Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, the son of a Cantonese opera
singer. He learned Wing Chun from Ip Man, became a cha-cha dance champion, and was sent
back to America at eighteen after too many street fights caught the attention of the
wrong people. He arrived in Seattle with $100 and no plan beyond teaching what he knew.
In 1964, at a martial arts tournament in Long Beach, he gave a demonstration that stopped
the room — a one-inch punch that sent a man stumbling backward, two-finger push-ups, a
speed that cameras had trouble tracking. He was 23. That same year, a Wing Chun master
named Wong Jack Man challenged him to a fight. The bout lasted three minutes. Lee won,
but the experience changed him — he decided traditional styles were too rigid, too
formal, too slow. He began dismantling everything he knew.
Jeet Kune Do — the Way of the Intercepting Fist — was not a style. It was an anti-style.
Take what is useful. Reject what is useless. Add what is specifically your own.
He filled notebooks with observations, diagrams, philosophical arguments. He read
Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Descartes. The physical and the philosophical were never
separate to him.
Hollywood wanted him as a sidekick. He wanted to be a lead. When they gave the Kung Fu
TV role to David Carradine, he went to Hong Kong. The Big Boss, Fist of Fury,
The Way of the Dragon — three films in two years, each a sensation. Enter the Dragon
was in post-production when he died on July 20, 1973, of a cerebral edema.
He was thirty-two. The film made $200 million.
