The year was 1964. The scene was a small residential garage in Oakland, California, that served as a martial-arts school run by Bruce Lee. The space was cluttered with homemade sparring devices pieced together by Bruce’s assistant James, who was a welder by trade, making it appear like a cross between a boxing gym and a mad-science lab. James locked the door because he knew things were about to get ugly. He had stashed a pistol nearby, just in case the situation got out of control. Bruce’s wife Linda was seated to one side, her belly bulging with their first child. She was surprisingly calm for a woman whose husband was being confronted by a man who came to kick his ass.
That man was Wong Jack Man, who was dressed in a traditional kung-fu robe. He had arrived a minute earlier with three associates. Bruce stood in front of him wearing jeans and a tank top. The two men sized each other up. They shared many traits. They were both 23-year-old martial artists who recently emigrated from Hong Kong. They were both fanatically committed to combat. They were both viewed as rising stars in the California kung-fu community.
Despite their differences, however, Jack Man and Lee had two glaring differences. One was technical, and the other was cultural.
From a technical standpoint, Jack Man employed the Northern Chinese Shaolin style of martial arts with its emphasis on legwork, kicking, and acrobatics. By contrast, Lee primarily used Southern Wing Chun that emphasized close combat, fist strikes, and redirection of attacks.
Culturally, Jack Man was a traditionalist, and he viewed Bruce Lee as a heretical street punk who needed to be taught a lesson. Lee was a vocal critic of the kung-fu establishment, which he publicly roasted for being too rigid, too deferential to hierarchy, and too focused on choreographed sequences. He called the established kung-fu masters “old tigers with no teeth.” Jack Man came tonight to answer that call.
Bruce Lee in 1964 was still an up-and-comer, still obscure, largely unknown outside of the California kung-fu community, and not that well known inside the California kung-fu community. It made sense that he had developed an anti-establishment worldview, considering he never really fit in. He grew up in Hong Kong, which was occupied by Japan during WWII and then taken over by the British when Japan surrendered. Being of Chinese heritage, he clearly didn’t fit into the British establishment. And yet he also didn’t completely fit into Chinese culture because he had European ancestors on his mother’s side. In 1950s Hong Kong, the kung-fu establishment only condoned teaching martial arts to students who were full-blooded Chinese. He faced prejudice from both sides.
Lee’s first kung-fu master, Ip Man, came under pressure for accepting Bruce as a student. He liked Bruce, who was barely a teenager when Bruce joined his school, and he saw tremendous potential in the young student. But the old shifu had to carefully navigate the traditional cultural sensitivities. He allowed Bruce to train privately and did not actively publicize Lee’s mixed heritage.
This need to tiptoe around cultural taboos enraged Bruce. He viewed the kung-fu principle of purity as regressive, upheld primarily to protect the status quo rather than produce the most effective combat techniques. He developed a chip on his shoulder about deference to tradition. It made him question the wisdom of the establishment, and in the world of martial arts so steeped in ways that dated back centuries, this stance by a young student was nothing short of radical.
Lee set his sights on becoming the best fighter possible. He relished the idea that a person of mixed heritage could whoop opponents who stood for an ideal of supposed superiority because of their pure-blooded heritage, whether Chinese, British, or other.
Ip Man, to his credit, taught his students to emphasize practicality. He encouraged them to test the techniques they learned by sparring with opponents outside of the formal school environment. Bruce zealously honed his techniques in street fights, which in 1950s Hong Kong often unfolded on the city’s rooftops.
He began to see that much of traditional kung-fu teaching, with its emphasis on choreographed moves, pre-determined patterns, and rote memory, was unnecessarily self-limiting and ultimately impractical for real combat situations. He saw this as a weakness to exploit. Lee’s view is what Mike Tyson said about boxing decades later: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
So Lee began looking for the best techniques wherever he could find them. He saw effectiveness in lunges and parries of fencing, in jabs and hooks of western boxing, in the nimble footwork of dancing, and elsewhere. He also championed efficient kinesthetics, expending minimal energy to create maximum speed and maximum force. In the context of singular links, he set out to combine these elements that normally exist in different domains so as to create a martial art that was more effective than all the others.
In 1958, when Bruce turned 18, he was beginning to show the benefits of his prodigious training across multiple disciplines. That year he claimed the Hong Kong interschool boxing title by beating champion Gary Elms, he won the city’s cha-cha dance championship, and he defeated a number of kung-fu rooftop opponents. Unfortunately, since he was also getting into trouble with the police, and his parents predicted his street-fighting lifestyle would land him in jail or worse, they arranged for him to leave Hong Kong and join his sister Agnes in California.
By the time he was standing in front of Wong Jack Man in the Oakland garage, he had spent the prior six years prolifically developing his own mash-up of techniques and philosophies under a unifying approach.
The details of what happened that night remain somewhat disputed, but the outcome was clear: Bruce Lee beat Jack Man in combat, but did so in ways that exposed shortcomings of Lee’s technique. Jack Man’s retreats caused Lee to expend too much energy pursuing him, which negated many of the efficiencies he had developed, leaving Lee spent and depressed.
Yes, it was a win. But it was an ugly win that exposed his novel approach to be just as impractical as he claimed the other approaches to be. He had won the battle, but not the war. He had spent years talking trash about the others, but now he felt hypocritical. He had set out to create the pinnacle of martial arts, but the battle proved he had failed.
This event was a classic example of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, provoking Lee into deep introspection and self-evaluation. To Lee’s credit, he understood that in order to achieve the highest possible level of combat, his approach needed to become even broader. He realized that, above all, the fighter should be flexible to his opponent and to the situation at hand, whatever that may be. He began searching for a concept or archetype that could further guide his development. And eventually, he found it in the analogy of water. Water flows, it moves, it absorbs, it molds to its environment, it crashes. “Be like water,” Lee is often quoted as saying.
Water became Lee’s singular link. We’ll unpack this in the next missive.