Michael Dorgan, "No Fight, No Blame: A Journalist's Life in Martial Arts" (part 2)

Madison BookBeat

Part two of Stu Levitan’s conversation with his friend and former newspaper colleague Michael Dorgan, about his new book No Fight, No Blame: A Journalist’s Life in Martial Arts. It is an absorbing read about a fascinating life which both general readers and martial arts aficionados will enjoy.

And quite a life it has been in both those fields for Michael Dorgan, taking him from Richland Center Wisconsin to Beijing China as bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers and as a formal disciple to the most renowned Chinese internal martial artist of his generation, Hunyuan Taiji Grandmaster Feng Zhiqiang.

And there were some pretty interesting – and frequently dangerous – journalism stops along the way as well, in places like Islamabad, Singapore, Hong Kong. Thankfully, his only arrest as a journalist was during the strike against Madison Newspapers in late 1977, for kicking the door of a VW bug filled with scabs plowing through our picket line. That’s how I first knew Michael, as a colleague at the Capital Times and then the strike newspaper Madison Press Connection.

With the strike doomed, Michael headed to California. As a journalist, he rose to become assistant business editor and Pacific Rim correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News. As a martial artist, he turned away from the Okinawan karate he practiced at UW-Oshkosh and the Korean Tae Kwon Do he studied here with Master J. B. Chung and pursued various styles of the internal Chinese martial art Taiji, or for those who don’t speak Mandarin, Tai Chi.

Among his Taiji teachers in San Francisco in the early eighties, Master Wong Jack Man, whose secret fight in 1964 with the soon-to-be-famous Bruce Lee looms large in martial arts folklore, with lingering uncertainty as to what really happened. Reverting to his journalistic identity, Michael published a major magazine article detailing, for the first time, Man’s account of the fight, which was licensed and freely adapted for the 2016 film Birth of the Dragon.

In 1999, Michael moved to China to become the Beijing bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers, parent company of the Mercury News and at the time the world’s second-largest newspaper chain. That’s when he began studying with Grandmaster Feng – a practice that proved so important that in 2003 he took a leave of absence and remained in Beijing for a year and a half to train intensively with Grandmaster Feng and his disciple Master Chen Xiang. Which in turn caused a documentary about him to be filmed and broadcast on Chinese TV to a viewership of about 800 million. You’ll hear more about all this in a few moments.

Returning to California in late 2004, Michael returned to the Mercury News, as an editor in the business section. Until the business of newspapers got so bad that Michael left and devoted himself fulltime to his Hunyuan Martial Arts Academy of San Jose. An endeavor helped no doubt by Michael’s designation in 2007 as an honorary instructor at the Feng Zhiqiang Martial Arts Academy in Beijing.

Michael returned to journalism just this week, with a powerful opinion piece in the aforementioned Mercury News. Sadly, the headline tells a tragic tale: Cancer-drug shortage creates ‘death panels’ for patients like me. And the sub-head: I’m deemed expendable as a national scarcity of life-extending chemotherapy medications has resulted in rationing.

Because Michael has a mysterious metastatic cancer that has caused him to be cut, burned and poisoned with some progress but without a cure. So I’ve edited to tape to start with that part of our conversation, then we’ll roll it back for talk of martial arts in the Bay Area and China, then reflections on the newspaper strike, and some closing thoughts.

Here’s Michael Dorgan, author of No Fight, No Blame – A Journalist’s life in Martial Arts.