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I was alive when Bruce Lee was alive, unlike many of those who today have made him into some sort of demigod. Plain simple truth of the matter as I see it, Bruce Lee was a very talented athlete, not much of an actor, and possessed a fair amount of martial art talent. Here are some of my observations about the man.
He was way too small to compete in the tournaments of his time although I think he did do a demo at one of Ed Parker's tournaments. People like Mike Stone, Chuck Norris, and Joe Lewis were much bigger and quite frankly much better and could have easily beaten him in the ring.
Bruce Lee was also a man who seemed to be battling his own demons. I think after the Wong Jack Man fight he came to question his own abilities and spent the rest of his short life trying to overcome his perceived limitations. He definately possessed somewhat of an arrogant personality but I also think he was very hard on himself and people seem to flock to him.
Bruce Lee though had a dynamic, charismatic personality and as I stated above, attracted quite a following. Three decades after his death, he apparently still does. He helped tremendously to popularize Martial Arts in his time, and again three decades after his death, he still does, which I find just amazing.
Bruce Lee was an iconoclast and as such rejected much of the traditions of CMAs including the practice of forms. I think much of that stemmed from the reasons I stated in the above paragraph. Whatever else though, Bruce Lee seemed to have possessed a high degree of curiosity about other MAs and had the keen sense to be able to pull many things together from many different arts. He therefore in my mind was a keen student, but had little patience for the traditional method of teaching found in most CMAs.
I have always been curious as to how Bruce Lee's MA philosophy and with that his JKD would have evolved had he lived longer. Bruce Lee was very much a product of his time, a time when every facet in society was being called into question. The prevailing wisdom of the time was to reject the wisdom of our elders, but I wonder how this attitude would have changed as Lee grew older(and wiser). I somehow like to speculate that eventually he would have come full circle and and just maybe would have come to realize the value of at least some of the traditions in CMAs he had previously discarded and that his natural curiosity I believe would have him at some point in time devoting time and energy to the study of those traditions and that would have made him both a better teacher and a martial artist. Just a theory of course, and I could be dead wrong on that.
His statement, "become water my friends" is IMHO, one of the corniest pieces of psycho-babble that I have ever heard!
My most favorite Bruce Lee "moment" was his scenes in the movie, Marlowe, with James Garner.
Much of what today we think we know about Bruce Lee comes from Linda Lee, his widow, and I think she has distorted or at least exaggerated a lot of events in Bruce Lee's life for her own financial gain and of course to promulgate his reputation and memory. I am not sure what to think of her or her motives.
Please note that these obsevations are made at a distance, and of course I never met Bruce Lee in person or for that matter, anyone close to him. Take them with a grain of salt if you want, doesn't matter to me. Just my two cents worth.
Robert