Sixty-two years on the mat. Over 4,000 championship wins — not a typo. Five-time World Champion at Madison Square Garden. Kyoshi Derrick Williams is a living monument to the old ways.
He started in February 1964, age six, at the Forest Neighborhood Center in the Bronx. No foam pads. Concrete under thin mats. Stances held until legs trembled. That was karate — raw, unforgiving, real. The kind of training that doesn't just build technique, it builds a person.
Think about that timeline for a second. 1964. The Bronx. A six-year-old kid walks into a neighborhood center and finds something that will define the rest of his life. While the world outside changed — decades of it — Derrick Williams kept showing up. Kept training. Kept fighting.
He became 8th Dan in Shotokan and 10th Dan in Jujitsu — a dual mastery that took a lifetime. Two disciplines, two mountains, one man. He learned directly under Master Osamu Ozawa, a kamikaze pilot turned karate legend in Funakoshi's lineage. That's not a credential you buy. That's a transmission — knowledge passed hand to hand from one of the giants of the art.
And then there's the competition record. Over 4,000 championship wins. Five world titles at Madison Square Garden — the Mecca of combat sports. Read that again: 4,000. Most fighters never see 40. Williams turned winning into a habit across six decades.
But ask him what matters and he'll tell you it's not the trophies. It's the philosophy hammered into him on those thin mats over concrete:
“Technique without toughness is incomplete. Toughness without discipline is dangerous. But discipline forged through hard training creates mastery.”
That's the old way. That's budo. And in an era of highlight reels and overnight experts, Kyoshi Derrick Williams is proof that the long road is the only road — sixty-two years of it, and he's still walking it.
Read his full story in DAOS Magazine 25th Edition.
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