Calasanz Hosts Charity Kick-a-thon : Frank Dux Runs Seminar

 Back since the school's foundation we have always been involved in charity towards the community and other community efforts.  Now we run a clothing and goods donation within the school where we send items big or small directly to Calasanz' sister (Cipri) in the Dominican Republic where she supplies them to the farmers and the [much] less fortunate.

(You Can Donate Monetarily Here : Every Dollar Helps)

 

In the past Calasanz Physical Art would hold charity events like the 'Kick-A'-Thon' or the 'Train Like a Fighter for LLS' events.  At one such event one of our main instructors at the time, Frank Dux, was scheduled to hold several seminars over the course of the weekend at our dojo, our school, for treatment of muscular dystrophy.

So the story goes that ...

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A student and friend of Calasanz, Bill Smith, was helping to organize, plan, run and promote the event.  Bill, the great guy that he is, worked very hard on the event for us even knowing how Calasanz was, how Calasanz would just destroy money.  He would make money, but just destroyed it.  It came to a point that the school no longer had any money to destroy.  But Bill, Bill worked with the school anyways and he continued helping.

At that time Frank Dux was at our dojo regularly.  Calasanz says, "Remember, I was the guy who promoted Frank Dux.  He was looking for someone to promote him when he was very famous from the movie 'Blood Sport'.  Frank Dux knew that I was one of the biggest schools and had one of the most real schools of those times."  And it's true.  His name, Calasanz, was [and still is] recognized locally and internationally in the martial arts world long before Frank Dux came here.

It's not like today where you see a lot of real schools.  Now there are a lot of real schools all over the place since the UFC came out; but again my school is not just being real, its being complete.  Good Karate.  Good Kung Fu.  Good Energy.  Good Practical Approach.  You don't have to be a professional fighter over here.  It's the only school probably that has that, I don't know who else can do that.  We could do that and we've been doing that and we have many many names, we have hundreds of names of people coming through here who fought the pros, who could fight anyone, and many of them won."

And so... Frank Dux was here to do a seminar that we had promoted all over Connecticut.   There ended up being 70, 80, maybe 100 people here after spending over $50,000 dollars on promotion.  The school didn't even make 25% of the money back.  But again, that was Calasanz, destroying money.  How could he do something like that?  Well, at that time he was so into the passion and the love for Martial Art that the last thing he was doing was planning for anything, he just spent money.  He would tell his people, "Here, go to WeBe 108 with $10,000 dollars.  Make a deal for promotion." Sending them off with check in hand.

We were the first school to do the best commercials of martial arts without a doubt.  We even had commercials on Larry King Live.  We would spend for those commercials $7,000 or $8,000 to have the best martial arts commercials on television, if not the only martial arts commercials on television at the time.  So it came to the seminar, the event.  Jenifer Lee was there working with us.

"I was there but so focused all I could do was focus, not looking at anyone, focused on how I am going to portray my technique on Live T.V."

But What Happened with Frank Dux?

"It's a long story, it's a story that Frank Dux denies today, but at that point everything went wrong.  I tried to keep everything quiet but what went wrong was beyond belief.  Nobody put it together but me.  Look, after taking thousands and thousands of dollars, writing checks all over the place and to believe I could make that money back out of signing people... only I would think something like that.  So that seminar it was a disaster on the fact that Frank Dux left.  The next day he came back in the afternoon, everybody had been waiting for 3 hours or more...


Everything went wrong over there.  But Paco Prieto and all of the people there were enjoying themselves and there was I, Calasanz, trying to keep faith, to keep a face, to do what I
could.  The day of the second seminar all I could do was run the seminar myself, to perform.  But since I could ... it's not the thing I like to talk about but that anyone knew I could do 10 times what Frank Dux could do.  Besides he had such a conflicting schedule everybody started asking, "Calasanz, why don't you do the seminar yourself?"  Because I wanted to keep faith, everybody had been waiting.  Everybody asked me that.

"I respect Frank Dux and he is the best.  He is a very good guy and he is for real.  I respect that.  But yeah.. that I had more to offer back then than even him?  Yeah... Because I am a guy born with a gift.  Because I am devoted 24 hours.  So the second and third days it was mostly me doing the seminar, giving techniques, exercises, doing all this stuff with the people.  The people were ready and excited when Frank Dux finally came.  So the experience there with Frank Dux was not a thing anybody wants to experience but we did it and we had the event."

The Above is transcribed and developed from an Audio Recording of Calasanz

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While the intentions of the event were noble and high minded those most important and trust bearing duties were not fulfilled.  Although everybody involved put forward their best efforts, somehow the event fell to shreds. The relationship between Calasanz and Frank Dux is deeper than this and will be brought to light in due time in another entry.  Stay tuned.

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