Perry Kicks Down Barriers to Achieve Goals : Taekwondo: Since he was 8, Santa Monica resident has excelled in martial arts. This weekend will mark his final competition.

By DAN REINES

Aug. 27, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

His right foot cuts a path through the air exactly chin-high.

“Jhaaaeeeee,” he howls, deep in concentration.

He ducks a kick and hops 180 degrees, spinning so that his left leg leads his body. He begins to sweep the left foot across his body at knee level, stops midway, then whirls around backward, whipping the foot past his opponent’s face in a reverse roundhouse kick. He doesn’t make contact, but you’re glad it’s not your face.

Again, “Jhaaaeeeee!”

The foot belongs to J.J. Perry, a 25-year-old Santa Monica resident and co-founder of Taekwondo West martial arts schools in Inglewood and Venice. Perry, a fourth-degree black belt in taekwondo, will compete in this weekend’s L.A. International Taekwondo Championships at Loyola Marymount’s Gersten Pavilion. He is sparring with a friend, demonstrating his skills but never touching his partner. Each fighter kicks, hops, ducks, and shouts, caught in a blurred cross-fire of feet.

With each kick, Perry shouts his initial, announcing his presence to his opponent. When he kicks twice, he shouts it twice, wailing and stretching the second ‘J,’ letting it reverberate around the room.

“That’s your spirit,” Perry explained. “When you hit somebody and you shout it, you’re like ‘Gotcha!’ You’re on them. If you get hit hard, you scream and it helps you regroup. It helps center things out.”

Perry knows about having to center things out, about being knocked on his butt and getting back up to fight. He’s been doing that all his life.

Born into a long line of fighters--”every man on my mother’s side of the family was a boxer”--Perry was expected to follow that tradition. But having been premature at birth, Perry was always a bit frail and was considered something of a sissy in his family.

“I’d get hit and I’d start crying,” Perry said. “But when it came time to kick, boy, I was first in line. I was down for it. I had kind of a knack for legwork.”

When he was 8, his mother, who was raising him alone, took him to Kwang Ha Suh, a retired Korean Marine who ran a karate school near their Houston home.

Perry’s mother couldn’t pay for her son’s lessons, so she made a deal with Suh. Perry would work for Suh, cleaning his school, and Suh would teach Perry karate. Suh also doubled as a baby-sitter for Perry, who would stay at the studio until his mother came to pick him up after work each evening at 8:30.

Suh became the male figure that had been missing from Perry’s life. The master taught his pupil about hard work and discipline, about honor and commitment. If Perry ditched his training to play stickball in the park, Suh would track him down and lead him by the ear back to the school.

“He really took me under his wing,” Perry said. “He was the one who pushed me, told me to study hard, kept me going. Sometimes I couldn’t afford to go to tournaments--my mom couldn’t afford it--so he’d pay.”

Perry proved to be a natural at karate, and later at taekwondo. He improved more quickly than the other kids who started at the same time. At 13, he was a junior national champion. At 16, he became the Texas State Champion competing in the adult division.

When he turned 18, Perry enlisted in the Army, inspired in part by his master’s military background. His sissy image long since behind him, Perry signed up to be a paratrooper (“I wanted to do the Rambo thing”) and, heeding Suh’s encouragement, requested that he be stationed in Seoul, Korea, the center of the taekwondo universe.

“I figured if you’re going to cook, you’ve got to go into the kitchen,” Perry said. “If you want to get better, you’ve got to go to where the world’s best are. And ultimately, the Koreans are the world’s best at taekwondo. There are no equivalents.”

With the help of a letter of recommendation Suh had written for him in Korean, Perry found a spot training with a top Korean team. But there was one problem: in order to get to the training center, Perry had to fight his way through hordes of angry Korean students who, in 1987 and ‘88, were vigorously protesting the American military presence in their country.

“We would ride the subways to where the universities were,” Perry said. “The universities were the center of the protests, but that was also the center where I trained with the Korean team. To get to training, you had to walk through there and you really can’t hide the fact that you’re American.

“I got a lot of ‘Yankee go home,’ and that sort of stuff. It was hard to take. We had a lot of altercations. It was kind of a pride thing. It wasn’t just for me, but it was kind of like they were chumping my country.”

But if the trip to the training center was tough for Perry, things didn’t let up when he got inside the school.

“I knew I had to get the Korean team’s respect,” Perry said. “So I figured the best thing to do was to get in there and bang with them and that’s what I did. For the first month, I’d go home every night all swollen up, with a steak on my eye.”

All the resistance worked in Perry’s favor and his skills improved dramatically. He won the All-Army taekwondo championship, then the All-Armed Forces title. In 1988, he earned the silver medal at the World Military Championships, losing only to the Korean champion in a match that ended in a 4-4 tie but was awarded to Perry’s opponent by the judges.

“We were in Korea,” Perry said, “so the audience was all for (my opponent). We were going blow for blow to the face. After it was over, they raised his hand and everybody cheered. But then he came and raised my hand too and everybody cheered even louder. I got the feeling I had gotten his respect.”

Perry has since gained the respect and the recognition of taekwondo fans across the country. The cowboy hat the 5-foot-11, 170-pound Texan wears into each fight for luck distinguishes him from his peers, as does his brash, showy style once he’s on the mat.

Perry fights like he’s playing blacktop basketball. He taunts his opponent, jeering him throughout the match (“Come on with that weak sauce! Come on!”) And when he knocks a man down he stands over him like Cassius Clay over Sonny Liston, pounding his chest and shouting his name so that the entire arena knows who’s winning.

According to James Choi, Perry’s friend and partner in Taekwondo West, all of Perry’s mind games make things easier during a match.

“He’s so smooth in the ring that he intimidates fighters without even hitting them,” Choi said. “They get distracted second-guessing themselves and suddenly he lowers the boom with some basic technique.

“Flamboyant. Devastating. A little bit cocky. That’s all J.J. You take him to any tournament in the United States and someone’ll recognize him.”

Perry hopes to parlay his charismatic ring persona into a career acting in martial arts films, which is why he moved to Los Angeles after his military commitment ended. In the meantime, though, he spends most of his time at his Inglewood school, training, teaching and working to repay what he considers to be a long-standing debt.

“I try to pay back (Suh) by teaching,” Perry said. “I see a lot of me in the kids that I teach. Especially in Inglewood, a lot of the kids can’t afford to pay for lessons, so we’ve got to make it affordable for them. Some of them have only one parent, some of them are neglected. I try to remember how my master was, to play that role that he played. I try to be like him.”

Perry keeps a photo of Suh hanging in the office of his Inglewood school, although he hasn’t seen his master since 1986. After Perry left for the Army, Suh retired from teaching and moved to his native Korea, taking up residence in a remote region south of Seoul.

But if Perry wins a gold medal this weekend, he also wins a trip to Korea to train with the Korean national team. Victory is by no means guaranteed--he’s scheduled to fight the world welterweight champion--but if he makes it to Seoul, he plans to find Suh and express his gratitude.

“I’m going to win me a ticket to go back to Korea,” Perry said. “I want to make (Suh) proud. I want to give him my gold medal. I always gave him my medals when I won. I figured everything I got I got from him, so that was my way to reward him. That was my way of saying ‘Thank you, master.’ ”

Today, Perry reflects on a life defined by the martial arts. He says that this weekend’s tournament will be his last, that he will stop competing so that he can concentrate full time on a film career. But he will never leave taekwondo, will never end the relationship he began with the sport 18 years ago as a fragile Houston child.

“I can’t remember not doing taekwondo, I’ve done it so long,” Perry said. “It’s my life, my bread and butter. I love taekwondo. I’ve found my own way, my own calling in taekwondo. . ..

“I can kick better than I can walk. It’s what I do naturally and I’ll do it the rest of my life.”