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);
Last edited by taai gihk yahn; 07-24-2010 at 08:18 AM.
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....
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.
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 was on the metro earlier, deep in meditation, when a ruffian came over and started causing trouble. He started pushing me with his bag, steadily increasing the force until it became very annoying. When I turned to him, before I could ask him to stop, he immediately started hurling abuse like a scoundrel. I performed a basic chin na - carotid artery strike combination and sent him to sleep. The rest of my journey was very peaceful, and passersby hailed me as a hero - Warrior Man
read this about bruce lee:
http://www.sanjosekenpo.com/UNSETTLEDMATTERS.pdf
For whoso comes amongst many shall one day find that no one man is by so far the mightiest of all.
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.Bruce's fight with Wong Jack Man was that he was teaching non-Chinese.
Hung Sing Boyz, we gottit on lock down
when he's around quick to ground and pound a clown
Bruh we thought you knew better
when it comes to head huntin, ain't no one can do it better
I was on the metro earlier, deep in meditation, when a ruffian came over and started causing trouble. He started pushing me with his bag, steadily increasing the force until it became very annoying. When I turned to him, before I could ask him to stop, he immediately started hurling abuse like a scoundrel. I performed a basic chin na - carotid artery strike combination and sent him to sleep. The rest of my journey was very peaceful, and passersby hailed me as a hero - Warrior Man