Bruce Lee beaten by Trovador Ramos?

Didn't inosanto start bjj several years after the first UFC he was focused on pushing Kali and Silat back then as were most of his jkd students it was only a few of his students like vunak who bucked that trend

 

IIRC by Vunak's account that was partly because a bunch of them at Inosanto's were already shoot wrestling under Kaminaga i.e. the other route by which MMA was being invented. Which reminds me I really should have mentioned Erik Paulson in that first post; massively influential and from that Inosanto school originally.

 

But none of them brought the Gracie's over or helped start the UFC so didn't influence that, it was more the influence bjj and the Gracie's had on jkd not the other way around. probably the biggest influence from America in that regard was Chuck Norris with his support and assistance to the Machado's.

 

I think you are leaving a lot out.

Without Bruce Lee, according to Dana White and more than one Gracie, more than just an actor, the Gracie family would never have left the Brazilian underground as a sort of super judo. Money buys a lot, but most especially global access.

Watch the part about gloves at the beginning. It's true.

 

I think if anything, they've been very respectful and for good reason. But they've definitely mentioned Bruce Lee and I believe Royce himself was a big fan of Bruce Lee. The little guy!!

How could you watch Bruce Lee and not want to learn every martial art possible? I picked up boxing because of Bruce Lee's writings, way before I could afford HBO or Showtime.

 

The Gracie's were fighting in front of packed crowds in Brazil years before bruce was born, that's a fact,

In the us it was art Davie who gave us the UFC as we know it, not Dana and according to him he wanted to piggy back on the success of actors like segal and JCVD by offering real fights to people.

The biggest influence jkd had on MMA was giving us Forrest Griffin (without him and Bonner and reality TV lol the UFC would have probably folded) but to argue what the singer brothers were teaching to Forrest was jkd and not combat sports with a different name would be strange

 

No doubt he was a huge inspiration, and we might not have those Seagal and Van Damme movies without Bruce Lee.

Technical lineage is a separate matter though, and everyone will just be talking past each other if cultural inspiration and technical lineage are conflated.

 

We also shouldn't forget the thread necro that got us talking: if we're discussing war then Russia, France and the US were synthesising Jiu Jistu, boxing and wrestling during WWI. Bruce Lee did bring the idea of different martial arts together in a NHB competition into popular culture, but that was through his film work, not his JKD training.

 

I'd argue it was really the fans that made UFC happen, and that happened because many millions of people love Bruce Lee's style, because just like Gracie said, Bruce Lee was doing MMA stuff on film in the 70's, complete with punches, kicks, clinching, takedowns and armbars. It made combat sports, in a word, cool. More real.

Comparing the relative popularity of the Gracies versus Bruce Lee, it's really not even close. The accounting of UFC is pretty small compared to the accounting of everything Bruce Lee inspired. As you said yourself, pit fights and deathmatch tournaments in front of spectators is old school stuff. I'm more of a civilized pugilist, and to keep things civilized, it needs to stay in the light, so to speak. And the best thing we've ever figured out using light, imho, is the movies.

What would boxing be without Sylvester Stallone? I'm just saying.

How about instead of actor, we say icon, a Greek word for special. All I know of JKD is that its basically Kung Fu if Kung Fu was basically a way of feasting on any martial art you might come across and smashing it into smithereens to see what you learn about yourself. IT's basically the plot of Kung Fu Panda too, but without Bruce Lee there would be no Kung Fu Panda, right?

 

I don't think this matters, though (the JKD training part). Good film work lasts centuries, it is epic by its very nature, it can last a thousand years. The Third Reich used it, and that's why we have so much knowledge of them.

Who benefited more from Bruce Lee? China or the United States? I'd say the latter. It's hard to find long lineages of fighting icons in the US. They're apparently all the rage in Asia for millenia but suddenly Bruce Lee (born in San Francisco), an American with some sort of mystical Kung Fu lineage, which eventually became the plot of Kung Fu the TV show, with David Carradine. Then Chinese Kung Fu ruled the 70's and 80s, until the 90's when the Gracies brought Vale Tudo to VHS.

 

Oh definitely, I can agree with that. I think we can agree to the quantity of his influence, but I'm talking about the quality of it. Did a huge number of people turn up to their local karate or TKD club because they thought Bruce Lee was cool? Definitely. Did some of those people end up in MMA? Yep. But did Bruce Lee "invent" MMA? Nope. Were early UFC champs beating their opponents with the way of the intercepting fist? Nope.

 

There have been many people claiming to train, fight, or knows Bruce Lee, I take these claims with a grain of salt lol.