Bruce Lee was only 31 when he made this interview. His most famous film, Enter The Dragon is pertinent as we enter the 2012 year of the dragon and the shift from West To East gathers pace in a way that only the historically literate can fully grasp. I urge the Synchromystics among you to scrutinise this movie as we enter the 2012 year of the dragon.
If you've never listened to Bruce Lee speak this is worth even a minute of your time. He was young, good looking, super fit, articulate, polite and wise beyond his years. As a movie star on the edge of global influence and circulating among the Archons of Hollywood, the discerning thinker will place his premature end two years later under questionable circumstances as joining the list of suspicious deaths including John Lennon, Bob Marley, Bill Hicks and others of great talent and shining example.
His inquest in Hong Kong took nine days for the coroner to decide an aspirin killed him. A preposterous idea that scraped the barrel of credulity but at least showed some resistance inside the system from somebody who stood their ground. Compare Bruce Lee's elevated conciousness to the knuckle dragging oratory of Chuck Norris over here and I refer you back to my original point of my post that the shift is on.
Here's a lovely story I uncovered about Bruce:
Lee was already challenging traditional notions by 1965. He was a practitioner of Wing Chung kung fu under Master Yip Man in Hong Kong and had been teaching the art since 1959 after expatriating to the United States. Lee was calling his style Jun Fan Gung Fu, but it was essentially his approach to Wing Chun. After opening his school in Oakland, his teaching of non-Chinese began to cause controversy among other Chinese martial artists in the San Francisco Bay area. Lee defended his spreading of Wing Chun and a duel was arranged between Lee and a fighter fielded to defend the art’s tradition of Chinese exclusivity.
The fight was to be no holds barred. If Lee won, he could continue to teach Jun Fan Gung Fu to anyone he desired. If he lost, he’d close his school and quit teaching to non-Chinese.
The duel wasn’t televised on pay per view and no documentation exists but a few first-hand accounts, including Lee’s own, his wife Linda’s, and his opponent Wong Jack Man’s (which, notably, differs dramatically from Bruce and Linda’s).
Shannon Lee told Fighters.com the version told by her parents. The fight lasted three minutes and, after absorbing strikes from Lee during the first minute, Man began to literally run from Lee. But, Lee desired a conclusive victory and chased Man, beating him into verbal submission.
But, Lee felt the fight should’ve ended quicker. He was disappointed with his physical conditioning and the limitations of his traditional Wing Chun martial art. This was a key turning point in the history of mixed martial arts, a philosophical evolution from traditional to modern, the way fighters think and train today.
After the fight, Lee had an image created of a burial mound with a tombstone to symbolize his death as a traditional martial artist and his rebirth as the first modern mixed martial artist, though of course the term “mixed martial artist” would’ve been unknown to Lee.
