Well I did it. I finally read all of Showdown in Oakland. I have to say that it was a very good read and very well researched.Originally Posted by Fa Xing
Here are what I considered to be Rick Wing's most important points:
1. The cause of the fight was Bruce Lee's challenge at the Sun Sing theater.
2. The fight was not over Bruce Lee's right to teach non-Chinese.
3. Linda Lee did not witness the fight.
4. Wong Jack Man and his crew intended the fight to be a sparring match with limitations on technique.
5. Bruce Lee attacked Wong Jack Man from the onset when he extended his hand, landing a blow above the eye which left a mark.
6. Wong Jack Man was able to do damage to Bruce Lee during the fight with a strike to the side of the neck.
7. Wong Jack Man slipped over a raised portion of the floor and Bruce Lee attacked him but did no damage.
8. The fight was stopped due to the intervention of the men witnessing the event.
9. Bruce Lee had demanded that Wong Jack Man admit defeat but he never yielded.
10. There was a battle in the newspapers over the outcome of the fight.
The battle in the newspapers was most interesting to me in this book. This was very new information to me and extremely bizarre. Basically someone had wrote in a Chinese newspaper that the fight was over a beautiful young actress who Bruce Lee had done a Cha-Cha dance with at the Sun Sing theater who Wong Jack Man was obsessed with and that Bruce Lee had lost the fight but scared Wong enough in to leaving her alone. Bruce Lee tried to set the record straight in the newspaper by denying these events and also declared that he was victorious in the fight.
I found that Rick Wing had a lot of credibility regarding the aftermath of the fight because he provided copies of the newspaper articles along with English translations. I wasn't however convinced of his account of the fight's result. He relied heavily on the Dorgan article for his analysis and tried to defend the narrative that the fight lasted around 20 minutes. He even considered the 3 minutes narrative provided by Linda and others to be absurd because he believed Bruce Lee was in good enough condition to last longer than a one round Boxing match. But we know from combat sports that a fighter can easily punch themselves out in the first Round if they don't pace themselves. Remember that according to Jesse Glover the issue with Bruce Lee in the fight was that he had trouble closing in on his opponent who was very swift and evaded him the whole fight while Bruce Lee exhausted himself throwing punches.
I think that Wing's insistence that Wong Jack Man not be vilified as a racist is a bigger issue than who won the fight. Did Bruce win? Was it a draw? Those matters are not clear but the evidence that Wong Jack Man was a representative of Chinese masters who didn't want Bruce teaching non-Chinese is severely lacking and I think Linda Lee should be questioned rigorously for her basis for that information. It's also interesting that she may not have seen the fight at all but her's is not the only account of Bruce Lee's decisive victory. Bruce Lee himself said in a Chinese newspaper and later in Black Belt Magazine that he had beaten Wong Jack Man soundly and gotten him to verbally submit. In fact in the Chinese paper Bruce Lee said that Wong Jack Man was so badly damaged and bruised that he did not show up for work for three days.
It's very possible that Bruce Lee embellished the outcome to save face or maybe the witnesses who say the fight was a draw are all lying. Someone lied about the outcome of this fight. I guess we'll never truly know exactly what happened but it is interesting that such thorough research has been done on the matter.
Reply With Quote