Bruce Lee & Me

A reflection on the 50th anniversary of my friend's death.

What If Bruce Lee Had Lived?

Fifty years ago, I was on my way to visit Bruce Lee when I learned of his death. He was 32, and I was 25. He had been not only my martial arts teacher but my close friend, and I was still young enough to not yet have experienced much profound loss in my life, which is why his death hit me so hard. I felt like I’d tumbled overboard from a ship that had sailed on without me. I was alone in a vast dark ocean, bobbing up and down in the turbulent waves, struggling to tread water.

Fifty years later, I am way too familiar with profound loss. Family. Friends. Heroes. With each loss, I still feel the pain of my heart being twisted and squeezed like a sponge wrung dry. But I recover. And await the next loss.

There’s a poem by Richard Wilbur called “The Juggler” that begins:

A ball will bounce; but less and less. It's not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.

That ball is our heart, and though we are resilient in overcoming life’s tragedies, sometimes we resent it and even grow weary of having to bounce back. Motivational speakers are fond of saying it doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get up. But sometimes, it does matter how many times you get knocked down.

Bruce was 32 when he died, in his physical prime of muscle, sinew, and athleticism. He had a cocky smile that the young can afford because their bodies haven’t yet begun to betray them in a hundred small and big ways. To the world, he remains frozen in youth with all its vitality and possibilities.

If he’d lived, he’d have been 83 today—the same age as Chuck Norris, John Cleese, Al Pacino, Lily Tomlin, Smokey Robinson, and Ringo Starr. He wouldn’t be jumping and flipping and hitting, but he’d probably be making movies in which other martial artists would be jumping and flipping and hitting. He’d still be telling stories. He’d still be a husband, a father, a grandfather.

He’d still be my friend.

To celebrate Bruce, I’m reprinting the excerpt from my autobiography Becoming Kareem, in which I describe our friendship. I hope it captures my appreciation, admiration, and love.

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Bruce Lee Becomes My Teacher

I met Bruce in 1967, the fall semester of my junior year at UCLA. He was not yet the international superstar he would soon become. He was just a struggling actor teaching martial arts to pay the rent and support his wife and baby boy.

I’d been training in aikido during the summer back home in New York City. Aikido is a modern Japanese martial art that means “the way of harmonious spirit,” so-called because it was created as a way to defend oneself without causing injury to the attacker. I got the idea of taking up martial arts the previous year when I saw one of the Zatoichi movies at the Kokusai Theater on Wilshire Blvd. near campus. Zatoichi is a blind swordsman character wandering through Japan in the 1830s in a popular series of Japanese movies. After watching the balletic movements of Zatoichi as he gracefully evaded violent gangs of opponents and left them all helpless, I figured learning that kind of bodily control could only help me in games when I was being double- and triple-teamed. Instead of brute force, I would slide and roll and slip by them without fouling. After only a couple months, I quickly found my senses sharped and my reflexes quicker.

When I returned for the fall semester, I knew I wanted to continue my training so I asked a friend of mine who ran Black Belt magazine where I should go in Los Angeles. He told me about this young guy out in Culver City, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, who had played the martial arts sidekick Kato on the single season of the TV series, The Green Hornet. I was a little skeptical of training with a television actor, but my friend assured me that this man was the real deal. He had already built a reputation as something of a maverick in the martial arts community, with his own unorthodox ideas of combat, but his skills were widely acclaimed to be remarkable. He was known for demonstrating the one-inch punch, a punch from only one inch away from the target that generated enough force to break boards or knock an opponent to the floor.

Bruce was the kind of person who could win you over within twenty seconds of meeting him. Most the martial arts instructors I had met before were very stiff and formal, constantly demanding overt demonstrations of respect, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Not Bruce. He greeted me with a broad smile and friendly demeanor and right away I knew this was not a scowling teacher from Japanese films demanding bowing obedience. We talked UCLA basketball for a while and then got down to business.

Bruce asked his wife, Linda, to assist him in a demonstration. He told me to hold a thick training pad to my chest and instructed Linda to kick the pad.

“Bruce, I don’t think this will work,” I said. “I’m two feet taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Linda.”

Bruce smiled but said nothing.

“Just hold it up to your chest, Lew,” Linda said.

My chest was higher than her head so I lowered it a little.

“Your chest,” she said. “Do you want Bruce to show you where that is?”

“Okay, okay,” I said. I held it up to my chest, maybe even a few inches higher.

“Ready?” Bruce said.

“Ready,” I said, a little smugly.

Bruce nodded at Linda.

Suddenly Linda fired off a kick that not only reached the pad, but the impact rocked me backward a few feet, readjusted my spine, and possibly rearranged the order of my teeth.

They stood there smiling at the shocked expression on my face.

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my chest. “Teach me that.”

Ironically, Bruce’s approach was very similar to that of my UCLA coach, John Wooden. They both emphasized practicing fundamentals over and over. Bruce used to say, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” In sports, we call this concept “muscle memory.” By practicing the same movement over and over and over, your body will react without the brain telling it to. Those fractions of seconds that are saved can be the difference between sinking a basket or having it blocked, between landing a punch or having it parried. For me, my hook shot was the one kick practiced 10,000 times.

Both also emphasized preparation. The winning athlete prepared for competition by training the body and the mind to anticipate all contingencies. While Coach Wooden told us, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail,” Bruce would say, “Preparation for tomorrow is hard work today.” Seventeenth Century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Book of Five Rings, which Bruce and I often discussed at great length, wrote, “You can only fight the way you practice.” The message from all of three coaches was the same and I took it to heart. I dedicated myself to preparation by maintaining complete focus during basketball practice and my training with Bruce. As a result, I became stronger, faster, and a much more intense player.

Bruce’s most significant teaching was that, when it came to martial arts, there was no single technique or philosophy that was the correct way. This was very different from other teachers who seemed to each belong to a single school of teaching. This was how Bruce developed his Jeet Kune Do (Way of Intercepting Fist) method: each fighter is unique as is each fight. Therefore, the fighter must constantly adapt, using multiple techniques and approaches. Bruce’s philosophy of training followed another Musashi teaching, “When I apply the principle of strategy to the different arts and crafts, I no longer need a teacher in any domain.” This was also a belief of Coach Wooden. Both wanted their pupils to reach a level where they could teach themselves how to continue to improve.

Bruce was—to me, to his friends, and to himself—foremost a philosopher. Although it was his almost supernatural physical abilities that attracted his students, including movie stars such as Steve McQueen and James Colburn, it was his equally remarkable intellectual abilities that kept us coming back. He had taken philosophy and psychology classes in college and was anxious to discuss the principles he’d learned. Bruce and I spent as much time talking about books as we did sparring on the mat.

Bruce and I had something else in common. We both had experienced brutal discrimination. Bruce came from an acting family and had been performing on stage and in Chinese films since he was a child. When he came to the U.S. from Hong Kong as a teenager, he briefly abandoned acting to pursue martial arts. Eventually, he did return to acting as Kato and in small parts in TV shows and movies. He was driven to share his philosophy of martial arts with the world through his acting. But Hollywood saw him only as an Asian and the only acting parts for Asians were villains or servants. He expected his big break in 1971 when he pitched a TV show that he maintained would become the hit series, Kung Fu. He had hoped to star in the series as the half-Chinese martial artist in the Old West, but that role went to non-martial artist, non-Chinese actor David Carradine. (Warner Bros. claimed they had been developing the series before him and Lee was never credited.) To his credit, Bruce publically stated that he understood the financial reasons for the casting choice. But his frustration with Hollywood prompted him to return to Hong Kong to make movies.

In Hong Kong, he started making martial arts films like Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon, which became huge international hits. Finally, he had the fame and success that had been denied him in America. And kids all around the world were flocking to martial arts studios to learn Bruce’s Jeet Kune Do.

In July of 1973, I was twenty-five years old and spending my summer break from the Milwaukee Bucks letting my nerd flag fly by traveling throughout the Middle East learning Arabic. On my way home, I decided to stop off in Hong Kong to visit Bruce. We had recently done a movie together called Game of Death, in which I played someone wearing awesome sunglasses who gets killed by Bruce. I think my sunglasses turned in a better performance than I did, but Bruce was his usual dynamic, funny, and cocky onscreen persona that the world so loved to watch. And we had great fun shooting that scene together.

When I landed at the Singapore airport, I saw the headlines that Bruce had died. I was stunned, of course, and saddened that I had lost such a good friend. But I was also aware of how profoundly his death would affect the rest of the world. He was only thirty-two when he died, but he had already revolutionized the way the world saw martial arts, both as a form of entertainment in movies and on TV, and, more importantly, as a philosophy and way of life.

It’s another teaching of Musashi that I think most describes Bruce Lee. Despite having had many ups and downs in his life, despite having been poor and rich, despite being snubbed and internationally acclaimed, he lived by this simple guiding Musashi principle: “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.”

I was twenty when I met Bruce Lee, but his teachings, both in his studio and by his example, have stayed with me the rest of my life.

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I hope this gave you some small part of the joy that Bruce gave to me.