He quit his job as a carpenter and spent a year driving with his father. But Elias returned home when the truck broke down during a 30-below winter storm in Michigan. Once back in Beaufort, he discovered his brother and his best friend had started taking karate lessons from Larry Rogers, the 14th martial artist ever to earn a black belt in the Chuck Norris System. With little else to do, Elias went to watch their lessons. “They bored me to tears,” Elias confessed. “Nothing they were doing made me really want to get out there and do it myself.” 

Nonetheless, Rogers vigorously tried to recruit a new student. Finally, Elias yielded, much as he had after his father’s relentless goading. It was 1973, a month shy of Elias’ 20th birthday.  As it turns out, karate would stick with Elias a lot longer than he stuck with trucking. In fact, it wasn’t long before Elias had earned a green belt and Rogers was paying him to teach classes. “I think it’s the teaching aspect that has really kept me involved,” Elias said. “I love it when I can instruct someone, and they say, ‘Oh!, Now I see.’ ”

Elias says many of his students are young people who have not excelled at team sports. They often lack self-confidence and physical endurance. “Molding students is just endlessly satisfying to me,” Elias said. “I get such joy from seeing kids grow mentally and physically.” Pausing only for the births of his daughters — Mandy, Aaryne and Hayley — Elias has been involved in karate since first taking the mat in 1973. However, in the late 1970s, he was still far from his pinnacle as a student and even farther from teaching martial arts as a full-time vocation.

In 1983, Elias earned his black belt, testing in front of Norris himself. He was excelling as a competitor, but when Rogers’ studio burned down in the mid-1980s, Elias and his friends were left without a place to train. They located a crumbling building near the end of Paris Avenue in downtown Port Royal. Elias remodeled and opened Club Karate in 1988, scheduling classes around his work as a carpenter. In 1998, he decided to focus full-time on karate instruction, and in 2007, he moved the business to its current location on Lady’s Island.

Elias teaches 20 classes in a typical week and currently has more than 110 students enrolled. Now an eighth-degree black belt, he frequently travels with his students to out-of-town competitions and serves as a tournament judge. He typically closes his studio in July — not to take a break from an unrelenting schedule, but to serve as tournament director at the UFAF International Training Conference and World Championships in Las Vegas. That event is Chuck Norris’ version of the Super Bowl, and Elias now counts Norris as a friend.

Elias still competes occasionally. In fact, in 2017 he became the oldest grand champion in the history of the ITC and World Championships. Nonetheless, teaching continues to provide Elias his greatest enjoyment and source of pride. A painted board mounted near the entrance of his studio honors each of the 77 black belts he has instructed with a gold plate. There are 12 rows of names above a 13th row of UFAF commemorative patches. The names include David Spears and his father, Charlie Spears, who at age 72 became the oldest pupil to earn a black belt in the Norris System. Also appearing are Tony Benton, who operated two studios in Japan for several years; and Lindy Woods, who still runs schools in Hampton and Ridgeland. If he conforms to the pattern on his board of black belts, there is room for just one more gold plate, but Elias said he won’t stop at 78. “I’ll just rip off the patches at the bottom and keep on going.”