Do you think WKF ruined Karate?

Could you be more specific concerning your question. The WKF sprung from WUKO which I competed in along with NASKA. Back then they oversaw Pan AM and World Games competition in the sport of karate and were responsible for regulating and overseeing international competition. I am not sure how familiar you are with competition at that level but I can tell you that a good analogy is mediocre college football to professional football. Today this organization is very active in trying to get karate into the Olympics and I have several friends that have been very prominent in that effort.

The level of skill in forms, weapons, and fighting and the training required for being competitive at that level is quite high. Many of those that are successful at that level come from and have a strong traditional back-ground in martial arts and competing is just an extension that they have taken their training and attention towards.

Having competed at that level when I was younger I can walk into just about any local tounrament and beat 85% of the black-belts that are present in forms, weapons, or fighting today still. Keep in mind that we are talking about competitors who are mostly 10-40 years younger than me. I can also walk into a traditional dojo with high standards and do a number of traditional kata, weapons kata, as well as self-defense and fight their rules and gain a good measure of respect from those instructors present.

If you are asking if sport karate or sport oriented karate has ruined the art of karate I would say that many things are responsible for that rather than just one thing or one organization. To me that type of training and competing is really just an extension of martial arts in some ways. It does not mean that it has to be the only thing for a martial artist to train towards and do and all that they are capable of.

Having fought full contact before any of my days of competing in NASKA and WUKO I can tell you first hand that full contact and the training and approaches in it are not the same as sport karate or sports oriented type martial arts. You can say some things are the same or carry over but yet they are still vastly different. Nor is full contact the same as self-defense and what that involves and entails and your approaches with that but some aspects and things do and will still carry over.

To me if you let one dominate you and your training at the expense of another or all others then yes it will leave you deficient in those other aspects that I am referring to here. That's a personal choice or preference though and so I don't agree that sport oriented martial arts is solely responsible for the ruin of martial arts or karate. Nor do I equate that with the existence of an organization like the WKF which has and stresses a very strong background in some of these traditional aspects that we are talking about here.

Some of your strict traditionalists will argue otherwise about this of course. When they do I ask them if they still do everything now in their lives the way their parents did. Of course they don't but their thinking and approach is so rigid and inflexible as it applies to martial arts that they can't see beyond their own view and modify their approach and thinking about this is what I have found.