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Our mission is to help as many people as possible to achieve health, strength, courage, and longevity. We offer our members the friendliest service, optimal environment, and a wide range of trainings at an affordable price that gives each individual the opportunity to pursue & achieve success and freedom.
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Welcome to Chinatown Sports Club

Our Club is a 9,000 square foot fitness and martial arts complex designed to fulfill your every fitness need. 
 
Recognized as the finest fitness and martial arts complex in the lower Manhattan, Chinatown Sports Club offers the most popular and progressive facilities, services and programming in an atmosphere of unprecedented comfort and convenience. We provide One on One training and group fitness programs daily. Our professional instructors teach Kickboxing, Taichi, Yoga, Karate and Aerobic exercises to adults.

Children Karate program is designed to help your children reach their highest potential in life and in school. The classes are taught by martial arts professionals who are experts in motivating children. The students will learn the importance of self respect, self discipline, goal setting and perseverance all while having fun!

Chinatown Sport Club is a place to work hard, feel good, and challenge yourself!!!

Martial arts master touched many PDF Print E-mail
No way did he die without a fight.

Sonny Sykes wasn't the type. He was a small guy, wiry, but he was tough as a cinderblock. He was 150 pounds of bust-you-up.
 No way did he die without a fight.

Sonny Sykes wasn't the type. He was a small guy, wiry, but he was tough as a cinderblock. He was 150 pounds of bust-you-up.

Not that he'd use it. He had too much discipline, too much respect for the gong fu system, which is diet and balance and Tao and the power of thunderclap hands.

"It's a way of life," said Sam Copeland, who trained under Sykes, and who kept training even after he'd opened his own dojo. "It cultivates the whole person. And if you truly prescribe to it, you become a better human being."

Sykes sure tried. He started at age 9, boxing and doing judo throws with his uncle. It toughened him up.


He found his way into the Army. He joined the Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne. They taught him combat judo.

Then he met the grandmaster Willem Reeders, whose gong fu included some kuntao, a style once taught only to the Chinese emperor's guards. He learned footwork and earned a fifth-degree black belt in karate.

That skinny little kid -- Arthur E. "Sonny" Sykes, the son of Lena Electra Sikes of Opelika, Ala. -- became a champion fighter, a grandmaster in his own right.

He opened his own dojo, a storefront on Parade Street. And Sam Copeland came knocking.

"I had heard a lot about him," Copeland said. "He had street legends, stories about his skills and abilities."

They practiced in a long narrow room, landing hard on the floor pads.

Sykes ran the school through the '60s and early '70s. Then he left. He went to Cleveland, looking to put his foot on a bigger stage.

"He had something that he wanted to prove," said his son, Roy Sykes. "He wanted to show the world what he could do."

He moved again, settling in Las Vegas. He opened the North American Self-Defense Association College of Arts and Sciences for Higher Education. He started Youth of America Research and Development, a program that applied martial-arts theory to the trials of teenage life.

Joe Salamone drifted in in 1973. He'd seen the "Kung Fu" series on TV.

"Master Sykes had a presence about him," he said. "The way he moved was unlike anything I've ever seen. It was like watching a piece of art."

The lessons were hard.

"You didn't spar with him," Salamone said. "No way. He moved so fast, you couldn't see it."

In time, Sykes moved back to Cleveland. He'd meet with former students. Whatever the setting, it was a class.

"I'm not saying he was the most perfect human being," Copeland said. "We were all young and wild once, you know? But he's down-to-earth people. And he never lost sight of that aspect."

In the end, he came back. He had children, and a passel of grandchildren -- 28 in all.

He taught them judo, too.

"I started when I was 5 years old," Roy Sykes said. "I'd get up with him at 5 in the morning, and we'd run.

"I liked it," he said. "I wanted to be tough."

Sykes died July 3. He'd been sick since April, but he was fit, and he had discipline, so it took a while for it to stick.

ROBB FREDERICK can be reached at 870-1733 or by e-mail.

Know before you go:
A memorial service for grandmaster Arthur E. "Sonny" Sykes will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. today at the Law Funeral Home, 2926 Pine Ave.
 
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