PEABODY — Master Michael O’Malley’s Taekwondo studio on Lynnfield Street hasn’t been a place to learn how to fight. It’s been a place to learn how to live.
“You can affect people’s lives in any way, in anything that you do,” O’Malley said, sitting next to the studio’s large floor mat one Sunday afternoon. “That’s what I feel like I do here.”
The building has had a facelift in the last few months. There’s fresh paint, a new store area for students to buy Taekwondo-themed gear, and the sign out front for “MJ O’Malley Tae Kwon Do” has been replaced with “Tiger An’s Taekwondo.”
After 14 years in Peabody, O’Malley, 67, is stepping away from the business to spend more time with family.
He’s stopped teaching regular classes, though will continue to train one last group of black belt candidates on Sundays at the studio until they take their tests. Otherwise, the business has been turned over to New Hampshire resident Eunha An and her husband Richard An, the son of a late Taekwondo teacher O’Malley knew.
Together, the couple runs five Taekwondo studios in Massachusetts.
“Master O’Malley has a great reputation for what he’s done and brought to the state of Massachusetts,” Richard An said. “He’s created his own legacy, and we are honored by the fact that we’re taking over and trying to create a new legacy based on what he’s already done, but in a new way.”
O’Malley fell in love with Taekwondo 53 years ago. It was the 1970s, when Bruce Lee’s roundhouse kicks on the big screen inspired kids everywhere to try martial arts moves themselves.
O’Malley caught that bug too. He looked around for martial arts schools and found one near Fenway Park run by Jae Hun Kim, an MIT student who was the first person to bring authentic Taekwondo to New England.
“All it took was seeing one kick (from Kim) for me to get going,” he said. “My life changed.”
O’Malley had recently moved to a triple decker in Dorchester to live with his mother after the death of his father, who owned a private school and had raised him in a mansion in Connecticut until that point.
He trained hard under Kim and paid for classes by shining every shoe he could on the streets of Dorchester. He took his black belt test at age 16 in the home of Taekwondo founder General Choi Hong Hi, and won his first gold medal in the U.S. team trials in 1978, then successfully defended it in 1979, 1980 and 1981.
He traveled around the world, even to South Korea, to compete. Undefeated in his national title, he bowed out of competitions by 1982 so he could support his family.
He ran Kim’s school while Kim completed his mandatory military service in South Korea, and trained teenage and adult black belt students.
O’Malley also coached the U.S. Olympic team in the lead up to the 1988 games, the first time Taekwondo was a part of the Olympics. He also trained Joe Rogan when the now famous podcaster still competed in Taekwondo as a teen.
By the 2000s, O’Malley needed a change. So he searched for a spot for his own studio, and found the perfect place in Peabody in 2011.
“When I came here and my very first student signed up, it was like this little blonde kid, cute as can be, four years old, who walks in the door and says, ‘I want to do karate,’” O’Malley laughed.
He’d never instructed young children before. How he spoke to his students quickly changed, but how he viewed the art, and its lessons, didn’t.
“Learning techniques like kicking and punching is one thing, but those are really just tools,” he said. “It’s about how do I teach this so they grow up to be strong and powerful and not actually try to find ways to use the stuff?”
O’Malley’s young students learned to stand tall and carry themselves with confidence; to listen to their intuition and trust it. He taught them to never engage in a fight unless they had no other choice, and to use their words over their kicks if they could.
O’Malley follows this rule too. Though when two men tried to attack him in the Kenmore Square subway station years ago, a roundhouse kick to the head was all he needed to knock one man out and send the other running.
“You call it self defense, but there’s nothing defensive about it,” O’Malley said. “If you have to protect yourself, it’s really about offense and acting first. You want to go home.”
His teachings have stuck with his students.
Krystana Manthorne grew up down the street from the studio and began training there when she was 7 years old. Now 21 and a student at Merrimack College, she’s an instructor at the studio and will stay on under the new ownership.
“This has definitely shaped me into the person I am now,” Manthorne said. “What he taught me growing up is to walk with confidence, talk to people the way you want to be talked to and treat people with kindness. That’s what I’ve tried to teach to the kids, too.”
Matt Lemieux said O’Malley and Manthorne have brought his young sons out from their shells. His family, like others at the studio, will miss O’Malley.
“He is incredibly understanding, and he really tries to meet everyone where they’re at,” Lemieux said. “He takes the time to get to know everyone as people, as an individual.”
Danvers resident Siobhan Stoney trained under O’Malley as a teen. Since 2017, all three of her daughters have been taught by him too, and she’s also been an instructor at the studio.
“He’s just so good with everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re neurodivergent, it doesn’t matter what you’re like,” Stoney said.
“He’s just good with everybody. I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who’s just so good at their job.”
Contact Caroline Enos at CEnos@northofboston.com .