December 1996. EYHKC's Sensei John Foster practising Aikido with Sensei Bill Collins. John had just been promoted to Ikkyo, first-degree white belt, roughtly equivalent to brown belt in our system. Please use the "back" button of your browser to return.

Sensei Bill Collins sets up John Foster for a shoulder throw.

And over he goes. John has been practising Aikido since 1993.

John and Bill demonstrate the "breathing throw."

Mr Collins had been a boxer in the Navy and later practised Judo for about ten years. At the age of forty, he discovered Aikido by accident. Instructors were hard to come by in Toronto many years ago, and Bill and his friends would often drive to Buffalo or Montreal to find a teacher. Mr Collins would later become Canada's first black belt in Aikido.

Mr Collins sometimes tells the story of the time someone tried to grab his newspaper at a baseball game. Sensei Collins simply let him take the paper and down the man went with his own exertion. A witness at the scene told a police officer, "I don't know what happened. He just grabbed the old man's newspaper and fell down."

Mr Collins operated this dojo through a local YMCA, so he was basically a volunteer. John told me that students "paid" him in Guiness after class.

Bill is well-liked and respected by his students as a teacher. This shot is pure Bill Collins: Throw a student to the mats, and then tell a story.

In the early sixties, Bill was training at a dojo above a restaurant in downtown Toronto, while the city's subway system was being built. The owners of the restaurant complained to the transit commission about damage the construction was doing to their establishment. It turns out cups and plates were falling off the shelves because of the Aikidoka upstairs.

Photos on this page courtesy of Gordon W.E. Nore © 1999 - 2007