GOING FAST AROUND CORNERS
by Patrick Tandy 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is the first in a monthly series that will showcase the interests, pastimes and curiosities of the MSBA’s members.

The soft-spoken man sitting across the conference-room table looks in no way out-of-place with his surroundings – cool, collected, professional. Indeed, he appears quite comfortable in his Clubman-style eyeglasses, dark suit and sharp red-and-black bow tie. Then he lays down his cards.

“What I like to do is go fast,” he says. “On the street, I like to go fast. I like to go fast around corners. And off-road, I like to go fast in the dirt.”

He pauses, before adding with a grin: “Always within the speed limit, of course.”

An avid motorcyclist and tae kwon do enthusiast, Mark Jensen, by all outward appearances, defies convention. He is a man, some might say, with danger on the brain.

“I would not dispute that,” says Jensen, a corporate transactional attorney and founding member of the Towson-based law firm of Bowie & Jensen, LLC.

But Jensen comes by it honestly, from his childhood in Minnesota where he began riding dirt bikes at the age of 8 to the present-day passion for motorcycling that he shares with his wife, Mia Pefinis.

“My father had motorcycles,” he explains. “He had his own business, which sold anything with a small, gas-powered engine – mini-bikes, go-carts – and from the first thing, I wanted nothing but to get on them and ride them. If it’s got two wheels and a motor, I want to ride it.”

Jensen might be a few miles down the track from those early days, but his eyes still sparkle with an 8-year-old’s enthusiasm for life.

“I presently have a Honda VTR 1000 Super Hawk, which is a sport bike,” he says, running down his current roster. “I’ve got a KTM Duke, which is a supermotard racer/hooligan bike.”

The term bounces oddly around the conference room, as though unable to find a place to call its own – “hooligan bike?”

“It’s a motocross racer that’s fitted with road-racing wheels, tires and brakes,” Jensen explains. “What it’s really made for doing are wheelies and stoppies. A stoppie is when you put the front brake on really hard and the back tire goes about three feet in the air.”

Not around town, though, as he quickly points out.

“Only on closed circuits and on private property,” he readily admits. “Thus, the ‘hooligan’ moniker.”

With a collection that also includes a BMW F650 (“on-road/off-road bike”), as well as a Honda XR 600 (“off-road race bike”), Jensen appears to be a connoisseur as much as a collector, though he readily defends his street credibility.

“You could say that, as long as you point out that my collection gets ridden,” he notes. “I like to ride motorcycles. I don’t like to keep them and polish them and look at them so much as ride them.”

And ride them he does; Jensen, like Johnny Cash, has been everywhere, man, from Maine to Minnesota to South Carolina, though his personal preference rests just over the western hills of Maryland.

“I do a lot of riding in West Virginia,” he says. “West Virginia is the best-kept motorcycle secret going. There’s spectacular scenery, lots of curves. You’re going up and down mountains and through passes, and there’s nobody around. Then you come around a corner, and there’s some great little crossroads town, with a nice restaurant and a decent hotel. You could drive around in the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden you slide down out of the mountains, and there’s a five-star restaurant and a really nice hotel room. To me, that’s living.”

Though Jensen is drawn to the solo nature of motorcycling, he speaks fondly of the diverse people that he meets through riding, including judges, doctors and house painters – a socio-economic cross-section that uproots any Wild One or Easy Rider stereotype, united in their love for their sport.

“The American Motorcycle Association, about 270,000 strong, does surveys of its membership on a fairly regular basis,” Jensen explains. “It’s a decent representation, nationwide, and they find routinely that most people who are riding motorcycles are well-educated, well-employed and making a pretty decent living: sort of your regular, law-abiding citizens.”

“You might just never find out what somebody does,” he adds. “When you meet people, they want to talk about what kind of bike you have, how you like it, where you’ve been, where you’re going, if there’s a good restaurant in that area. People don’t talk a lot about what you do for a living, where you live. Not that those are bad questions, either, but it’s sort of a nice change.”

Jensen is not unnecessarily reckless; despite his penchant for danger, he has never been seriously injured.

“I attribute that to a lot of things,” he says. “I attribute it to having taken a lot of safety courses and a lot of road-racing courses, and I’m really serious about what I’ve learned there. All kidding aside, I don’t ride my bike like a race bike on the street. If I want to race, I go to a racetrack. If I want to race a dirt bike and do wheelies and stoppies, I go someplace that’s not a public road.”

Jensen also credits the extensive safety gear – including a full-face helmet and padded leather jacket, boots and pants – that he wears every time he rides.

“If it’s too hot to wear that, then it’s too hot for me to ride,” he says. “Having said that, it’s never been too hot for me to ride.”

Responsibility, particularly when riding among other vehicles, is equally important. “I believe in the Law of Gross Tonnages,” he says, “which my brothers, both retired Navy, taught me, and that is that there are all sorts of rules for which ship has the right of way, but the real rule is that the biggest ship has the right of way. Cars and trucks are always bigger. When I’m riding a motorcycle, it’s my job to be looking out for the car and staying out of the way.”

“The number-one serious motorcycle accident is a car turning left in front of a motorcycle,” he explains, “and that can be the motorcyclist’s fault or the car’s fault. The motorcyclist loses every one of those accidents. The car gets hurt, the driver is fine, but the motorcyclist is injured somewhere between badly and killed.”

Family tradition, however, trumps the risks involved for Jensen, who has no intention of dissuading his first child, due this July, from a two-wheeled future.

“We’re going to actively encourage it, and we’re already looking at motorcycles,” he says. “My brother has a 3-1/2-year-old daughter who is already riding, and I would hope that her cousin would follow in her footsteps.”

Unlike motorcycles, Jensen’s interest in tae kwon do – a traditional Korean martial art with an emphasis on kicking – is relatively young.

“I’ve always been active, in terms of working out and exercising,” he says. “Three years ago, my wife started taking kickboxing lessons from a fellow at the gym we would go to, and she was after me to go and take some kickboxing lessons.” The fellow giving the lessons was Master Frantz Cadet.

“He has a very interesting story,” Jensen says. “He’s an orphan from Haiti. [He] was in a refugee camp in Cuba, got out of there after a couple of years, got to the United States, made his own way, and is now a fifth-degree (out of 10) tae kwon do black belt. He draws a lot of his students from the Broadway and Eastern Avenue neighborhood where his studio is located. He focuses on training kids from the neighborhood, and his goal is to produce Olympic competitors in tae kwon do.”

Since tae kwon do is not yet an Olympic sport, Jensen explains that the studio currently emphasizes tournament competition. A brown belt himself, he won gold medals in his class in both pomse, or forms, (“a choreographed set of moves”) and sparring (“fighting”) for the second year in a row in the state championship at Essex Community College on February 1.  Jensen also took both titles in last year’s national championship, which he plans to defend in May at this year’s nationals in New Orleans. He hopes to receive his black belt by August 2004.

In addition to valuing qualities such as justice, honesty, loyalty, confidence and dedication, Jensen describes tae kwon do as “a great sort of release.”

“All day long I do transactional work,” he explains. “You feel like you’re advancing the ball, but it’s not quite as definitive as when you go to a tournament and there are three two-minute rounds, and at the end of the third round somebody’s a winner and somebody’s a loser.”

“I ride the desk all day,” he continues. “There’s a lot of pressure. [Tae kwon do]’s wonderful because it’s a different part of my brain [being used] when I’m sparring. When you’re working on corporate transactions, most moves are well-planned. When you’re sparring, if you take the time to try to plan your moves, you generally get beaten about the head. It’s much more instinctive.”

A typical week for Jensen includes about six collective hours of practice, though he might train for as many as nine hours a week in the face of an upcoming tournament.

“The threat of being publicly humiliated is a great motivator,” he says.

Despite having torn a calf muscle and sustained “innumerable scrapes, bruises, strains, sore pieces and parts,” Jensen is no more deterred by the thought of injury than he is on a motorcycle.

“In some ways, that’s probably some of the attraction,” he says. “Not that I’m enthused about injuring myself, [but] it helps to focus the attention when there is a risk if you do something wrong.”

“[I really like] the tradition of tae kwon do,” Jensen says. “Part of the tradition is humility, so showboating, bragging, gloating – you get deductions for doing that. If you score a really good kick to somebody’s head, then turn around and run around the ring, pumping the air with your fist, not only do you not get the points, they take away points.”

Jensen, however, has set his long-term sights above protocol and pageantry.

“Master Frantz, a poor street kid from Haiti, credits his successes in life to the discipline learned in tae kwon do and martial arts early on,” he says. “He is very interested in sharing that with a lot of the other kids in the neighborhood around his studio. He’s putting together a group – and I’m pleased to be part of that group – that is going to put together a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation to provide an environment for at-risk youth to do their homework, practice their basic life skills, take field trips, learn tae kwon do [while] raising money to pay for uniforms, sparring gear, entry fees for tournaments, traveling expenses to national tournaments and assorted field trips and educational aids for these kids. I would like to get my black belt so I could then be qualified to coach kids at a national or state tournament level and help Master Frantz with the tax-exempt corporation - the Intrepid Foundation is what it’s going to be called.”

“I want to be clear, though; I don’t spar with the little kids,” he quips. “This isn’t like the Seinfeld episode where I’m beating up little kids.”

Whether popping wheelies, throwing a kick or practicing law, Mark Jensen breaks his approach down to one commonality: focus.

“If I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing on a motorcycle at all times, it gets dangerous,” he says. “If I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing in tae kwon do, it gets a little less dangerous, but I lose. And I need to maintain that focus here, practicing law, also, or clients aren’t getting what they’re paying for.”

Jensen also stresses the importance of instinct.  “When you’re riding a motorcycle,” he explains, “when bad things start to happen, they usually happen very quickly. You don’t have time to stop and think, ‘Well, now I need to do the following six things.’ In sparring, especially at more advanced belt levels, you just don’t have time to stop and think what your next move’s going to be. For every move, there’s a countermove. For every kick, there’s a counter-kick. The guy that wins is a guy who can process what the other guy’s doing fast enough to block him and kick him.”

“When I was a kid,” he recalls, “I always thought, ‘Man, if I could roll out of bed in the morning and play guitar like Jeff Beck, it’d be okay with me.’ And I realized early on that that was never going to happen. I hear guitar players talk about how, “Yeah, he’s not stopping to think about what note he’s going to play next. He’s doing something special.’ Let me be very clear: I am not the Jeff Beck of martial arts, motorcycles or the law! I can’t do that on the guitar, and I can’t do it as good on a motorcycle as Jeff Beck did on a guitar, but I’m pretty good on a motorcycle, just doing it instinctively. I’m getting there with the tae kwon do, and I’m getting there with the practicing of law.”

But make no mistake – Mark Jensen appreciates what he has as well as what he can do.

“I consider myself a very lucky human being,” he says. “I’m blessed with being able to enjoy these hobbies. I’ve also got a wonderful wife, a really nice practice, great partners. It’s a pretty nice deal, and I try to keep that in mind.”

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Publications : Bar Bulletin: February, 2003