Born a decade after his death, I shared my childhood hero with millions of kids of many generations around the world. And as to many of them, I probably owe my lifelong fascination for martial arts to Lee, the most famous martial artist of all time, and one of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century pop culture. If there is anyone deserving to be in my Hall of Fame, it is him.
Who was Bruce Lee?
Bruce Lee alias Li Jun Fan was born on 27 November, 1940 in the United States where his father was on a long tour with the Cantonese Opera Company, accompanied by his wife, Bruce's mother. Thanks to her own mixed heritage, the boy who came to the world in San Francisco, California was 5/8 Chinese, 1/4 English, and 1/8 Dutch Jew. The family went back to Hong Kong three months later, and the son, although technically an American citizen, didn't set foot in the US until 18 years later.
In Hong Kong, thanks to his father's business acumen, Bruce grew up in a well-off family. His father, an occasional actor, also helped him into the movie business. Bruce started a career as a child actor at the age of six. By his teens, if not a household name, he was a recognizable face in Hong Kong. He excelled in roles of a street urchin with a good heart or of a rebellious teenager but was generally stiff and unconvincing in other types. His thespian fortes were not accidental. As a kid, he was a hyperactive boy who only stayed put when reading comic books. He performed abysmally in school and struggled in every subject but English so much so that he was held back twice. As a teenager, he was a troublemaker with serious problems with authority. But Bruce was also funny, witty, and charismatic, a prankster and a natural gang leader.
He got into street fights a lot. At 14 he was defeated by a boy named William Cheung who practiced Wing Chun. Bruce, to regain his dominance, decided to learn martial arts, too. He soon became passionate about it, eager to try out every new technique he learned on the street. He was also equally passionate about another physical art, dancing. After winning a dance championship, later in life Bruce has always referred to himself, stretching the truth a bit, as the cha-cha-cha champion of Hong Kong.
In high school, he participated in his first and last official combat sports event, a boxing match against a student from another high school. He won the bout but wasn't satisfied with his own performance.
Not long after that, he got expelled from the school for threatening a teacher with a knife. By then he has brought enough shame to his parents that they decided to put him on a boat to America with the warning: make something out of yourself or don't come back.
Bruce arrived in Seattle in 1959, aged 18. His father secured him a tiny lodging and a dishwasher job in the restaurant of a Chinese acquaintance. He finished high school and, to the surprise of everyone, in 1961 he even enrolled at the University of Washington as a drama major. Eager to stop washing dishes and waiting tables, he started giving cha-cha-cha lessons. In the breaks between the classes, he entertained his students with Wing Chun demonstrations. Eventually, he opened his informal kung-fu studio with a handful of students at the age of 19.
There were only a few Eastern martial arts enthusiasts in America at that time, but Bruce quickly caught the eyes of some of them. He was charismatic, fun-loving, boisterious and an incredibly gifted athlete. He gained both friends and admirers quickly, and the two groups almost perfectly overlapped. In 1963, with an American friend James Lee (not a relative) he published a book about Wing Chun kung-fu, what he later, after breaking with traditional martial arts, regretted.
In his early twenties, Bruce had two aspirations. Either getting into Hollywood or opening a chain of schools overall the US and dedicating his life to martial arts. At first, he had moderate success in the second endeavor. He opened multiple studios, but their attendance was meager and the revenue barely enough to pay the bills.
He also quickly discovered another challenge. In America, he started to get disillusioned with traditional martial arts, even with the more practical Wing Chun style he learned. They were stiff, impractical, and put more emphasis on practicing unrealistic techniques than on real sparring excercises. The Wing Chun techniques didn't really work against the bigger and more athletic Americans. He realized that he has to move beyond what he learned in Hong Kong.
His fame among martial art practitioners grew and eventually caught the attention of Ed Parker, the father of American Kempo. Parker organized the 1964 Long Beach Karate Tournament and he invited Bruce to give a demonstration of kung-fu, which at that time was an just obscure Chinese martial art few even heard about. This was Bruce's first chance to perform in front of a large audience.
Multiple demonstrations followed, on which he often spoke about traditional martial arts in disparaging terms. In 1964, the kung-fu community of Chinatown, Oakland where Bruce opened a studio had enough. Not only was the cocky Lee badmouthing their styles, he was teaching the art to non-Chinese. A local martial artist, Wong Jack-man, decided to issue a formal challenge to Bruce, which lead to highly controversial duel. Bruce defeated Wong in a matter of minutes, but as after his boxing bout, he was extremely dissappointed with his own performance. After the short fight he was exhausted, his fists were bruised, and realized that Wing Chun's close-quarter techniques were not effective against someone who avoids direct engagement. This experience reinforced his growing dissatisfaction with kung-fu.
Eventually, becoming disgusted with its obsession of forms, rigidity and ineffectuality, he turned his back on Chinese Kung Fu completely. His personal style, what he in 1967 christened to Jeet Kune Do, was mainly based on Western boxing, fencing, and some Wing Chun techniques and principles. Even the name "the way of the intercepting fist", esoterically Oriental as it sounds, is adopted from the fencing tactic "stop-hit" that aims to intercept the opponent in mid-attack instead of a parry and counter-attack combination.
He watched boxing matches endlessly. He especially admired Mohammad Ali, whose matches he would watch for hours, shadowing the champ's moves over and over again. His training ethos put free sparring at the center of the training session and dispensed with traditional Eastern training elements. Bruce was an early proponent of a totalitarian art encompassing all forms of stand-up fighting and grappling - Mixed Martial Arts, as it's called today.
He also become obsessed with nutrition and body-building. In his early twenties, he could still be described as slightly pudgy a young man with still some baby fat on. He explored many diets and imposed some exotic ones on himself over the years. Apart from running every morning, and the hours honing his martial art skills every day, three times a week he lifted weights. The boy with a baby fat transformed his body to that paragon of physical perfection we can see in his movies.
In 1964, he married one of his students Linda Emery and not long after they had their first baby, Brandon. Linda's family was not enamoured by the prospect of having a pennyless Chinese wanna-be-actor as a son-in-law (the racialist resentment was not unrequited when Linda visited Bruce's family in Hong Kong later), but after the marriage Bruce quickly won them over with his characteristic charm.
In 1966 came a breakthrough in his acting career when he was cast into the role of Kato, the masked Asian martial artist sidekick of the vigilante Green Hornet. The show lasted only one season but it propelled Lee into the right circles, of both Hollywood and the martial art world. Still uncertain about the future, he moved back and forth between opening schools and vying for new movie roles.
With acting, teaching, and having a family, he had no time for University. Although he silently dropped his studies in 1964, his interest for psychology and philosophy only deepened. He was a voracious reader. One of his early aspirations was to own a second-hand bookshop. By the end of his life his personal library contained over 2,500 books.
Utilizing his newfound fame as a minor Hollywood celebrity, Lee continued touring the US giving demonstrations on Karate tournaments, which were starting to become the big thing in the mid-sixties. As the guest star Kato, he demonstrated his famous one-inch punch, 2-finger push-ups, side-kicks that sent his partners flying in the air, his preternatural speed, and performed free sparring. He befriended several champions of the era. Between 1967 and 1969 Karate champions Joe Lewis, Mike Stone, and Chuck Norris, or Jhoon Rhee, father of American Teakwon-Do became not only his friends, but training partners/students as well.
Getting friends and admirers was easy for him. He was a natural showman. Witty, charming and always fun. This wasn't lost on his female acquitances either. Beyond the traits his male friends admired, Bruce was gorgeous. Despite being a loving husband and father, he often had relationships, and didn't even put too much effort in keeping them secret. This was something that his wife Linda, his always supportive and devoted wife did not deserve, but apparently didn't know about them either.
Despite all the successes and friendships of Hollywood men and elite sportmen, Bruce's teaching fees and rare movie roles barely covered his expenses and now he had a family to feed, too. In 1967, a sturdent and friend of him, Jay Sibring, the hairstylist of stars, gave him an idea. As a personal self-defense trainer, he should angle for big Hollywood names. To catch the eye of the creme, he should charge extraorbintant fees. Lee, not fully convinced, nevertheless went along, and to his surprise, soon he found among his students James Coburn, one of the biggest stars of the time, and Steve McQueen, the King of Cool, the biggest star of Hollywood. His slowly forming but eventually deep friendship with McQueen was a mixture of mutual admiration, envy and rivalry. McQeen wanted Lee's physical gifts and Lee wanted the stardom.
In 1968, Bruce and Linda purchased a house in Bel Air, Los Angeles. On the surface, Bruce achieveved the dream of every American immigrant. He married an American, made into Hollywood, befriended the stars, owned a beautiful house. But everything was built on debt. The family often lived from one paycheck to the next. Bruce was as financially irresponsible as flamboyant. Shortly after buying the house he could not afford, he spent the full 7,000 dollars he unexpectedly got from his mother who sold one of his father's buildings not to pay off some of his debts, but to buy a red 911 Porsche. His prospects were not rosy. At the time, there were not that many roles to go around for Asian characters in Hollywood. He refused to play the traditional role of the subservient Chinaman, and he spoke English with heavy accent.
Even though his career as an actor did not progress as fast as he wanted, his reputation as a martial artist wunderkind and teacher, the legends of his feats, and his circle of Hollwyood friends grew. He rubbed shoulders with Frank Sinatra and taught Roman Polanski. If not yet a successful actor, he was the most sought after martial arts instructor in Hollywood.
Too turbocharge his career, Bruce had a idea for a movie. An X-rated, allegorical martial arts epos, combining martial arts and philosophy. He named it The Silent Flute. He tried to convince first McQueen, then Coburn to partner up with him on the movie, but after some promising start on Coburn's side, he was eventually rejected by both men. That really hurt him personally and Bruce woved that one day he will show them. He will be a bigger star than McQueen.
He also had another idea of a TV-show featuring a Chinese martial artist roaming the American West, the Warrior. Unfortunately, he tshow was dropped in favour of another of a similar theme, the Kung Fu. Lee auditioned for the lead role of that, too, but he was found too intense for the character of a reluctant, contemplative dispenser of justice. The role was given to David Carradine.
In 1970, Lee suffered a debilitating back injury during a morning work out. He was forced to bed for 3 months and the doctors told him he would never kick high again. 3 months of bed-confinement would be a torture to anyone, but it was especially cruel for someone whose life revolved around his physical abilities. To make the most of it, Bruce turned his energies into writing. The sketches, notes and essays in which he tried to capture both his philosophy to martial arts and technical repertiore was collected and published after his death by his widow Linda in a book titled The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Not unlike popular books on fencing of earlier times, the Tao covers techniques, tactics, psychology, physiology, training advices and discussions of concepts like rythm and timing. In the end, Bruce recovered completely.
By the early 70s, he temporarily gave up on Hollywood, and took up an offering of making a movie in Hong Kong, The Big Boss. Lee with his family sold their Bel Air house and moved to Hong Kong. Lee, who by then had got used to American standars was appalled by amatuerism of Hong Kong movie makers. He clashed heavily with the director and the producer. His behaviour on the set was typical Bruce Lee and the opposite of normal stereotypes. He was loyal to and gracious with the stuntsmen and the crew and rude and disrespectful for those above in the hierarchy.
To his surprise, the low budget and amateurish Big Boss which was based on 3 pages on script, terrible acting, and lousy directing turned out to be thunderous success in Hong Kong. His second movie, the Fists of Fury in 1972 was even more of a blast. The audience have never seen anything like Bruce before. Hong Kong cinema was flush with Kung-fu movies of course, but the fight scenes in them were extremly long and artificial. What Bruce Lee did seemed frighteningly real. Amazing, but at the same time something that can both work in real life and can be learned. Secondly, in both movies, a Chinese guy sticks it up to the British and the and hateful Japanese. The Hongkongers who were mostly refugees from the mainland living under their British overlords, were in a desperate need of national pride. Bruce gave it to them. Audiences raved and literally were throwing chairs in the air in the theaters. Bruce has become a superstar literally overnight.
Fame pressed hard on him. Paparazzis, constant challenges for duels, intrusion in his familiy's privacy, attacks of Hong Kong media mocking his rusty Chinese and questioning his nationality made him stressed and paranoid. He hired bodyguards from his former stuntmen friends and - the human weapon himself - even started carrying a gun.
Bruce decided to keep total control over his next movie, The Way of The Dragon. He wrote, directed, and starred his spagetthi Eastern. He offered the role of the bad guy to the most famous American Karate fighter of the time, the then middle-weight world champion, Chuck Norris. Even though its climax is arguably one of the greatest martial art fight scenes of all time and it was a big commercial success, Lee didn't think the movie was good enough to be released in the West as a vehicle to get back into Hollywood.
In 1972, he started to shoot the Game of Death, another movie where he wanted to demonstrate his philosophy to martial arts, even more explicitly than in The Way of The Dragon. Negotiations started to have George Lazenby, the latest James Bond, as a co-star of the movie. Perhaps 20 minutes material was produced, and the movie was released only 1978, 5 years after Bruce's death.
1973 came the Enter the Dragon, Lee's first superproduction meant to conquer Hollywood for him. As one of the international cast of main characters, Bruce played an unstoppable killing machine driven by cold revenge. The movie made Lee a houshold name all over the world but he didn't live to see that. On July 20, 1973, in his mistress's flat, Bruce died of cerebral edema. The indirect cause of death is still debated. The most probable theories are that of heat stroke and medicine allergy. After his death, Enter the Dragon made the so far obscure Asian actor the Hollywood superstar he had always wanted to be. The audience loved it and even the critics had to grudgingly admit that despite its extreme violence (the threshold was lower in 1973), the movie is something they haven't seen before. Fights in Western movies still followed the John Wayne-type coreography. Lee broke the way of a new genre that was carried on later by Chuck Norris, Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and countless other actors cum martial artists ever since. But he was only followed, never replaced. Bruce Lee's name has irrevocably fused with the image of the ultimate martial artist, the unbeatable fighter.
His body was put to rest in Seattle, the city where he and Linda fell in love. Among the six men carrying his coffin on his last journey were James Coburn and Steve McQueen.
Lee has become a superstar, far beyond anyone, even he could have imagined. He did become bigger than McQueen. Apart from the remotest corners of the world, practically there is no one over 30 who hasn't heard about Bruce Lee, a man who died fifty years ago at 32. They might not recall the titles of his movies or when he lived or they mistakenly think he was a Japanese Karate champ. But they know Bruce Lee, the icon.
For us who watched his movies when we were kids, and take his presense in the public consciousness a given, it's almost impossible to appreciate the enormity of his achievement. Similarly nigh impossible to find any name or face that is more recognisable than his, with the possible exception of Elvis. But perhaps not even the King can push him off the throne of pop culture. Bruce Lee, after all, was invincible.
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