Was Bruce The Real Deal....

[hskwarrior]

In some cultures, peeing on another's grave is a sign of deep respect and devotion!

ROTFLMAO.......that's why im getting Cremated!!!!!!

[Scott R. Brown]

What if your devoted followers pee on the fire and accidentally put it out?

[hskwarrior]

I guess then i'd pushin up Pee Pee Daisies then huh

[Hardwork108]

The Police have been alerted. They will be processing your DNA that you left on his grave and will be contacting you very soon

The police are probably heading for Dave Ross's gym as we speak.....

[Hardwork108]

anyone can have a fight. that doesn't make them a fighter.

Look, i am not a Bruce Lee fan, but credit has to be given where it is deserved. The man was an ennovator and by many accounts he had a lot of street fighting experience. Actually, didn't he leave Hong Kong because of all the gang trouble he was getting into?

Add that to his fanatical MA studies, training and great conditioning, then you have somebody who is more than some street thug with a couple of fights under his belt.

I should not be the one to protect him here as his evolution of the MAs turned into something other than TCMAs, that is what he did was closer to modern "funtional" MMA than traditional kung fu. Actually, I have seen some knuckleheads in this forum who swear by him....LOL!

By the logic you are using, any street thug is a fighter. in reality, he is just a person who has been in a fight.

And by the logic you are using Bruce Lee is just any street thug?

Lee did not fight for a living.

Yet, by some accounts, he trained harder and more constantly than many people who did!

Cung Le does. He is a fighter. Soldiers were fighters. Lee was an actor.

Lee was a martial artist before anything else. He was a street fighter probably even before he became a martial artist.

And again, many martial arts were not designed for sports tournaments. IMHO, and you may not agree, the proof of a MA's functionality is to be found in the street and not in sports tournaments, even if the latter scenario may have beneficial effects, in regards to the former.

[taai gihk yahn]

In some cultures, peeing on another's grave is a sign of deep respect and devotion!

perhaps you will allow me to show my deep respect and devotion while you are still with us...

[taai gihk yahn]

fuk bruce lee
i pee on his grave

considering that he is buried in Seattle and you live near Toronto, that's pretty impressive range you have there!

[Hardwork108]

given the degree of candor with which Dave (and myself) regularly speak about the reality of CTS, I believe that the answer would be "yes";

anyway, the tone aside, the point is well-taken: Bruce Lee was first and foremost an actor; it doesn't mean he had no fighting skill, but it doesn't make him as good as many people like to paint him, i.e. - legendary / unstoppable - also, remember the context: he was dealing with people who fought out of a relatively rigid paradigm: whereas he took his WC and added in the flow of boxing and fencing, which is why he was so much more agile and maneuverable than pretty much anyone else at the time in the TMA world; he also trained very hard and certainly he obviously was very well conditioned not to mention intrinsically fast - so for the time he was an anomaly, but again, the average TMA skill level at that time was not what it is today (and part of the reason u have MMA is due to the artificial constraints of TMA in the US for so many decades);

I would not paint him as legendary but I would not put him down next to bone head street thugs either.

IMHO, the man had more than enough fighting talent to send quite a few of the "functionally" trained MMA posters in this forum to hospital.

Yet,and again, I am not a great fan of his, and one of the reasons is that he is responsible for the fad of "hey lets learn some MA and then make our own "better" style", which is so common nowadays. A lot of the senseless cross training (yes, there is sensible cross training too), is due to his MA approach.

I always say, that Bruce Lee made his approach work for him. HIs Jeet Kune Do worked for him, however, what he ended up with was NOT a new TCMA style, nor a better way to do them.

That is why a lot of people who try to improve their kung fu, through cross training/MMA, without first having completed a given style or understood it, end up with something that may "work for them", while that something is not a TCMA anymore. That is why we have so much cluelessness about the TCMAS.

I believe that Bruce Lee is at least partially to blame for that, even if the poor man never classified what he did as a TCMA, as he had made up his mind that "classical" kung fu was just nonsense.

The irony is that many people who are putting the man down follow the same clueless path that says, to simplify, modern good because it is scientific and "functional", and classical is bad because it is old and has concepts that are useless because WE, the great, do not understand them. LOL!

Just to say again, the man was more than just an MA actor. The world is full of MA actors, but he left behind a legacy, and a MA approach that have influenced many ( including not a few knuckleheads who lurk in this forum), to choose a certain martial path.

For whatever its worth, I think that CTS would eat Bruce Lee alive. Dave Ross, on the other hand would probably eat him alive, literally speaking....

[teetsao]

i have to agree with ikfmdc,not that my input counts for much. i started martial arts because of bruce lee movies, but also because of old shaw bro. films. i like most was you in the early 70s' and saw all the bruce lee stuff. i think one of the biggest things that adds to the bruce lee mystic is that he was in the u.s. in the 60s'. martial arts had just been introduced to america maybe 20-30 years earlier in pockets. ark y. wong was teaching whites in CA way before lee,but middle america still only knew judo and maybe some karate.
so many people these days still say"bruce lee was the best that ever lived" then i have to remind them about some people called the shaolin monks who lee couldnt touch if he had tried. not the modern wushu,im talking tradidtional shaolin with all the conditioning training. i think he was a good influence on the t.c.m.a. community but not the best there ever was. everybody has a teacher and there is always someone better than you.

[Lucas]

imo there are 4 bruce lee, one is real info that we know, and 1 is the icon. then like for everyone else, there is 1 for your friends and family, and 1 that is only for yourself.

[thelegend731]

I think Bruce Lee was an exceptional fighter. The fact that he devoted his life to martial arts and expanding on the effectiveness of his techniques shows that at least he was extremely devoted to fighting to win, whatever that could entail.

He spent his entire life thinking of how to fight. He studied how to make the most practical combat techniques and their usability in a fight. He was constantly streamlining new methods into his practice.

Now could he take on someone today may be a different question entirely. Martial arts had not evolved yet like the arts we have today (MMA). Fighting back then was quite different than fighting today.

I'm sure he was an effective fighter back then. I'm not so sure with the skill and mindset he had back then, would he be able to take on today's top fighters. Of course I completely believe that if he continued his streamlining process of adding more useful things to his arsenal and discarding the useless, he could very well catch up and be on even ground with some of today's top fighters.

[Faruq]

All the information everyone's giving is pretty interesting. Teetsao, where you say Ark Yuey Wong was teaching Whites way before Bruce is interesting, because I've always read that the cause of Bruce's fight with Wong Jack Man was that he was teaching non-Chinese. Did they give Ark Y Wong a hard time about it as well to your knowledge?

i have to agree with ikfmdc,not that my input counts for much. i started martial arts because of bruce lee movies, but also because of old shaw bro. films. i like most was you in the early 70s' and saw all the bruce lee stuff. i think one of the biggest things that adds to the bruce lee mystic is that he was in the u.s. in the 60s'. martial arts had just been introduced to america maybe 20-30 years earlier in pockets. ark y. wong was teaching whites in CA way before lee,but middle america still only knew judo and maybe some karate.
so many people these days still say"bruce lee was the best that ever lived" then i have to remind them about some people called the shaolin monks who lee couldnt touch if he had tried. not the modern wushu,im talking tradidtional shaolin with all the conditioning training. i think he was a good influence on the t.c.m.a. community but not the best there ever was. everybody has a teacher and there is always someone better than you.

[Lucas]

read this about bruce lee:

http://www.sanjosekenpo.com/UNSETTLEDMATTERS.pdf

[hskwarrior]

Bruce's fight with Wong Jack Man was that he was teaching non-Chinese.

In San francisco's Chinese community they did not allow teaching outsiders and many masters were opposed to it. However, even T.Y. Wong was bringing out Chinese Martial arts to the american public as he was on t.v. doing so.

[Faruq]

lkfmdc, lol. You should be a writer! You've made me feel embarrassed to have even posted this, lol. Your gift for pointing out the lack of logic in someone's post, coupled with the hint of sarcasm makes a person have to laugh at himself even though he's just been shown how ridiculous his position is. Your pen fu is unrivaled, lol. No wonder you're one of the posters who keeps this site going. Touché!

oh dear lord

1) I respect Dan Inosanto, but please realize that if Bruce Lee had never made a movie he'd have been a high school PE teacher, IE he has a very vested financial interest in the Bruce Lee persona

2) That aside, saying "in my MIND" means nothing anyway... do you know how many "highly touted" prospects with great amateur careers do ZIP (ZERO) in pro boxing?

3) Based upon Bruce's STUDENTS, ie people vested in his image, we have stories of Bruce winning some highschool boxing tournament. What does this mean? That he beat some other high school kids in a tournament, IF that did happen

4) Roof top fights? LMFAO! Have you seen these fights!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ewgpH4e_g

5) The infamous "karate black belt". Aside from Bruce's students do we have ANY VERIFICATION? Bruce supposedly fought a guy who did karate. Did he take classes at the local YMCA maybe ? Again, these are STORIES told by people vested in the image... there is no independent info


6) The Wong Jack Man thing has been done to death.. look it up

7) Bob Wall? He'd likely be homeless if he didn't give lectures on Bruce Lee.

People need to get over this crap