Jun half dozen, 2020

  • Dotun AkintoyeESPN.com

Sentry "Exist Water," an ESPN 30 for 30 moving-picture show chronicling Bruce Lee's life, on ESPN+.

SOME CAREERS HAVE the good fortune of ending too soon -- they petrify into myth. When Bruce Lee died at 32, on the eve of his offset international hit, "Enter the Dragon," whatever he might have go lapsed into what might accept been, into the realm of rumor and wish fulfillment and conjecture.

And perhaps no question about Lee is as trivial yet ardently pursued as this: Could Bruce Lee win a real fight? It's in some ways predictable that fans hungrily debate the skills of the man who refined and mainstreamed the martial arts movie as we know it. Few actors accept ever exuded equally much physical charisma on screen as Lee. He makes you want to believe he'south the real thing. When watching his films, one feels the nostalgist's urge to vindicate quondam affections. If, off screen, it turned out he wasn't then dangerous after all, and so masterful, we'd feel duped. He left usa longing -- in that mode he was one of the great actors of his era. And so there are hours of Zapruder-esque YouTube videos defended to Lee's fighting prowess, bottomless Reddit threads obsessed with this nerdy, needy question.

Terminal summer, Quentin Tarantino, in his revisionist odyssey "In one case Upon a Time in Hollywood," added his impudent voice to the argue when he depicted Lee, played by actor and martial artist Mike Moh, every bit a vainglorious braggart who gets into a fight with Brad Pitt's Cliff Berth, a stuntman and former Light-green Beret. The portrayal angered many. Lee's daughter, Shannon, accused the manager of replicating the racist contempt her male parent suffered while he was live. "He was continuously marginalized and treated like kind of a nuisance of a human being being by white Hollywood," she said, "which is how he'south treated in the picture."

The fight in "OUATIH" is partly based on Lee'southward outset meeting with Factor LeBell, a 2-time national champion judoka and legendary Hollywood stuntman who is credited with popularizing grappling in North America. They were introduced on the ready of "The Green Hornet" in 1966, where LeBell promptly scooped upwardly the not-nonetheless-iconic role player, tossed him over his shoulders and carried him around the set up in a fireman'south lift.

Lee was not tickled. Only LeBell laughed anyway. He was introducing himself, in his way, as a swain martial artist, not challenging Lee, who was oft called out by daring stuntmen on his pic sets.

Lee and LeBell forged a friendship away from the set, training together for about a year in the late 1960s. (Decades later, LeBell would scandalize Lee'south public by insisting his student Ronda Rousey could boot Lee's ass.) It was during those sessions that Lee started to contain grappling into his style. He would later on use submission holds to finish opponents in his fight scenes, similar his classic guillotine choke of Chuck Norris in "The Way of the Dragon." In addition to LeBell, Lee worked for years with the likes of Norris and Joe Lewis, two of the most celebrated not-boxing fighters of their twenty-four hours. Before he became an action star, Norris was the world middleweight karate champion from 1968 to 1974. Lewis won what is regarded as both the kickoff kickboxing match in the U.S. and the span between the karate point fighting era and the full-contact kickboxing we know today.

UFC welterweight Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson, unusual amidst prominent mixed martial artists for being a karate stylist, amassed a 57-0 tape as a professional and amateur kickboxer earlier joining the UFC. He knew Lewis personally and says Lewis told him one of the hardest kicks he'd ever endured was from Bruce Lee. Lewis was a heavyweight kickboxer; Lee was five-foot-8 and weighed less than 150 pounds.

"You tin can't tell me that Bruce Lee is not a hard guy, wasn't a expert martial artist, wasn't a good fighter, if y'all got guys like Joe telling me that," Thompson says.

Lewis, who died in 2012, said it was under Lee's tutelage that he broke with karate betoken fighting once and for all and transitioned into full-contact fighting. In 1970, Lewis faced Greg Baines in a total-contact lucifer that didn't accept a name until the ring announcer, in an accidental but successful bid to make history, appear the two men every bit kickboxers.

The fact that fighters like Lewis trained with Lee before he was Bruce Lee -- learned from and taught him, and took him seriously -- provides a great bargain of show equally to what kind of fighter Lee might accept been. The equivalent today of what Lee was doing back then, working with existent fighters as a peer, would be like watching thespian Jason Statham sparring in hostage with UFC light heavyweight champ Jon Jones; it would never happen. No one would cover Statham's insurance.

Contemporary fighters, no doubt overawed by a man they consider the progenitor of their vocations, speak of Lee worshipfully. In 2014, Conor McGregor insisted that Lee would be a globe champion in the UFC. And before his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2017, McGregor cited Lee's philosophy as an inspiration for his crossover endeavor into boxing. "That'southward what a true martial artist can do -- they can arrange under any circumstance," McGregor said. "Bruce Lee said, 'Be similar water.' When water enters a cup, it becomes the loving cup."

And fighters who think of themselves every bit Lee's fellow travelers aren't limited to MMA. In a 1982 Playboy interview, Sugar Ray Leonard suggested he perfected his jab by watching Lee. And Manny Pacquiao, asked by The New York Times to describe his fighting style, said simply, "Like Bruce Lee."

"I call back if he [Lee] was in his prime number today, he would exist where Conor McGregor is now," Thompson says. "He would be that guy."

Information technology IS WELL DOCUMENTED that as a teenage protégé of the legendary Yip Man, a primary of Wing Chun Kung Fu -- which is characterized by its economy and rapid, direct hand parrying and striking -- Lee fought frequently on the roofs and back alleys of Hong Kong. Nonetheless, he has but three recorded fights on his "record," as it were. Each was instrumental in shaping his views of fighting.

Lee won an interschool boxing tournament in Hong Kong in 1958 while deploying some mixture of Fly Chun and rudimentary Western boxing he tried to choice up by himself in preparation for the contest. He easily bested Gary Elms, the city champion in that weight division the previous iii years, knocking Elms down three times in the three-round bout.

Information technology was Lee'due south first meet with Western boxing and his offset fourth dimension competing in a rules-based tournament instead of street fighting. Co-ordinate to Lee biographer Matthew Polly, Lee disliked the feel. He felt the padded gloves stifled his power; he couldn't quite detect Elms the fashion he wanted. The fight planted the kickoff seed of doubt about the effectiveness of Wing Chun'southward orthodoxy in Lee'southward heed and left him with a lifelong aversion to tournament fighting and an obsession with the bug of fixed styles.

Years later, after he moved to Seattle and began grooming others in martial arts, Lee would often boast that his Fly Chun was the preeminent fighting way, leading to frequent arguments and challenges from adepts of other forms. One such argument resulted in the second-most storied fight of Lee's career, a showdown with Yoichi Nakachi, a Japanese karate black chugalug. Subsequently days of taunting, the two decided to settle their grudge at a local YMCA. The fight concluded in eleven seconds. A flurry of punches from Lee sent Yoichi reeling to the floor, where Lee dashed in to kick his opponent in the head, knocking him out cold.

A like incident led to the most of import fight of Lee's career, in Oakland in 1964. Ed Parker, the founder of American Kenpo and perhaps the country'south first karate entrepreneur, invited Lee to the Long Beach International Karate Championships. There, Lee gave a scintillating performance, demonstrating his ane-inch punch, finger pushups and kung fu techniques. Simply he also gave a lecture, asserting the supremacy of the individual practitioner over the rigid demands of way and denouncing instructors for enforcing sclerotic katas on their apprentices. In effect, Lee undermined the very tradition of martial arts pedagogy that had lasted for centuries. His audition was outraged.

Word of his exploits traveled back north to the Bay Area. Weeks later, at another demonstration in San Francisco where he mocked traditional kung fu, Lee issued what was understood (perchance mistakenly) as an open challenge to any practitioner in Chinatown.

Wong Jack Man, a recent émigré from Hong Kong who, like Lee, was 23 and trying to make a name for himself and open his own school, took Lee upward on his dare. After weeks of negotiating the time and identify and rules, Wong and a scattering of friends drove to Lee's preparation and pedagogy studio in Oakland. Lee was attended by his wife, Linda, and his business concern partner, James Lee. What followed over the side by side few minutes remains a matter of dispute. Polly says that researching the details of the fight took nearly a yr.

A blended of all the various accounts, bystander testimony, hearsay and urban fable thrice removed, transmuted past time and distorted by Lee'southward staggering posthumous glory, amounts to something like the following: Wong Jack Man extended a hand in what he said was a preliminary greeting (think touching gloves before a boxing match), Lee dispensed with that pleasantry and rushed forwards, sending his opponent back. Lee was eager to re-create the 11-2nd knockout of Yoichi and to fulfill one of the dictums he had learned from street fighting: Stop things chop-chop. But Wong Jack Man, a talented kung fu stylist in his own correct, was highly evasive -- so evasive, in fact, that he briefly turned his back on Lee to become away. Somewhen, Wong Jack Human being wheeled on Lee, striking a blow to his neck. Lee pushed his attack harder, and Wong Jack Homo tripped on a slightly elevated ledge on the studio floor, allowing Lee to pounce on him and land a salvo of punches before the two men were pulled apart.

Lee won, but neither man looked good. The three-minute fight left Lee winded and deeply troubled. He feared the limits of Wing Chun had finally been exposed. He didn't know what to do with an opponent determined to continue him at range instead of attacking, and he was disappointed with his stamina.

That nighttime untethered Lee once and for all from the constraints of Fly Chun or whatever other single style.

"In the erstwhile days, you'd do what your teacher tells you, because it's a 500-year tradition and you're supposed to keep the tradition going," Polly says. "Lee was the first person to come out and explicitly say, 'Traditions and styles are stupid. All that matters is what works for you.' And people hated him for it at the time. Information technology wasn't an easy position to accept."

Like Warhol and Ali and other '60s iconoclasts, Lee's rupture with tradition would prove seismic. His new ideas about martial arts -- that it had to be syncretic, streamlined, bespoke, honed for combat instead of aesthetics, paved the way for mixed martial arts, an embryonic form of which he adept when he developed his ain personal form, Jeet Kune Do.

When people describe Lee as the male parent of MMA, as UFC president Dana White has, for example, that is what they mean.

"HE WAS YEARS ahead of his time," says Dan Inosanto, a disciple, preparation partner and close friend of Lee's who still teaches Jeet Kune Do. Inosanto has given occasional lessons to fighters the caliber of Anderson Silva, who is widely considered among the greatest MMA fighters of all time. Inosanto has intimate knowledge of Lee's techniques and philosophy. "I've been knocked down and hurt by him more than than any man being," he says, laughing.

Both Inosanto (from firsthand experience) and Polly (from numerous interviews) draw Lee every bit remarkably fast and intuitive. He was a "kinetic genius," says Polly, going on to describe Lee'due south quickness and uncanny anticipation in much the same terms opponents utilize to draw Floyd Mayweather Jr. Inosanto believes Lee'south training methods helped mainstream the adoption of focus gloves, now used throughout the fighting world to sharpen accurateness and timing.

Part of what contributes to the idea that Lee was a fighter and visionary, not just an actor-martial artist like, say, Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme, is that even in his movies, Lee choreographed with a fighter'southward brain. Thompson recently gave an interview for GQ in which he broke down the plausibility of various fight scenes. He lauded non just Lee's technique simply also his agreement of how combat works. Lee wins a fight in "The Way of the Dragon" past first front-kicking an opponent'due south forward paw then replicating the movement, just to uncurl and extend his leg into a head boot. Today's mixed martial artists would phone call that a question-mark kick, a staple of the earth's most advanced strikers.

Merely these are movies. Moh, the actor who played Lee in "OUATIH," is a fifth-degree blackness belt in taekwondo. He also has trained in a picayune bit of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. (One dabbles in BJJ the way one dabbles in verse: You lot promise no one e'er asks to see the proof.) He draws a difficult line between martial arts and fighting. "For me to exist like, 'Oh, I could have my fifth-degree black belt and vanquish somebody up,' I think that's absurd," Moh says. "Obviously I spar and I train, just would I put myself in the Octagon? No, I would need years and years of specific training just to fight."

The answer to the question of whether Lee was a real fighter would require us to wrench him out of his context. Since the UFC debuted in 1993, mixed martial arts take undergone a dramatic evolution. The development of MMA around the world forced a lot of martial arts theorizing and educational activity to cook in the flash burn of real fighting. BJJ, for case -- unglamorous, intricate, vicious and exacting -- has ascended every bit the indispensable martial art. Information technology'southward almost impossible to succeed equally a professional person mixed martial artist without at least a solid BJJ foundation. The karate indicate fighting tournaments that Norris thrived in, Lee scorned and Lewis eventually consigned to obsolescence some 50 years ago are unrecognizable as fighting now.

What we're left with is hero worship. That'due south why this otherwise meaningless question matters. "Asian fans are probably more protective of Bruce Lee and his legacy considering he became a global icon and he seemed to do it on his ain terms," The New Yorker's Hua Hsu wrote in an email to ESPN. "He became a movie star by confounding expectations and stereotypes, not by playing into them. And it wasn't but his physicality, which differed from the perception of Asians every bit cognitive and passive. It was his arrogance and vanity -- the fact that he didn't simply experience like he belonged in Hollywood'southward upper strata simply that they could learn from him also."

The true fighting abilities of Lee's martial artist-player successors similar Seagal and Van Damme and Jackie Chan are questioned all the time, typically with a sense of sense of humour (save for the subjects of the query). Only with Lee, it's different.

"Bruce Lee is the reason that many in my generation of martial artists started martial arts," Polly says. "He's not just a celebrity. He's a patron saint. Martial arts is quasi-religious, and when you lot're insulting Bruce Lee, it's similar insulting someone's iconic saint hero, almost a religious figure."

The main account of Lee's fight against Noichi Yakachi comes from Jesse Glover'due south volume "Bruce Lee: Between Fly Chun and Jeet Kune Exercise." Glover, who died in 2012, was Lee's outset student and later a highly respected martial creative person. In Glover's description of the fight, Lee hit Noichi with a double punch that "lifted the homo completely off the floor and sent him flying half dozen feet through the air."

Polly's vigorously researched biography is non immune to that sort of mythopoeia either. He too repeats the "half-dozen feet through the air" effigy about Yoichi. And in another scene, a 230-pound skeptic who asks to see Lee's famous one-inch punch flies "8 anxiety" through the air when our hero demonstrates the technique on him. These are signs and wonders, the hysteria of the acolyte.

The truth is, in many ways, prizefighting is directly opposed to the ideals of traditional martial arts, which stress in development, combat against the unruly and opaque self. "The reason nosotros learn how to train, how to kick, punch and fight," Moh constantly tells his beginners, "is so that we never have to."

LeBell also makes this point. While he has the utmost respect for Lee as a martial artist, he believes that the just thing that makes one a fighter is fighting other professionals, and oft. "Yous can hit a punching handbag all you want. Unless somebody is hit back at you, you don't become what I consider adequate," LeBell says. "Martial arts is a cracking practise. It gives you ideas about what to exercise. Only if you want to be a professional, you fight."

DESPITE THE BRUISED sensibilities of Lee's fans effectually the world, Bruce Lee doesn't actually lose his fight in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." Tarantino stops several seconds curt of the daydreaming revisionism he flaunts in the balance of his picture show. The Lee of "OUATIH" is cocky, hotheaded and easily goaded past Cliff Berth after he laughs at Lee'due south merits that he would "cripple" Cassius Clay. (In a foreign anachronism, not remarked upon, anybody in the scene uses the proper name Cassius Clay. "The Greenish Hornet" aired on television some 2 years after Clay renamed himself Muhammad Ali. "OUATIH" really is a fairy tale of reaction.)

Lee and Booth agree to a all-time-of-iii, the winner of each circular the human being who claims the first autumn. Lee floors Berth with a flying kick, exactly the kind of maneuver the existent Lee would deride as a flourish unfit for combat. But this Lee steps abroad jauntily, taking the bait when Booth invites him to try it again. Lee does, but to be snatched out of the air and heaved confronting a car, cratering its rider-side door.

Notably, Tarantino has Berth remembering this fight in a daytime reverie, calculation yet more doubtfulness to how much of the scene we should believe is true and how much of it is blurred in the honeyed sunlit glow of Berth's cocky-aggrandizing retentiveness.

The 3rd circular is a close-run thing. Booth is the larger man, and he's non without skill. It's unclear who is going to take it before the two men are interrupted. Evidently, part of what rankles some about the scene is the racial subtext. "When Tarantino has a white guy beat out up the iconic Asian badass, it feels like in that location's something more going on than if he had been beating upwardly, I don't know, Steven Seagal or John Wayne," Polly says. "Bruce Lee represents Asian strength and in a gild where Asian males are portrayed as weak."

But somewhere underneath that is the tremor of fantasy rubbing up against the ambiguity and unpredictability of homo performance. Despite its obvious choreography, Lee and Booth's fight is tense, about startlingly so given the dreamland setting it takes place in. Its faithfulness to what a fight betwixt ii such men might feel similar is exactly what the real Bruce Lee strove to achieve in his ain work.

And that surprising realness, despite the audacity of the whole sequence, is another source of its controversy. Tarantino forces some come across betwixt our idea of Bruce Lee the icon and, nevertheless narrowly or fleetingly glimpsed, yet clumsy, an image of Bruce Lee the man, the fighter capable of rashness, capable of losing. In that meeting, myth quickens to flesh, sweats and trembles.