Sensei of the Grove

Carol White is four years old and kneeling in front of her grandmother’s little black-and-white television set when destiny comes calling: She’s watching the old-school Adam West Batman show when, amidst the usual steady stream of puns and POW!s and BAM!s and ZAP!s and KER-PLOP!s, the Green Hornet’s sidekick Kato bursts onto the screen looking like…well, anything but a sidekick. Portrayed by none other than a going-for-broke Bruce Lee, Kato delivers a focused and intentional whirlwind of limbs that is as elegant and beautiful as it is commanding.  

For White, everything changes. She discovers her father was a martial artist and amateur boxer—and his pair of nunchucks under his bed. “I wanted to do what Bruce Lee and my dad did,” White tells AQUA Miami. “At first my parents didn’t take it seriously, but I just kept running around the house punching and kicking everything until they were like, ‘Okay, we need to find a school.’ Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” 

She was six years old and the only girl when her parents scraped together the money to enroll her in a martial arts program at the YMCA. The class didn’t even have mats, but she took to it. Less than a decade later, White had earned black belts in Hapkido and Taekwondo.  

As White’s inspirational north star Lee once said, “If you always put a limit on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Bartender      

And then, as they say, “life happened.” Or at least the facsimile we are constantly told to accept. White attended the University of Miami, pursuing a double major in poly sci and business. After graduation, she ended up bartending and managing at some of the hottest restaurants and nightclubs in the city. Martial arts faded into the background—but never quite disappeared from White’s mind. “I was making great money, but I felt a little bit lost,” she says. “Sometimes you have to lose something to truly understand how important it is to you. That’s what happened to me. I was longing for the martial arts. I missed my sensei. I needed that time away to realize martial arts was a lifelong journey for me, not some hobby I had as a kid.” 

And so, after a few years, White returned to her practice, training by day, working the clubs by night. It was a whirlwind, but she earned another black belt and—perhaps even more importantly—discovered Kempo (or “way of the fist”) school of karate. “[Kempo] is considered by many the first eclectic art of combat,” the International Kempo Federation notes, “as well as having its founding roots stretch back to 520 BC.” The style has many offshoots in Asia—Okinawa Kempo, Nippon Kempo, Chinese Shaolin Kempo—but was brought to America in the 1940s and then codified and popularized in the 1950s by Ed Parker, a fighter with a background in both Judo and Western boxing who had earned the nickname “The Magician of Motion.” White took to it like a duck to…well, water.  

“My Sensei said, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at this—do you want to buy into the school?’” White recalls. “The next day I brought him a check. I quit the hospitality industry the second I signed the contract for the school and became a full-time martial artist instructor and school owner. It felt so good to get back on the mat.” 

Rise Above 

A true Sensei, White, now a sixth-degree black belt, offers up nonstop pearls of wisdom on the mat at White Tiger & Dragon Martial Arts—some general, some clearly tailored to the student in front of her. One stands out, however: Why be good when you could be great?  

This ethic operates on multiple levels. First, there is, obviously, the fighting sphere—the way of the fist. “Our style is based on physics, so we’re not wasting any space or time,” White says. “We’re lightning fast, and while we’re hitting you from the top, we’re controlling your body with our legs and movement at the same time. It’s a very effective, very unorthodox self-defense style that can be modified for competition as well.” (Indeed, legendary UFC Light Heavyweight Champion and Hall of Famer Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell used the style to pioneer success in mixed martial arts and even competed with a large “Kempo” tattoo on his arm.) 

The Kempo roots of White Tiger & Dragon go deep—the school is affiliated with White’s teacher, Grandmaster Larry Tatum, a 10th degree black belt who has specialized in the form since the mid-60s and trained celebrities ranging from Sidney Poitier and Gary Collins to Julie Haggarty and Nancy Cartwright. “Grandmaster Tatum always says we’re in the business of changing lives,” White says, “and we take that to heart.” 

Eddie DeLaVega, who has known White for 20 years and worked with her at White Tiger & Dragon for most of that time, concurs. “Carol’s impact on me is hard to overstate,” DeLaVega, a fifth-degree black belt in his own right, says in a text interview from the Netherlands, where he recently opened his own school. “I tell people my time with her turned me from a cheap house cognac into a Rémy Martin Louis XIII. Two decades is a long time to learn from someone and still walk away inspired.” 

“Carol trained Chinese and American Kenpo for as long as I have—with a whole martial arts life before that—and she’s a longtime Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner on top of it,” he continues. “What makes her rare is that, as a female master, she holds a position most male black belts never will: Kids and women don’t read her as a threat, so she reaches them in a way the rest of us can’t. But make no mistake, when Carol hits you, you feel it. I describe her as a female Wolverine: warm and disarming until the moment it counts, and then there’s steel.” 

During a demonstration for AQUA Miami, White dumps an attacking 20-something MMA fighter like a bag of (very lithe and lean) potatoes then rolls deftly beneath the flying side kick of another.  

“Not bad for a 58-year-old lady, huh?” she says. 

No one argues.  

Nurturing the Next Generation

Which brings us to the second aspect of greatness that White Tiger & Dragon embodies, which is the way of the samurai—honor, service, community, and engagement. “I got my yellow belt when I was six years old,” White explains. “My teacher immediately sent me to help someone else in class. I was like, ‘But Sensei, I’m not a teacher.’ And he said, ‘No teacher knows everything—you know more than they do. So go share your knowledge.’ So, yes, we have Sensei and leaders, but we also recognize we do this together. We’re a very community-oriented school, and we teach all our students to be samurai. The word samurai means to serve. Here, we give back and have each other’s backs.” 

Perhaps this is why the school is so diverse in terms not only of race, ethic, and geographic background—though it does have a United-Nations-on-grappling-mats vibe—but also in terms of age and income. The school, in a nod to White’s own financial situation growing up, operates on a sliding pay scale and never turns anyone away. “Money is not the motive here,” White says. “Yes, you have to pay your bills, and it’s nice to make a living, but we’re a mom-and-pop-type school. To me, it’s about all the proverbial pebbles, all the ripples that might become waves that take students on journeys they’ll still be on long after I’m gone. Legacy. Accessibility. That’s what motivates me.” 

“Before coming to White Tiger, my son tried two other dojos,” Tahiluma Fernandez tells AQUA Miami while watching her son practice a complex kata. “He plateaued at both, and we never saw any progress. But after the first two sessions at White Tiger, we noticed an immediate difference in his enthusiasm to go to the dojo and learn. Where we really saw the difference was in how the older students help teach the younger students; that level of dedication and maturity from the older students I hadn’t seen in other studios. Sensei Carol has really done an excellent job at creating this little community where everyone helps each other, and the kids thrive and learn martial arts. I couldn’t recommend her studio any more highly than I already do.” 

Fernandez is not alone: White Tiger & Dragon has an extraordinarily high retention rate and includes wunderkind students such as Damien Villafane, who began at the school at age four, earned an adult black belt at 12, earned a second degree black belt at 14, and, now, at 16 continues to train hard, serving as an example for kids to emulate as well as an ambassador for the school and the value of martial arts. “He’s our youngest sensei,” White says, “and we couldn’t be prouder.” 

Honor & Legacy 

“People around town call me Sensei so often,” White says with a laugh, “I sometimes almost forget my own name.”  

For her, however, it’s a welcome sign of how deeply embedded her school and philosophy is in the community. Which is to say, it transcends her as an individual—though former students will still often stop by to catch up with their old Sensei, some from more than two decades ago. “It’s an honor to be a part of their lives as long as possible,” White says.  

White uses the word “legacy” quite a bit. She thinks about it perhaps even more. What does it mean to carry forward the legacy of, yes, her father, but also the martial artists and fighters in her lineage that can be traced back through the generations to England, Ireland, and Italy? Or that of Kempo, a style that, in one iteration or another, has existed for more than five hundred years? Or to be a female trailblazer in a male-dominated industry? 

“I have a lot of legacies that I have to live up to,” she says. “And a lot of legacies that I want to keep alive and pass on to the next generation.” In this, White looks once again to Bruce Lee.  

“Bruce Lee strove to be a citizen of the world,” she says. “He didn’t look at his sparring partners, adversaries, or anybody else as an enemy. He looked at everyone as a potential friend, a potential ally, a potential teacher. He knew you had to rise above to make a larger, more fundamental impact. That word rise always resonates with me—yes, you can rise against many things in life, but it’s just as important to rise for things. At White Tiger & Dragon, we teach our students to get strong, be strong, and stay strong, so that they can do just that.” 

One can imagine Lee—who once said, “the key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering”—smiling at White’s words and school from somewhere in the ether.