Natalie Sharp isn’t your typical black belt candidate. Born with bilateral phocomelia, she explains that her “arms are extremely short and I only have three fingers on each hand.”
Joshua Loya grew up in the 1980s, watching “Karate Kid”, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and dreaming of one day becoming a black belt. But Joshua was born with a high risk of retinal detachment and eye injury, making martial arts training out of the question. At age three he had already lost the sight in his right eye, and despite countless surgeries, Joshua went completely blind shortly after his sixteenth birthday.
It’s not uncommon for a person to get their start in martial arts because a parent pushed for them to take classes. In that way, Dan Kersten shares the beginning of his martial arts story with many others: he joined taekwondo in part because of his father. However, Kersten’s story diverges there.
It takes discipline, focus and motivation to manage martial arts training, a hit TV show, and a budding film career. Leo Howard worked to master all three.
It was the mid-1990s and Quinton Hooper was neck-deep in the customs and culture of Japan. As a college student teaching English in the tiny village of Nagato, Hooper had arrived expecting to simply instruct teenagers. What the native-Texan found, however, was a chance to learn right alongside them.
When Alec Brown was born, his parents noticed his legs bent oddly. Even when he began to walk, when he would stand he kept his legs bent at the knees as though crouching. It became apparent that he almost could not physically straighten them. When he was four years old, Shriners Hospitals for Children in St. Louis diagnosed Brown with cerebral palsy, a condition that affects the brain’s ability to control muscles.
Tori Lynn Andreozzi earned her black belt in karate at the age of 12. One of the highlights of her competitive career came when she was only nine years old, at the Quebec Open. She was excited to compete and mingle with other martial artists. When she was the first to present out of 52 in her division, she expected to be forgotten by the judges. It didn’t dim her attitude, though – she was just happy to be there.
