UCI’s Myles Got the Breaks to Become a Karate Champ : Goodwill Games: Top AAU national heavyweight helped the American team earn a silver medal with a victory against Mexico.

Robert Myles, a fourth-year medical student, has had intimate experience with the type of injuries he hopes to deal with someday as an orthopedic surgeon.

Myles, the AAU national heavyweight karate champion, has a different perspective on broken bones than most of his UC Irvine classmates.

“Once, I fractured my bone . . . and everybody heard my foot snap,” said Myles, 26. “But my instructor wouldn’t let me stop fighting until it was time to stop fighting. I had to continue fighting for another 20 or 30 minutes on a foot that had obviously snapped.”

Myles took his never-stop-fighting-despite-what-medical-wisdom-says philosophy to the Goodwill Games karate exhibition in Seattle last week. There, he helped the American team to a silver medal with a victory against Mexico. The karate exhibition preceded the Goodwill Games, a 17-day, 21-sport international competition that begins today.

Myles adopted the attitude, and fractured his foot on more than one occasion, at UC Riverside under Coach Ray Dalke. Myles took second place in the NCAA finals in 1983 and helped Riverside to a national title that year.

“When I took second place in (the NCAAs), I broke my foot in the first day of the competition,” Myles said. “As a matter of fact, it was my first match. So I had to fight for two days on a broken foot. I would hop out there and everybody would say, ‘Oh, you’re faking.’ But once I started fighting, I would step on it and not pay attention to it. . . . If he (my opponent) stepped on it, that’s just life.”

Dalke recalls Myles’ initial transition to his school’s style of karate as not being an easy one. “He was jumped on right away by our other members,” Dalke said. “He thought we were crazy.”

Myles still drives from Irvine to Riverside, where he completed his pre-med requirements without earning a degree, several days a week to train. He also trains at Japan Karate Federation in Mission Viejo under Paul Godshaw.

Myles said that Godshaw’s style is different from Dalke’s. “He works with me on technical points,” Myles said of Godshaw. “He’s taught me ways to trick somebody into (striking) distance.”

Steve Jaffe, another martial artist who trains at Japan Karate Federation, said Myles’ concentration on the mat is what makes him world-class. “What’s so good about Bobby is he just focuses,” Jaffe said. “And as soon as the other guy moves, he counterattacks.”

Jaffe also points to Myles’ coordination: “Bobby has feet and arms. Some guys don’t have both. If his punch is missing, then his feet are going. He’s just unbelievable.”

Said Myles: “I still feel clumsy.”

At about 5-feet-8 and 190 pounds, Myles has been an athlete most of his life.

As a running back at San Gorgonio High School in San Bernardino, Myles was offered the opportunity to play football for Cal Poly Pomona but instead chose karate at UC Riverside because he thought he would have more time to study.

Myles now laughs at the reasoning behind that decision.

He began studying the martial art of Tae Kwon Do when he was 13 and made the transition to karate when he was 17.

Dalke said the emphasis on kicking in Tae Kwon Do helped Myles to develop a balance between kicking and punching.

Myles said he kicked his way to a 3-0 victory against his Mexican opponent during the Goodwill Games exhibition.

In his only other fight, Myles lost, 3-2, to German national champion Vladimir Rausch in the individual tournament.