I followed a 3 day Aikido seminar with him in 1994, in a small town close to Paris.
Place was packed with about 400 students from all over Europe and some from the US as well.
In those days he used to give seminars when he wanted as he travelled the world to promote his (then succesful) movies.
Sign up was limited and the Paris seminar was an annual thing back then and was always fully booked a year in advance, when people were at the seminar and registration for next years seminar opened up that weekend.
I missed '93 because of this, but made sure my buddy who went that year signed me up for the year after in '94.
You were not allowed to bring video/photo camera and no training weapons inside the training hall (wooden stick/jo, sword/boken, knife/tanto).
When he entered the hall the first day, I was kind of surprised with how tall he is, never realised it until then how tall he is.
You know how soft he speaks sometimes in the movies? That's how he was speaking while demonstrating/explaining a technique. Too bad if you were sitting all the wayin the back, your eyes would have to do the studying.
After the technique he did take his time and walked around and made sure everybody got attention.
Dude training not too far away from me had the courage to ask Steve/Take sensei to do his famous clothesline move on him (irimi nage)
Steve asked him if he was sure. Dude got excited and said YES.
Ofcourse everybody around Steve always sits down when he's showing something so you can see from up close what's going on, same here.
The guy hit the mat so hard and fast that the people watching him got worried when they saw him going down. He was ok, little dizzy but at least could "brag" for the rest of his life that he was thrown by Steve.
Here is Irimi nage.
The short Japanese guy Steve used to use in every demo and most of his early movies is his former student Matsuoka.
They're not on good terms for a while now, but Matsuoka is gangster as well, short as he is, dude is fast as lightning!
