It's not often you meet a diminutive (5 feet 2 inches, 100 pounds) 73-year-old grandmother of four who breaks boards with her bare hands. But, with a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do, Dottie Abbott is hardly your everyday grandmother.

Abbott's introduction to martial arts occurred six years ago, when a flier offering three free lessons at the Martial Arts Institute in Overland Park was left at her front door.

"I knew nothing about martial arts, but I had to try it," Abbott said. "After the first lesson, I was hooked. I can't tell you just why, but I loved it, loved everything about it. It's phenomenal exercise."

Abbott takes classes three days a week and is rigorous about it.

"I won't miss a class," she said.

Abbott had to move up through nine levels before testing for her first-degree black belt. She accomplished that in less than three years, earning her second-degree black belt two years ago. She learned kicking, punching, self-defense, and martial arts techniques at each level.

"We don't make contact with our opponent, just targets," she explained. "We work a lot on form and moves."

Abbott is required to wait three years before testing for a third-degree black belt.

"I haven't decided yet whether I'll go for it," she said. "It's a three-and-a-half-hour test. It's grueling, very demanding physically."

Abbott doesn't break cinder blocks, as men do. Instead, she breaks stacks of half-inch boards.

"It's important to do a lot of preparatory stretching exercises or you may hurt yourself," she said. "The only injury I've had was a pulled hamstring. I didn't kick very high for awhile."
Before she immersed herself in tae kwon do, Abbott was playing competitive tennis, doing dance aerobics, and running three miles a day—all with the same passion. She also quit smoking.

"Running became almost a compulsion," she said. "I felt guilty if I missed a day. I loved tennis. I wanted to play every day. If I had to, I'd call 10 people to find someone to play. I wanted to do some kind of physical exercise every day."
Abbott insists that people who don't exercise don't know what they're missing. A natural assumption would be that Abbott was a tomboy who excelled in sports growing up. Wrong!

I wasn't active in sports until I was 37 years old, married, with two daughters," she said. "I grew up in Kansas City, Mo., in a non-athletic family. I was the oldest of seven children and none of us were into sports. And really, there weren't many sports programs for girls in those days. I got my exercise dancing. It's still my first love."

Abbott graduated in 1957 from Avila University (then the College of St. Teresa) with a nursing degree and was a surgical scrub nurse in the Kansas City area for 11 years.
She met her future husband, Hayden Abbott, on St. Patrick's Day at Kelly's Tavern in Kansas City.

"We were both 24 years old," she recalled. "He was a dental student and I was a nurse. We began dating and married in 1967 after Hayden served two years as a captain in the Air Force."

Hayden, an outstanding athlete, was a forward on Kansas State University's 1957–58 basketball team that won the conference championship and went to the NCAA Final Four in Louisville, Ky. He was playing in a city league when he and Dottie married, but he never urged her to get into sports.
"It just happened," Abbott said. "I was taking our daughters to the swimming pool and decided that as long as I was at the club, I should try tennis. I fell in love with it—and running, and aerobics, and martial arts, all of it, just followed."

According to Hayden, "Dottie is a very disciplined lady. She's also an outstanding cook. She comes up with exotic dishes. I walk into the house and it smells like Thanksgiving."

For Abbott, "Cooking is a kind of art form. Creating different dishes is a way of expressing oneself."

It's not surprising that their daughters, Michelle and Nicole, were outstanding basketball and tennis players at Shawnee Mission East High School and have continued playing tournament tennis and running marathons.

Dottie and Hayden, who retired in 1997, live in Leawood. Daughter Michelle (Griffith) also lives in Leawood, and daughter Nicole (Spachman) lives in Kansas City, Mo.

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