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Count Dante: The Deadliest Man Alive!

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gematriot:
From Phil Elmore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvnRahGFZSg&


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A little more on Dante here -
http://hockscombatforum.com/index.php/topic,2493.0.html

JimH:
Wow the Count relegated to the list of Unsecret lives of Walter Mitty ?

Keegan was a real martial artists who did push the boundries of the Arts,Did Gain Recognition for the Arts and did teach People who were non white in Chicago in the 1960's when this was unfavorable.

Keegan held competitions that did indeed have full contact,with No Gear,(there really was no gear used then anyway),and these competitions did turn out to be human blood baths.

Jhoon Rhee was a regular at these competitions and liked the concept of the bouts,but even he said it was too bloody.
This started Master Rhee on the quest to develop protective gear which would allow full contact matches as he witnessed at Keegan's bouts.
Jhoon Rhee also brought Bruce Lee to at least one of the Counts competitions.

The Count was extreme but he was the Real Deal who believed in the effectiveness of the arts usage on the street rather than just in the dojo or in competitions in which points and pulled punches were the norm over full contact tests of skill.

Joe Hubbard:
Count Dante was a “made up” character with a “made up” false background in order to market and create a mystique for Karate man John Keehan. 

Keehan was an Irish-American who was born and bred in Chicago.  Later in life he changed his name to Count Dante.  The back story he used to acquire students was that his heritage was of Spanish nobility claiming his parents fled to America seeking refuge after the Spanish Civil War; he then used this twist to create a comic book type of character: The Deadliest Man Alive!

He may have had some great Karate skills and contributed some decent stuff to the existing martial arts scene, but the background he was claiming was all bull shit.   He also used this Spanish royalty mask to make his students believe that he was constantly under threat of assasaination- more bull shit.

Again, another example of someone who possessed some decent skills, but lied about his background to stand out from all the others just relying on hard work.  Not dissimilar to:
-   Wagner
-   Spour
-   Short
-   Larkin
-   Peterson
-   Webb
-   Aisik

Joe Hubbard:
According to Massad Ayoob in his book "The Truth About Self-Protection" :

"The Count's disciples, who tended to come from a hard core criminal word, used it (a previously described technique) frequently. They left some people blind out there but were never injured themselves... Under such circumstances self-defense techniques tend to become refined very quickly - necessity being the mother of invention - there being no room for error. There are no recorded instances of Dante's people complaining that something didn't work, so we must assume that they were well satisfied that what he taught worked.

He was supposed to have had a tough vetting process in order to study with him (to weed out the assasains LOL), but he didn’t care about teaching criminals.

Joe

Joe Hubbard:
Another confabulation of Dante's was claiming he walked up to Ali's house and challenged him to a fight.  When Ali's trainer was interviewed and asked this question he replied by stating that Dante was obvious hallucinating because this never happened.  Dante used this story at the center of his marketing.

http://thesearchforcountdante.com/html/TrailerDundeeplay1x.htm

Joe

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