Katalin Rodriguez Zamiar is routinely punched, kicked, and thrown around, and sometimes the consequences are dire. Detailing a recent surgical procedure she underwent to repair structural damage to her spine, she was sanguine. “It was noninvasive laser surgery. They inserted some needles and a camera,” she says. “I have a very high threshold for pain, and sometimes that works to my disadvantage.”
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She grew up on the near north side, near Chicago and Wells. Her father, Thomas Zamiar, is a painter and photographer who was also a two-time Golden Gloves boxing champion; her Cuban-born mother, Isis Rodriguez, who passed away five years ago, was passionate about boxing and baseball. Her parents directed her into ballet at an early age, and she danced in the Ruth Page Foundation’s Nutcracker. Desperate to try something more exciting, Zamiar conspired with her mother to convince her father she was still attending dance classes while she took up karate instead.
Martial arts seemed like a natural path for Zamiar, who was already a fan of Bruce Lee and Felix Savon. “I was never a sad or aggressive kid,” she says. “I just wanted to try [karate] on my own….My mother was an exile from Cuba who was kicked out for being too outspoken and opinionated. I was given a lot of her confidence.”
It wasn’t until 1994, during her last semester, that the game’s producers filmed her against a blue screen, compiling footage to be digitized later. During one full day of shooting and two pickup days, Zamiar befriended Ho-Sung Pak, a Korean actor and martial arts performer who was serving as the model for the character Liu Kang and had played Raphael in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. Under his guidance she studied kung fu. “Karate is more linear and hard, with more rigid movements,” she says. “Kung fu tends to have softer and more circular movements….If you look at a lot of the classical kung fu, it is very similar to ballet.”
Until recently she was teaching 18 different classes a week, and she has attained such stature as an instructor that most of her students refer to her as sifu, or professor. Her approach to individual training–emphasizing flexibility, stability, and movement–works for radically different athletes. Last month she designed a workout program for Jerome Beasley–a six-ten basketball player for the University of North Dakota who’s projected to be a first-round NBA draft choice–that included kickboxing, strength training, yoga, and ballet.
