BRUCE LEE’S TOUGHEST FIGHT
by Michael Dorgan (from Official Karate, July 1980)
Considering the skill of the opponents and the complete absence of referees, rules, and safety equipment, it was one hell of a fight that took place that day in December. It may have been the most savagely elegant exhibition of unarmed combat of the century. Yet, at a time when top fighters tend to display their skills only in huge closed-circuited arenas, this battle was fought in virtual secrecy behind locked doors. And at a time when millions of dollars can ride on the outcome of a championship fight, these champions of another sort competed not for money, but for more personal and passionate reasons. The time was late winter, 1964; the setting was a small kung fu school in Oakland, California. Poised at the center of the room, with approximately 140 pounds packed tightly on his 5’7" frame, was the operator of the school, a 24-year old martial artist of Chinese ancestry but American birth who, within a few years, would skyrocket to international attention as a combination fighter/film star. A few years after that, at age 32, he would die under mysterious circumstances. His name, of course, was Bruce Lee. Also poised in the center of the room was another martial artist. Taller but lighter, with his 135 pounds stretched thinly over 5’10", this fighter was also 24 and also of Chinese descent. Born in Hong Kong and reared in the south of mainland China, he had only recently arrived in San Francisco’s teeming Chinatown, just across the bay from Oakland. Though over the next 15 years he would become widely known in martial arts circles and would train some of America’s top martial artists, he would retain a near disdain for publicity and the commercialization of his art, and consequently would remain unknown to the general public. His name: Wong Jack Man.
What happened after the fighters approached the center of the room has become a chapter of Chinatown’s "wild history," that branch of Chinese history usually anchored in fact but always richly embellished by fantasy, a history that tells much about a time and place with little that’s reliable about any particular incident. Exactly how the fight proceeded and just who won are still matters of controversy, and will likely remain so. But from the few available firsthand accounts and other evidence, it is possible to piece together a reasonably reliable picture that reveals two overriding truths. First, considering the skill of the opponents and the complete absence of referees, rules, and safety equipment, it was one hell of a fight that took place that day in December. And second, Bruce Lee, who was soon to rival Mao Tse Tung as the world’s most famous Chinese personality, was dramatically affected by the fight, perhaps fatally so.
Due to the human desire to be known as an eye witness to a famous event, it is easier to obtain firsthand accounts of the fight from persons who were not there than from those who were. As to how many persons actually viewed the contest, even that is a point of dispute. Bruce Lee’s wife Linda recalls a total of 13 persons, including herself. But the only person that she identifies other than her husband and his associate James Lee, who died of cancer shortly before her husband died, is Wong Jack Man. Wong, meanwhile, remembers only seven persons being present, including the three Lees. Of the three persons other than the Lees and himself, only one, a tai chi teacher named William Chen (not to be confused with the William Chi Cheng Chen who teaches the art in New York), could be located. Chen recalls about 15 persons being present but can identify none other than Wong and the Lees. So except for a skimpy reference to the fight by Bruce Lee himself in a magazine interview, we are left with only three firsthand accounts of the battle. They are accounts which vary widely.
Linda Lee, in her book Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew,
initially dismisses the fight as follows: "The two came out, bowed formally
and then began to fight. Wong adopted a classic stance whereas Bruce,
who at the time was still using his Wing Chun style, produced a series
of straight punches. "Within a minute, Wong’s men were trying to stop
the fight as Bruce began to warm to his task. James Lee warned them to
let the fight continue. A minute later, with Bruce continuing the attack
in earnest, Wong began to backpedal as fast as he could. For an instant,
indeed, the scrap threatened to degenerate into a farce as Wong actually
turned and ran. But Bruce pounced on him like a springing leopard and
brought him to the floor where he began pounding him into a state of demoralization.
"Is that enough?" shouted Bruce.
"That’s enough!" pleaded Wong in desperation.
So the entire matter was just another quick triumph for the man who frequently
boasted he could whip any man in the world. Or was it? Later in her book,
Linda Lee hints that the fight may have amounted to more than the brief
moment of violent diversion she had earlier described. "Bruce’s whole
life was an evolving process - and this was never seen to greater effect
than in his work with the martial arts," she begins. "The clash with Wong
Jack Man metamorphosed his own personal expression of kung fu. Until this
battle, he had largely been content to improvise and expand on his original
Wing Chun style, but then he suddenly realized that although he had won
comparatively easily, his performance had been neither crisp of efficient.
The fight, he realized, ought to have ended within a few seconds of him
striking the first blows - instead of which it had dragged on for three
minutes. In addition, at the end, Bruce had felt unusually winded which
proved to him he was far from perfect condition. So he began to dissect
the fight, analyzing where he had gone wrong and seeking to find ways
where he could have improved his performance. It did not take him long
to realize that the basis of his fighting art, the Wing Chun style, was
insufficient. It laid too much stress on hand techniques, had very few
kicking techniques and was, essentially, partial."
Still later in the book, Linda Lee adds: "The Wong Jack
Man fight also caused Bruce to intensify his training methods. From that
date, he began to seek out more and more sophisticated and exhaustive
training methods. I shall try to explain these in greater detail later,
but in general the new forms of training meant that Bruce was always doing
something, always training some part of his body or keeping it in condition."
Whether Bruce Lee’s intensified training was to his benefit or to his
destruction is a matter to be discussed later. For now, merely let it
be observed that the allegedly insignificant "scrap" described early by
Linda Lee has now been identified by her as cause for her husband to intensify
his training and serves as the pivotal reason for his abandoning the fighting
style he had practiced religiously for more than 10 years.
That the fight with Wong was the reason Lee quit, and then later repudiated
the Wing Chun style, was confirmed by Lee himself in an interview with
Black Belt. "I’d gotten into a fight in San Francisco (a reference, no
doubt, to the Bay Area rather than the city) with a Kung-Fu cat, and after
a brief encounter the son-of-a-bitch started to run. I chased him and,
like a fool, kept punching him behind his head and back. Soon my fists
began to swell from hitting his hard head. Right then I realized Wing
Chun was not too practical and began to alter my way of fighting."
For those who have difficulty believing that a quick if clumsy victory
over a worthy opponent was sufficient reason for Lee to abandon a fighting
style that had seen him through dozens of vicious street fights as a youth
in Hong Kong, where his family had moved shortly after his birth in San
Francisco, a more substantial reason for Lee to change styles can be found
in the account of the fight given by Wong Jack Man.
According to Wong, the battle began with him bowing and
offering his hand to Lee in the traditional manner of opening a match.
Lee, he say, responded by pretending to extend a friendly hand only to
suddenly transform the hand into a four-pronged spear aimed at Wong’s
eyes.
"That opening move," says Wong, "set the tone for Lee’s fight." Wing Chun
has but three sets, the solo exercises which contain the full body of
technique of any style, and one of those sets is devoted to deadly jabbing
and gouging attacks directed primarily at the eyes and throat. "It was
those techniques," say Wong, "which Lee used most."
There were flurries of straight punches and repeated kicks at his groin,
adds Wong, but mostly, relentlessly, there were those darting deadly finger
tips trying to poke out his eyes or puncture his throat. And what he say
he anticipated as serious but sportsmanly comparison of skill suddenly
became an exercise in defending his life.
Wong says that before the fight began Lee remarked, in reference to a
mutual acquaintance who had helped instigate the match, "You’ve been killed
by your friend." Shortly after the bout commenced, he adds, he realized
Lee’s words had been said in earnest.
"He really wanted to kill me," says Wong.
In contrast to Lee’s three Wing Chun sets, Wong, as the grand master of
the Northern Shaolin style, knew dozens. But most of what he used against
Lee, says Wong, was defensive. Wong says he parried Lee’s kicks with his
legs while using his hand and arms to protect his head and torso, only
occasionally delivering a stinging blow to Lee’s head or body. He fought
defensively, explains Wong, in part because of Lee’s relentless aggressive
strategy, and in part because he feared the consequences of responding
in kind to Lee’s attempt to kill him. In pre-Revolutionary China, fights
to the finish were often allowed by law, but Wong knew that in modern-day
America, a crippling or killing blow, while winning a victory, might also
win him a jail sentence.
That, says Wong, is why he failed to deliver a devastating right-hand
blow on any of the three occasions he had Lee’s head locked under his
left arm. Instead, he says, he released his opponent each time, only to
have an even more enraged Bruce Lee press on with his furious attack.
"He would never say he lost until you killed him," says Wong. And despite
his concern with the legal consequences, Wong says that killing Lee is
something he began to consider. "I remember thinking, ‘If he injures me,
if he really hurts me, I’ll have to kill him."
But according to Wong, before that need arose, the fight
had ended, due more to what Linda Lee described as Lee’s "unusually winded"
condition than to a decisive blow by either opponent. "It had lasted,"
says Wong, "at least 20 minutes, maybe 25."
Though William Chen’s recollections of the fight are more vague than the
other two accounts, they are more in alignment with Wong’s than Lee’s.
On the question of duration, for example, Chen, like Wong, remembers the
fight continuing for "20 or 25 minutes." Also, he cannot recall either
man being knocked down. "Certainly," he says, "Wong was not brought to
the floor and pounded into a ‘state of demoralization.’"
Regarding Wong’s claim that three times he had Lee’s head locked under
his arm, Chen says he can neither confirm or deny it. He remembers the
fighters joining on several occasions, but he could not see very clearly
what was happening at those moments.
Chen describes the outcome of the battle as "a tie." He adds, however,
that whereas an enraged Bruce Lee had charged Wong "like a mad bull,"
obviously intent upon doing him serious injury. Wong had displayed extraordinary
restraint by never employing what were perhaps his most dangerous weapons
- his devastating kicks.
A principal difference between northern and southern Chinese
fighting styles is that the northern styles give much more emphasis to
kicking, and Northern Shaolin had armed Wong with kicks of blinding speeds
and crushing power. But before the fight, recalls Chen, "Sifu Wong said
he would not use his kicks; he thought they were too dangerous." And despite
the dangerous developments that followed that pledge, Chen adds that Wong
"kept his word." Though Chen’s recollections exhaust the firsthand accounts,
there are further fragments of evidence to indicate how the fight ended.
Ming Lum, who was then a San Francisco martial arts promoter, says he
did not attend the fight because he was a friend of both Lee and Wong,
and feared that a battle between them would end in serious injury, maybe
even death. "Who," he asks, "would have stopped them?" But Lum did see
Wong the very next day at the Jackson Café, where the young grand master
earned his living as a waiter (he had, in fact, worked a full shift at
the busy Chinatown restaurant the previous day before fighting Lee). And
Lum says the only evidence he saw of the fight was a scratch above one
eye, a scratch Wong says was inflicted when Lee went for his eyes as he
extended his arm for the opening handshake.
"Some people say Bruce Lee beat up Jack Man bad," note Lum. "But if he
had, the man would not have been to work the next day." By Lum’s assessment,
the fact that neither man suffered serious injury in a no-holds-barred
battle indicates that both were "very, very good." Both men were no doubt,
very, very, good. But Wong, after the fight, felt compelled to assert,
boldly and publicly, that he was the better of the two. He did so, he
says, only because Lee violated their agreement to not discuss the fight.
According to Wong, immediately following the match Lee
had asked that neither man discuss it. Discussion would lead to more argument
over who had won, a matter which could never be resolved as there had
been no judges. Wong said he agreed.
But within a couple of weeks, he says, Lee violated the agreement by claiming
in an interview that he had defeated an unnamed challenger. Though Lee
had not identified Wong as the loser, Wong says it was obvious to all
of Chinatown that Lee was speaking of Wong. It had already become common
knowledge within the Chinese community that the two had fought. In response
to Lee’s interview, Wong wrote a detailed description of the fight which
concluded with an open invitation to Lee to meet him for a public bout
if Lee was not satisfied with Wong’s account. Wong’s version of the fight,
along with the challenge, was run as the top story on the front page of
San Francisco’s Chinese language Chinese Pacific Weekly. But Bruce Lee,
despite his reputation for responding with fists of fury to the slightest
provocation, remained silent.
Now death has rendered the man forever silent. And the question of whether
Wong presented Lee, who is considered by many to have been the world’s
top martial artist, with the only defeat of his adult life will remain,
among those concerned about such matters, forever a controversial one.
Even those Bruce Lee fans who accepts the evidence as supportive of Wong’s
account of the fight may argue that the outcome would have been different
had the two battled a few years after Lee had developed his own style,
Jeet Kune Do. But while it is true that Jeet Kune Du provided lee with
a wider range of weapons, particularly kicks, it is also true that Wong
continued to grow as a martial artist after the fight. Only after that
battle, says Wong, did he develop tremendous chi powers from the practice
of Tai Chi, Hsing I, and Pakua.
Martial art styles can be divided roughly into two categories:
external and internal. External styles, which are also called "hard" styles
and which include such American favorites as Japanese karate and Korean
taekwondo, rely primarily upon muscular strength, while internal or "soft"
styles, such as Japanese Aikido and the three above-mentioned Chinese
styles, cultivate a more mysterious energy called chi.
Although everybody has chi, few people have much of it, and fewer still
know how to express it. But according to the Chinese, this precious elixir
can be cultivated and controlled through the exercises of the internal
martial arts styles.
Specifically, they say chi can be brewed in the tan tien, a spot about
an inch below the navel. Once the tan tien is filled, the chi supposedly
spills out into other parts of the body, where it is stored in the marrow
of the bones. It is said that as a martial artist develops chi energy,
his bones become hard, his sinews tough, is muscles supple and relaxed,
which allow the chi to circulate freely through the body.
Chi usually takes much longer to develop than muscular strength, but it
is considered a much more formidable energy. In normal times it is said
to serve as a source of extraordinary vitality and as a guardian against
my diseases. And in battle, it is said to provide a person with awesome
power and near invulnerability.
Though Wong had been trained in the internal styles while still in China,
up until the time he fought Lee he had concentrated mainly on the refinement
of his elegantly athletic Northern Shaolin, which, like Lee’s Wing Chun,
is an external style. Following the battle with Lee, Wong would train
in the internal styles until he had developed such chi power that he can,
according to Peter Ralston, a former student of Wong and the first non-Asian
to win the Chinese Martial Arts World Championships in Taiwan, take a
punch to any part of his body without injury or even discomfort. As for
Wong’s offensive capabilities, they have apparently never been tested.
Regarding the question of how much Lee grew as a martial
artist after the fight, Wong is convinced that the benefits to Lee from
his homemade style were more than offset by the damage it did him. Wong
even goes so far as to speculate that Jeet Kune Do may have caused Lee’s
death.
Most martial arts masters agree that just as serious training in a proper
method can greatly improve one’s health, strenuous and prolonged training
in an improper method can destroy health. Of the health damage is attributed
to improper breathing practices, and often the damage is to the brain.
Special use of the breath is acknowledged by every martial arts style
as a key element to developing power, though different styles have different
breathing methods. Proper methods can be simply categorized as those which
develop power while building health, and improper methods as those which
either fail to build power or build it but at the expense of one’s health.
Though many of the ways in which breathing methods affect health remain
mysterious, the methods themselves - at least the proper methods - have
been empirically refined over many generations. Wong’s Northern Shaolin,
for example, can be traced back to the great Shaolin Temple of more than
a thousand years ago, which is considered the source of Chinese martial
arts. While the Wing Chun practiced by Lee until his fight with Wong also
had a long period of development and refinement, the style he put together
after the fight was a chop suey of many and varied ingredients.
That Jeet Kune Do lacked the cohesion and harmony of a style in the traditional
sense was something acknowledged by Lee himself, who preferred to call
it a "sophisticated form of street fighting" rather than a style. After
abandoning Wing Chin, Lee developed a disdain for all traditional styles,
which he considered restrictive and ineffective. He even went so far as
to place outside his school a mock tombstone that read: "In memory of
a once fluid man crammed and distorted by the classical mess." It is grimly
ironic that it would be Lee would be in need of a tombstone long before
the man, trained by and loyal to the "classical mess," who was almost
certainly his most formidable opponent.
It cannot be proven, of course, that Lee’s fatal edema of the brain was
caused by Jeet Kune Do, just as it could not be proven his death was brought
on by any of the other rumored causes ranging from illicit drugs to excessive
sex to blows on the head. Wong thinks, to serve as a caution to those
who believe they can, by themselves, develop the knowledge it has taken
others many generations of cumulative effort to acquire.
Perhaps it is because he gives so much credit to those
who came before him that Wong’s voice is absent of boast when he says
his art was superior to Lee’s. But while to him that is a matter of simple
fact, Wong, aware that legends are larger than men, is not optimistic
about ever being accepted as the winner of the fight. He says, however,
that what people think regarding the outcome of the fight is less important
to him than what they think provoked the battle in the first place.
In Linda Lee’s account, which has been repeated in a number of Bruce Lee
biographies, Wong is portrayed not only as a loser but also as a villian.
According to Ms. Lee, Wong provoked the fight in an attempt to force her
husband to stop teaching Kung Fu to Caucasians.
After sketching a brief history of Chinese martial arts up to the Boxer
Rebellion, she writes: "Since then - and the attitude is understandable
- Chinese, particularly in America, have been reluctant to disclose these
secrets to Caucasians. It became an unwritten law that the art should
be taught only to Chinese. Bruce considered such thinking completely outmoded
and when it was argued that white men, if taught the secrets, would use
the art to injure the Chinese, he pointed out that if a white man really
wanted to injure a Chinese, there were plenty of other ways he could do
it. "However, Bruce soon found that at first his views were not shared
by members of the Chinese community in San Francisco, particularly those
in martial arts’ circles. Several months after he and James Lee had begun
teaching, a kung fu expert called Wong Jack Man turned up at Bruce’s kwoon
(school) on Broadway. Wong had just recently arrived in San Francisco’s
Chinatown from Hong Kong and was seeking to establish himself at the time,
all his pupils being strictly pure Chinese. Three other Chinese accompanied
Wong Jack Man who handed Bruce an ornate scroll which appears to have
been an ultimatum from the San Francisco martial arts community. Presumably,
if Bruce lost the challenge, he was either to close down his Institute
or stop teaching Caucasians."
So by Linda Lee’s account, her husband had suddenly found
himself in a position no less heroic than of having to defend, possibly
to the death, the right to teach Caucasians the ancient Chinese fighting
secrets. It is a notion that Wong finds ridiculous.
The reason he showed up at Lee’s school that day, says Wong, is because
a mutual acquaintance had hand-delivered a note from Lee inviting him
to fight. The note was sent, say Wong, after he had requested a public
bout with Lee after Lee had boasted during a demonstration at a Chinatown
theater that he could beat any martial artist in San Francisco and had
issued an open challenge to fight anyone who thought he could prove him
wrong. As for those in attendance at the fight, Wong says he only knew
of few of them, and those barely. Certainly, he says, no group had come
as formal representative of the San Francisco martial arts community.
Wong attributes both Lee’s initial challenge and his response to the same
emotion, to arrogance. "If I had it to do over," he says, " I wouldn’t."
But while admitting to youthful arrogance, Wong strongly contests Linda
Lee’s allegation that he was guilty of trying to stop Bruce Lee from teaching
Caucasians.
It is true, say Wong, that most - but not all - of his students during
his first years were teaching were Chinese. But that was true, he adds,
only because few Americans outside of Chinese communities had even heard
of kung fu. Americans who then knew anything at all of the martial arts
most likely knew of Japanese judo or karate. They would not hear of kung
fu until several years later, when it would be made famous by the dazzling
choreography's of Bruce Lee.
Far from attempting to keep kung fu secret and exclusive, Wong observes
that his was the first school in San Francisco’s Chinatown to operate
with open doors. That the other kung fu schools then in existence conducted
classes behind locked doors was due more to the instructor’s fears of
being challenged, say Wong, than to a refusal to teach Caucasians. Once
Caucasians became interested in kung fu, it would be Wong who would train
some of the best of them, including Ralston and several other leading
West Coast instructors. And all of these students of Wong who currently
teaches at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center would be taught for a monthly
fee amounting to a fraction of the hourly rate (in some cases $500) charged
by the man who allegedly fought for the right to teach them.