, tracing roots to ancient Chinese practices. John had lost a couple students to the Green Dragon Society, according to Rapkin, and likely held it against them.
There was a camaraderie between many of the different schools and senseis. But on some occasions, especially when John was involved, a simmering competition boiled over.
“We were known as the bad boys of karate,” said a karateka from that time named Rico Paone about the Chicago martial arts scene. “And it was true.” If a member of one dojo visited another, John could be counted on to take rivalries to the next level. One night while drunk, John and a fellow instructor decided to remind the sensei of the Chicago Judo and Karate Center that he owed them money for a tournament. Police showed up as John was trying to ignite the fuse of a dynamite blasting cap at the dojo’s front door. The police chased John and his collaborator down a dead-end alley, where they tossed a dozen detonators from the car. John was charged with attempted arson, possession of explosives, and resisting arrest.
Many in the community were appalled by John’s tactics as well as his ambitions to hold full-contact fights that would draw blood. Dojos around the country refused to send their students to compete. “Karatekas who will support and engage in this type of fiasco are so desperately seeking to destroy and undermine the true ethics and spirit of karate-do,” Robert Trias, John’s former sensei, told Black Belt about the Chicago tournaments. John got kicked out of Trias’s United States Karate Association a few years prior, turning master against student. John, in turn, insisted that his bad blood with Trias was because of him awarding black belts to Black students.
The managing editor of Black Belt, D. David Dreis, finally organized a parley with John and other Chicago martial artists. Dreis’s magazine, perhaps the most respected publication of its type, had banned coverage of John’s competitions and in turn most of theChicago karate scene. The meeting was at the Essex Inn. Over the summer, the sounds of police and anti-war protesters clashing at the Democratic National Convention had reached the hotel’s stately lobby. It was the first time Christy had seen so many of those in the contentious Chicago karate scene in one place. It made rifts in the community seem bridgeable.
John was on the defensive so much of the night that the meeting later would be dubbed “The Trial of Count Dante.” John insisted his approach to karate was one that stressed authenticity. “The streets are where you learn whether or not you can fight, not in tournaments where they pull their punches,” John explained to the room. “My people know their karate and they know how to kill, if necessary.” John would not budge, and the other attendees, although conceding to some value he brought to the practice, were fed up with the bad publicity he brought to karate in Chicago. Christy held firm in defending John during and after the meeting. “I object most vehemently to your obvious disdain of Count Dante,” Christy would respond to one critic. “You very effectively omitted…many of the good points regarding Mr. Dante’s efforts to spread karate throughout the Midwest area and deleted none of the ‘shenanigans.’”
A perfect storm had gathered over Christy’s world. The Essex Inn meeting did not clear the air in the community as intended. A cornered John became even more dangerous. Instead of a truce, John’s insistence on a violent trajectory for Chicago karate put his foes on high alert to prepare for potential violence. John became increasingly erratic and paranoid. Everyone was a potential enemy, particularly those pushing to stifle his powers.
That category suddenly included Christy. John began to see her as another threat, and Christy felt herself become a target. Despite her demonstrations of her karate abilities, the fact was her fighting skills were largely an illusion, one of many perpetuated by John. “I was a front,” Christy explained about her role at the dojo. “I was the face.”
Christy had been learning karate, but John insisted on exaggerating her skills as the Dragon Lady. When they shared the appearance on The Chicago Show, the local television talk show, and Christy broke the pile of wooden boards with a forceful karate chop, the boards actually had been split beforehand and reglued to make them weaker. She had been wearing rings on every finger that night. For the rest of the interview, she remained playful and charming, but out of view of the camera she cradled her hand as her fingers swelled. It was emblematic of the split between her outward image and internal wounds.
“I was something that was manufactured in John’s imagination,” Christy recalled. His nickname for her was Dulcinea, as in Dulcinea del Toboso from Don Quixote. In the novel, Dulcinea is a model of female perfection that Don Quixote invents.
For so long, it had felt natural to go along with the performative aspects of the Dragon Lady because John’s own persona was piled high with inventions. The claim that his mother’s family were aristocratic Spanish refugees was dubious. Christy knew his family to be as Irish-American as they come. The name Dante, which he used to elevate himself as far above Chicago as possible, may well have come from a street where he grew up.
Christy knew she was carrying on a persona, but that semitheatrical role had helped genuinely entertain and inspire followers of the Imperial dojo. On one level, she had merely traded her bunny suit for a gi, still donning a costume imposed by a man. John’s psychological relationship to his character was very different. To say he was committed would be an understatement. Putting it in contemporary terms, it was as though a WWE fighter went to sleep and woke up believing he was the character that had been scripted out for him in the ring. In his mind, John really was the Deadliest Man Alive. And marketing ploys aside, he really did plant bombs and brawl in the streets.
Christy had envisioned a life for them in which John’s ability to dream big was embraced while his penchants for spectacle and violence were held in check. She imagined a dojo that stuck with the character building sides of karate, helping people left out of society find a place, even envisioning her own future children in the corner patiently learning kata.
But as the Dragon Lady took on a life of her own, the paranoid sensei felt his own stature weakening. Christy was the center of attention when they walked in a room, not just because of her looks, but also because of genuine star power. That took attention from John, who was jealous. When Christy was offered the slot by producers of The Chicago Show after their joint appearance, he stewed. The offer, he thought, should have gone to him.
John became psychologically and physically abusive. Fueling his manic anger with drugs, he pointed a gun at Christy and hissed: “If you tell anyone what goes on here you’re dead.” It was not only the staged robbery and the other tactics that had crossed legal lines that Christy knew about. Far more of an existential threat, she knew who he really was. “He could have become the greatest martial artist in the world,” Christy said. “But John Timothy Keehan was a nobody. Count Dante was somebody.” He would rather kill than let his persona be stripped away by giving in to Christy or competing dojos.
Across Chicago, martial arts students stood in a ready stance on padded mats and hard floors. They practiced strikes and kicks, the sounds of their efforts echoing off the bare walls of gymnasiums. Jim Koncivic prepared for action, grabbing beers with John after training, eyes scanning dark pubs for potential threats. Fighters of the Green Dragon Society, meanwhile, swung blades and thrusted spears into the air in training sessions.
John, meanwhile, used his training against Christy, to control her and bend her to his will. The manipulation and abuse grew worse. Christy felt trapped, and she was in the worst possible position. The outside world believed she was a master fighter, but behind closed doors she could not physically defend herself against John, who had stockpiled fighting techniques from around the world. “Women are murdered every day,” she explained. “And many women are in prison for murdering their men.” At one point, she wandered Chicago and ended up at the house where her mother, who had abandoned her so many years ago, lived. With nowhere else to go for the night, she slept on the porch. Knowing he could search for her, she inevitably would go back to him.
After that night, something felt different to Christy. She returned to John, but the constant fear — of abandonment, of not belonging, even of her physical safety — was gone. The next morning, he ordered her to make breakfast. She went into the kitchen and began frying bacon. She looked down at the sizzling fat and thought of John’s preciously manicured beard and that “pretty” face that had turned ugly, even monstrous, toward her — as when it glared over the top of a pistol. She picked up the pan, walked over to her sensei and slung the boiling grease toward him. John, moving as fast as she knew he could, dodged the scalding oil. When he looked at her he had something in his eyes that Christy recognized: bloodthirsty excitement. Christy grabbed a kitchen knife to ward him off. He lunged, slicing his arm on the blade. He didn’t look excited anymore. He looked scared.
In that showdown she was no longer his illusion. She was dangerous. John Keehan wasn’t defeated by a so-called Death Touch, but rather by a confidence he could only envy. “He knew that I wasn’t going to take it anymore,” Christy remembered. “It was at that point he realized he didn’t have any control over me.”
All the while, rival Chicago dojos remained on a collision course. Exacerbating all of it, Count Dante without his Dragon Lady by his side was unmoored, having one fewer reason to operate within any rules. It was only a matter of time before it all came to a head.
What specifically sparked the infamous, unprecedented confrontation between John’s crew and the Green Dragons that unfolded on April 24, 1970, at the Black Cobra Hall is still debated: It may have been a feud over students, or an attempted extortion. What is known is that John rounded up a group of devotees and, in a bizarre gesture at fair play, called up the Green Dragons to let them know they were coming to the Black Cobra Hall, where the Green Dragons trained. The space was located in a nondescript one-floor storefront. But inside it resembled some kind of medieval lair. On the walls were various weapons: a pair of guandaos, a Chinese pole with long shafts and curving flat blades, a spear, nunchucks, a mace and an ax.
On John’s side was Jim Koncivic, his talented 26-year-old protege now running a dojo of his own, and three of Koncivic’s students. At the door, John presented an Indiana sheriff’s badge — the reason for this remains unclear — and the group burst into the dojo. There, they faced a couple dozen Green Dragon students and allies.
John faced a moment of truth in the small space that was losing light with a dropping sun. If he had any chance to live up to the more noble ideals of karate to improve and empower people’s lives — something Christy had always applauded — this was it. He could pick up the mantle of using karate to bring people together in a society filled with biases and unfair advantages. But he chose the path of deploying karate to tear people apart. He had truly become Count Dante, the villain he had invented.
The door slammed, closing the combatants inside. One fighter with a blade lunged while most of the students bolted for the back exit. Those who remained went into their stances, grabbed weapons off the wall and charged. John landed a debilitating blow to the face of one young karateka(with a mace, or nunchuck, or his fingers as he tried plucking out his eye, depending on who told the story). But there was an especially fierce focus on Jim Koncivic. His body poured blood from slashes and stab wounds. Koncivic’s students, realizing he was in serious danger, kicked open the front door. As Koncivic stumbled outside, clothes soaked in blood, a Green Dragon member hurled a spear, puncturing his throat.
The next morning the Chicago Sun-Times ran the headline “Rival karate clubs fight on N.W. Side; one killed” and the Chicago Tribune’s read “Karate School Feud Flares.” The Green Dragon member struck in the face by John had to be hospitalized to save his right eye. Devotees of John who had found an important part of their identities at the Imperial Academy of Fighting Arts were heartbroken to see where it had all ended up. Koncivic, John’s earnest and well-meaning pupil and lookalike, was dead, a morbid symbol of the better parts of John Keehan that died that night.
The papers labeled the tragic events the “Dojo War.” Instead of heroes, it left mourners, like Koncivic’s mother, who would also lose her husband almost exactly a year later. She lived in a condo across the street from their graves and, according to family, would walk through the cemetery to get anywhere worth going. John was charged with aggravated battery and Koncivic’s murder under Chicago’s Accountability Statute. A member of the Green Dragon Society side was also charged with killing Koncivic. The judge could not fathom the details of a brawl with medieval weaponry, and fighters from both sides could not control their machismo in court. “You’re each as guilty as the other,” the judge said at sentencing. As though acknowledging that justice was impossible in the morass of Chicago karate, he dismissed all charges for everyone.
Christy followed the events as they unfolded, John having finally gained a public stage that could not be ignored. The Dojo War was everything she feared John was capable of; all the darkest scenarios of John’s training coming true. Had she not escaped John’s orbit, she thought she could have ended up dead like Koncivic. Even more directly by John’s hand, she could have been one of those bleeding out on the sidewalk or lying in a hospital bed praying to survive. Her own showdown with John had likely saved her life.
In the summer of 1975, the phone rang at Christy’s desk in the real estate office where she now worked, a world away from her life a few years before. The previous night, there was a ferocious storm: gutters flooded, lightning glared off windows. On the phone was John’s ex-wife, whom he married after Christy left. The two had struck up an unlikely friendship. “You’re not going to believe this,” the woman said. Christy thought of the storm. “Are you sitting down? John’s dead.”
Christy found herself calling the funeral home to confirm John was dead and even thought about going down to see his body. It would not be beyond him to fake his own death. But it was true; he died at age 36 due to an internal hemorrhage of a perforated ulcer. John had become embroiled in more troubles over the years, including a heist that involved the mafia, as well as continuing controversial and dangerous martial arts tournaments. At the time of his death, he had been holed up at his home, paralyzed with fear that he would be murdered. “There’s no question that someone took a hit out on him,” said Christy, although it has never been proven his death was unnatural. The killers could have been from the mob or even, she heard, a member of Jim Koncivic’s family, who never forgave John for the Dojo War. Karate lore has suggested a skilled rival killed him with the dim mak, or “The Death Touch,” of which John liked to advertise his knowledge — the same move that some blame for Bruce Lee’s untimely death.
Decades later, looking back at John and their relationship, Christy remembers his tragic flaws. “When you’re involved with someone like John, you want to make it better. You want to make him perfect and whole.” Before his rapid descent, he was skilled, intelligent, and charismatic. But inside he turned out to be rotting. She thought it fitting how he spent the last days of his life; paranoid to be on the receiving end of violence.
In the end, what was illusion and what was real hardly mattered to those who had been caught in his matrix and made it out. John’s early students and acolytes have had a lasting and more positive impact, like Eddie Baker, who today claims to run the country’s oldest Black-owned dojo. Some theorize that John’s exploits would end up inspiring the Cobra Kai dojo in 1984’s original Karate Kid, led by an unstable sensei, John Kreese, whose name echoed John Keehan. The fictional sensei sought power for its own sake; in addition to power, the real sensei sought a new identity and would rather die and destroy than fall short of his dreams.
The Dragon Lady, to the extent she had ever existed, was frozen in that wild and deadly time, a moment the likes of which would never be seen again. She had epitomized the lure of martial arts in an era in which women were increasingly empowered politically but continued to be demeaned, harassed, and underestimated. Christy’s fighting prowess was partially fantasy, but it showcased real confidence and strength, which she had unleashed to survive.
“I have a tremendous respect for the martial arts,” says Christy. “I’m one that believes the universe is flawless.” She wishes she had stuck with it. Her neighbor’s daughter is enrolled in karate and she watched the young girl practicing kata recently, filled with a quiet determination, a growing secret.
JUSTIN HIGGINBOTTOM is a print and radio journalist living in the Mountain West. He has reported on culture and conflict across the U.S., Asia and the Middle East.
