Remembering Master Bruce Lee, 41 Years...

[SteyrAUG]

Oh jeeze ok, I feel pretty stupid now... are the matches fake too.... I thought the ping pong looked a bit too much.... but the matches I thought looked possible. I can remember seeing this quite some time ago I thought. I just happened to see it again.

So that's all fake... damn... I wondered why it had a Nokia phone at the end.... oh well... I've been stupid before and I'm sure it will happen again.... that's the only good thing about getting old.. the bouts of intense stupidity don't seem to bother you as much.

Yeah, it's a promotion for Nokia. Decent CGI but all fake. I wouldn't lose any sleep over being duped. And except for being on the boxing team at St. Francis Xavier and some rooftop "rumbles" during his Hong Kong gang member days, Bruce Lee never competed at all in any matches or martial arts competitions. His involvement in Ed Parkers Long Beach International was demonstrations of Kung Fu only, despite what some films about Lee suggest.

He did have more than a few challenge matches, which were basically fights, with a few notable martial arts teachers and challengers who found their way to movie sets, but no footage of any of those events is known to exist.

[KalashniKEV]

...except for being on the boxing team at St. Francis Xavier and some rooftop "rumbles" during his Hong Kong gang member days, Bruce Lee never competed at all in any matches or martial arts competitions.

I was going to point that out, but I didn't want to rain on the parade.

Bruce Lee was awesome, but he has more in common with Jackie Chan than he does with Helio Gracie, who tested his skills against a wide variety of styles under all kinds of different rules, in what were basically open weight, NHB, bone breaking competitions.

He did make a relevant contribution to combat sports though, because JKD is a fusion style, like today's "MMA Style."

[SteyrAUG]

I was going to point that out, but I didn't want to rain on the parade.

Bruce Lee was awesome, but he has more in common with Jackie Chan than he does with Helio Gracie, who tested his skills against a wide variety of styles under all kinds of different rules, in what were basically open weight, NHB, bone breaking competitions.

He did make a relevant contribution to combat sports though, because JKD is a fusion style, like today's "MMA Style."

For a little context, we must remember that competitions at the time were hardly full contact and often had severely limiting rules. Also with the exception of a few "open" competitions, most tournaments were restricted to specific styles. Even the All Japan Open was heavily biased against non Japanese systems when it came to scoring. There was no K1, Sabaki challenge or UFC.

There just wasn't an environment for Lee to pit his methods against other styles in a realistic way and he was in fact pioneering things like full contact training methods. He did get into some actual / factual real fights with martial artists who came calling looking to make a name for themselves so I think that proves a lot more than winning in the AAU tournament circuit that existed in the late 60s.

I don't want to take anything away from guys like Norris, Lewis, Wall or Mullins but I think if Lee did enter the circuit he would have regularly destroyed them. Unlike Chan, who came up training for the Chinese opera and went directly into film, Lee had a more fighting oriented foundation and background.

[Failure2Stop]

MMA is basically JKD's validation.

[SteyrAUG]

MMA is basically JKD's validation.

There is some merit to that notion.

[Denali]

Yep, huge missed opportunity.

Now certainly, in the 1960s and especially in Hollywood it's almost guaranteed that Lee encountered some manner of racism on a regular basis and it probably was one of the factors that made it difficult for him to find work

I didn't necessarily mean that it was entirely a racist response, just that turning down Bruce Lee for David Carradine was in and of itself a huge fail. Of course as you have correctly noted, all of this was just before Lee had starred in his first martial arts films...There are other interpretations of the Carradine/Lee casting of the series "Kung Fu" revolving around their contrasting demeanor's, where as Carradine was thought to be more cerebral appearing, as opposed to Lee's high octane energy.

Oh well, only thing I can say for certain is that if I myself had been in charge of casting the part, the door wouldn't have hit Carradine's back side fast, or hard enough....

[SteyrAUG]

I didn't necessarily mean that it was entirely a racist response, just that turning down Bruce Lee for David Carradine was in and of itself a huge fail. Of course as you have correctly noted, all of this was just before Lee had starred in his first martial arts films...There are other interpretations of the Carradine/Lee casting of the series "Kung Fu" revolving around their contrasting demeanor's, where as Carradine was thought to be more cerebral appearing, as opposed to Lee's high octane energy.

Oh well, only thing I can say for certain is that if I myself had been in charge of casting the part, the door wouldn't have hit Carradine's back side fast, or hard enough....

I was more addressing a common misconception than I was addressing your post specifically. But I agree, "Kung Fu" starring Bruce Lee could have been amazing.