This is a story of chance meetings and second chances, of love and honor, discipline and respect.
And taekwondo.
Asked to speak at a fitness convention in Longmont in 1999, Hung Tran, the owner of Tran’s Martial Arts & Fitness Center there, talked to the crowd forcefully.
“I spoke about how they can take action in their life, that they are never too old to do things,” Tran, now 37, recalled recently. “I told them I’d be willing to give a free membership for a year to anyone willing to take their life back.”
Soon, he had two new clients: a married couple, Tom and Barb Fletcher.
Both were hitting 50. Both were out of shape.
And both have been blind since birth.
Today, the Fletchers are working with Tran toward achieving their black belts. For now, Barb Fletcher sports a blue sash around her waist, two colors away from her goal.
Tom Fletcher, who wears red, is one color away. Both of them say taekwondo changed their lives.
“This is more than martial arts and being fit,” Tom Fletcher said. “You’re more calm about your surroundings and your world.”
The best part, his wife said, “is being able to feel safe and having a way of defending yourself. I think everybody should take some type of self-defense. You put on a confident air, hold your head up.”
They didn’t always feel that way.
Nor did their instructor.
“We came to this country in 1975, refugees from the Vietnam War,” Tran said of his family.
His father raised all five children as a single parent, working as a bagger at King Soopers near their home in Fort Collins.
The family lived on food stamps and in government housing, Tran said, and he often encountered hostility.
“I got picked on and beat up almost all my life in this country,” he said.
Then an older brother invited him to watch taekwondo. The brother had been taking classes from an instructor who taught him in exchange for him cleaning the school.
Soon, all five children, three boys and two girls, were taking classes, all in exchange for cleaning the school.
“That’s a gesture I remember to this day,” said Tran, whose siblings own four other locations of Tran’s Martial Arts & Fitness Center. “So we have a scholarship program.”
And that’s how he met the Fletchers.
His first day of class, Tom Fletcher recalls, “I literally got sick to my stomach. I walked out on the mat and thought, ‘What am I doing here?”‘
Growing up, he said, “I was very short, very timid,” and the object of scorn from some classmates.
He also struggled with a brutal reality: “I was a ward of the state and molested by a foster parent.”
Slowly, deliberately, Fletcher said, Tran worked with him and his wife, painstakingly maneuvering their hands, arms, feet and legs to form every move required to learn taekwondo.
“He’s so patient,” Barb Fletcher said, “and he teaches us step by step, and we go over it and over it. He has so much discipline and respect.”
The combination, they said, empowered them.
“As a child, I wouldn’t fight. I would just freeze,” Tom Fletcher said. “Now, I have enough confidence to do something, but I’ll do my best to make sure it doesn’t get to that point.”
The students are also teachers.
“I’m learning, too, as we go,” Tran said. For his advanced red belt, Tom Fletcher is required to run 2 miles in 20 minutes, Tran noted, so they are learning to run together using a tether.
“The best thing I’ve learned is patience,” Tran said. “They’re always positive. If I say, ‘No, you need to do it this way,’ they’ll smile at me. I can’t get frustrated with them.”
Others speak of that same energy.
“They’re always there with that positive attitude,” said Monica Hall, an instructor at the Longmont Tran’s location and owner of Active1 Self-Defense. Hall, 42, who has worked with the Fletchers at Tran’s in the past, said she considers them role models.
“They always have a smile, an encouraging word.”
Tran agreed that others can learn from the Fletchers.
“If those guys are willing to step out of their comfort zone and do things they are not comfortable with, none of us have an excuse.”
Staff writer Amy Herdy can be reached at 303-820-1752 or aherdy@denverpost.com.
