Count Dante, Mastermind or Mad Man?
by: Tracy Warrener
The Martial Arts have always been a platform which attracts so many different personalities. Some regular, everyday people and then there are others who stand out from the masses and are quite different… Count Dante from Chicago was one such person.
He was born John Keehan and was raised in a well off family from Chicago. During his high school years, John studied boxing and then later joined the Marines and Army where he learned martial arts. After studying with various instructors, he earned his black belt and went on to teach others. Keehan
really didn’t like the formal, traditional side of the martial arts and felt that it wasn’t realistic in a street self defence situation. So he created his own style of martial art and called it the Dan-te System. He was known to be a very colorful and an eccentric person and one who liked to brag and talk about his past fighting conquests. One such story he spoke of involved him allegedly participating in death matches in Thailand and China. In 1967, he
legally changed his name to Count Dante.
Count Dante was key in implementing Full Contact Tournaments in the United States. He was the director of United States Karate Association as well as in 1964 the founder of World Karate Federation. He became well known for taking out ads at the back of Comic books advertising himself as the Deadliest Man Alive and promoted his instructional book ‘Dance of Death’ and also promoting himself as an expert instructor of the famous ‘Dimak technique’. Aside from his world of martial arts, Dante was a hairdresser, and was known also for his criminal activity and affiliations.
Controversy and his eccentric nature was something that he became famous for. He was arrested and charged with attempted arson of a rival dojo, his ‘Black Dragon Fighting Society’ made headlines when he and some of his students went to another rival dojo and attacked the students which ended in the death of his friend.
There have been other crimes linked to him as well as his association with known criminals.
Count Dante was definitely one of the more evocative characters of the Martial Arts world during the 60’s and early ’70’s. It was almost as Hollywood itself wrote his fascinating story and he was the character developed for a cheesy kung fu movie. He was known as a skilled fighter and a good teacher in what he believed in. Dante died in 1975 at the age of 36yrs old from a a bleeding ulcer. For someone to be such a major influence on modern martial arts culture, develop a large following of students, and to be a fundamental role in the organizing of such full contact tournaments it takes someone who is both intelligent and charismatic. When you couple that with some of his more darker characteristics and affiliations, one may come to the conclusion that he was both a mastermind and a mad man. How ever you choose to view him, one thing is for sure he was truly a very unique individual.
