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Instantly then, Bruce had gotten off to a bad start within Chinatown.
These tensions would only build over time as he increasingly became a vocal critic of traditional approaches to the martial arts, which—in his minimalist Wing Chun mindset—he saw as heavy on flair but short on effectiveness. In many ways, his style appeared to be an inverse of Wing Chun: Chinatown was quickly impressed with Wong Jack Man, and embraced him in every manner that they had shunned Bruce.
Notice his one white student Noel O'Brien on the top right, who followed Al Novak in a steady stream of non-Chinese students that TY taught throughout the s. Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong. This theory, which was rendered in heavy-handed fashion in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story , has always been completely void of details as far as who exactly took exception.
Yet, there is not only scant evidence to support this, but developments at the time prove highly contrary to this perspective. In Hung Sing, Lau Bun was training a Hawaiian named Clifford Kamaga, and also showing no open opposition to his senior student Bing Chan, who was accepting all types of students at his own newly-opened school just a couple blocks away in Chinatown.
Lau Bun's Los Angeles colleague and noted kung fu master Ark Wong 2nd from top right would eventually give a formal interview to Black Belt Magazine in expressing that he was open to teaching all types of students, regardless of race. Of course, the situation was not without nuance. And the Chinese-only martial arts code was a very real policy that existed for decades, and one that had surfaced against Bruce at various early points in his life.
Yet the code was in its final throes by the s. Bruce Lee's demonstration at Ed Parker's inaugural Long Beach Tournament in August of is typically cited as a key moment in his career in which he first get noticed by Hollywood , but is typically sanitized to omit the critical lecture he delivered to an international crowd of martial artists. Photo courtesy of Barney Scollan. One of the styles he liked to perform and then dismiss was Northern Shaolin, and he began to air these viewpoints to some very large and qualified audiences. As longtime karate teacher Clarence Lee remembers it: This brought them to the Sun Sing Theater, in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown where Bruce's demonstration and critical lecture would infuriate the neighborhood's martial arts practitioners.
Yoichi pursued him for weeks.
When the two finally fought, Bruce obliterated Yoichi with a rapid series of perfectly places punches and a knockout kick in an second fight that left him unconscious with a fractured skull. Oddly enough, the entire affair tends to get shrugged off as meaningless; when really, it should be seen as a case study. An earlier formal location on Broadway Avenue—where the Wong Jack Man fight took place—proved to be short-lived. There are two main theories on this. The first is that because Wong Jack Man was poised to open his own martial arts school in Chinatown, he stepped forward in an opportunistic moment to generate some publicity.
Local tai chi practitioner David Chin asserts that Wong said as much when he signed a challenge note to be delivered to Bruce. Yet a more popular theory professed by many local sources from that era is that Wong Jack Man was duped into fighting Bruce, essentially the new kid on the scene goaded into a schoolyard brawl without grasping the stakes. But who were those five people that drove over to Oakland with Wong Jack Man? In Oakland, Bruce would only have two witnesses: This made for a total of nine people in the room, only three of whom are alive today.
With a couple of very rare exceptions, Wong Jack Man has stayed perennially quiet on the matter. Linda Lee and David Chin, who were on opposing sides of the conflict, give a generally similar account: The exchange was crude, and far from cinematic. Having lost his footing, Wong had no choice but to concede.
As with any good schoolyard fight, the exaggeration soon took on epic proportions. Perhaps the most absurd of the hyperbole, which is now a regular storyline in the press surrounding the upcoming release of Birth of the Dragon , is that the fight lasted for 20 minutes, a notion which is not only wholly inconsistent to the accounts of all proven eyewitnesses, but contrary to all basic sense for the nature of a street fight.
A rare image of Bruce Lee demonstrating techniques the night before the first Long Beach Tournament, in the summer of In time, the urban mythology surrounding the incident would cite that Wong issued a call for a rematch in his article, though the exact wording suggests otherwise: For a martial artist who all year long had been so loudly professing the effectiveness of his technique against the inferiority of others, Bruce found the Wong Jack Man fight to be a sober reality check, in which both his technique and his conditioning came up very short of his expectations.
The timing was right for Bruce to begin tangibly forming his new system, Jeet Kune Do. In creating Jeet Kune Do, Bruce incorporated elements of Wing Chun, fencing, and American boxing into a minimalist-based approach with a philosophical orientation.
Bruce Lee back row center with one of his early Oakland-era classes operating out of James Lee's bottom row, third from left garage, circa ' Bruce's time in the Bay Area was was essential to his evolution as a martial artist, yet remains a largely obscure period of his iconic life. This is the takeaway that gets lost amid the petty debates over the particulars surrounding the Wong Jack Man fight. I disagreed with him at the time, but he was right.
Charles Russo is a journalist in San Francisco.
We think you'd also like. Thank you You are on the list. This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Most Popular Viewed 1. China and Russia perform controversial experiments to modify atmosphere.
Thank you You are on the list. Wednesday, 28 June, , 3: However, because the fight happened behind closed doors, there are several contradicting accounts of what really happened. Jeet Kune Do One-inch punch Straight blast. Charles Russo is a journalist in San Francisco. The school is still in existence and is run by his former student, Rick Wing.
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