What do you guys think about Bruce Lee?

maybe im not viewing the same clip as you, because other than both using a punch bag theres not much the same about those two clips: the punches thrown, head movement and intent are totally different to me

 

Undeniable:

* BL became a Martial Art Icon, and if he wasn't any good, he would not have so much exposure

* He popularized Chinese Martial Arts

* He got the world to respect Chinese/Asians a little more

 

*shrugs* possibly not - my main contention is that if you look at Dempsey on the bag it is far from stellar in comparsion to something like this

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4WnPp754Uc"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4WnPp754Uc[/ame]

But Jack has a different end goal in mind

If you look at he full footage of Bruce on the bag it seems he is actually giving an impromptu demo of how to pressure the bag - note he is BK and has to take his shades off

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c117fXy7cGE"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c117fXy7cGE[/ame]

It isn't great footage of technique as such, but it is also not a workout as much as a demo for a private student

Although a JKD'er I am no nut hugger, but equally will not hate for it's own sake

 

I think he was a really good martial artist, and a supremely tough guy. That said he's not a personal hero of mine nor do I hold him above other great names in the martial arts world. He made thoroughly bad movies that I enjoy hugely, but I honestly prefer Jackie chan in the regard.

 

I think he's dead however I don't know for sure. He could be hanging out with Elvis.

 

Absolutely!

In terms of general physicality and body control, I much prefer watching Jackie Chan.

His clowning, free-running, acrobatics and athleticism are incredible. His stunts and fight choreography during his Hong Kong days blow me away.

I think Bruce Lee is far more influential for how others have run with his ideas than anything he actually did himself.

Though if Dan Inosanto says Bruce always got the better of him in sparring, he must have been pretty darn good!

 

Not just Dan but Larry Hartsell too - and Larry could throwdown with the best of them

 

Are Dan and Larry any good? Just asking out of interest, as i've never seen any footage of them

 

Go to youtube then come back

 

Dan Inosanto has probably forgotten more about martial arts than the whole MAP collective will ever know.

 

He pioneered the Christmas Tree back and wrote a lot about his methods for honing deep cut abs and lats which spread like wildfire in the American MA circles due to his being involved with all the big wigs in American and Hong Kong MA – not to mention how it affected the average Joe watching his movies. Pretty much every major bodybuilder of that era credits Lee as being, while not the first, the most visible and revolutionary proponent of working hard to create the perfectly sculpted body as opposed to the bulky body, and his experimentations with how to get such a body through both revolutionary fitness training and diet has been taken seriously ever since in modern bodybuilding, general athletic sports, and MMA and vale tudo. He was one of the first proponents of definition as opposed to sheer bulk; of organized and scientific bodybuilding to aid realistic MA. Athletic body building in general changed pretty drastically once Bruce came on the scene and can be followed in the literature going from the focus on bulk no matter the cost (being misshapenly huge) to being symmetrical and well defined, and this especially resonated with martial artists wanting to get muscular and toned (which is also attributed to Lee's impact in 70s and post-70s American MA). Bruce’s public image gave people, athletes and non-athletes, something to aspire to be physically and his cultural impact is pretty undeniable in this respect. The man had one of the most incredible bodies of all time and he was so visible. Very few people looked like Bruce before Bruce came along and caught people’s attention, especially martial artists’ attention.

Before Bruce came along there was a popular stigma in athletic fitness that if you trained like a bodybuilder you’d hurt your speed and flexibility. Bruce destroyed that notion and showed that you can tweak bodybuilding methods in ways that actually enhance your overall ability as a fighter – not only building muscle tone but creating better avenues for stamina endurance and flexibility and speed and dexterity. Before Bruce Lee came along, martial artists in general didn’t value weight training and athletic dieting like they did afterwards. If you look at modern MMA training, you can trace so much of the curriculum back to the ideas that Lee made popular and helped spread in the 70s. The man built personal programs for everyday of the week and wrote about them in detail and it’s amazing how mirrored they are in modern MMA and athletics in general – and if you talk to the old guys involved in modern MMA it seems pretty clear that all this is more than correlation alone. Back in the 70s and 80s trainers and athletes wanted to know how look and move like Bruce Lee, so naturally they researched what he did and that knowledge has reverberated through real health science to this day.

According to his wife, he read a lot of science books on kinesiology as well and wrote about what he’d learned and shared it with the community at large. When you’re a big movie star like he was and your ideas get paid attention to and practiced by legit athletes and sports fighters you create an impact in the real world. He had specially designed workout equipment built for him too and you can find their successors and offshoots in every boxing and MMA gym in the world nowadays to help build forearm strength and stamina. As far as dieting goes, he experimented with high protein drinks and vitamins long before doing so got popular. He would literally pick and choose the various minerals, vitamins, and supplements he wanted to experiment with and buy them in bulk from around the world so he could mix them together in a full package he’d intake each day. Today you find all this stuff in the same package everywhere you go thanks to the advent of the modern multi-supplement industry. He made this stuff fashionable and it spread like it probably wouldn’t have for a long time if he hadn’t come on the scene. Lol, he even used electro-shock muscle therapy and stuff to help rebuild damaged muscles long before it was a norm and people thought he was crazy for doing so. He had an important influence due to his fame and that’s what I mean when I say he was an inspiration for fitness and diet in modern athletics and martial arts. He experimented with what we take for granted today and he made it cool and popular.

Yeah, this is very true. And too you hear people like Sugar Ray Leonard, Mike Tyson, and Manny Pacquiao talk about how they were influenced by his quickness, directness, head movements, and footwork. I mean, the fact they endorse Lee’s boxing style isn’t some nail in the coffin argument saying that Lee was a great boxer, but you have to think twice when pro-boxers take him seriously. And yeah, just look at Dempsey. Dempsey was an incredible boxer and they shared quite a bit in common.

Yeah, that’s true. As far as I know there is no documented evidence proving that Lee fought in the Honk Kong ISABC and beat 3 fighters in order to face off against and knock out Gary Elms. This story is an anecdote from Lee’s family and a few eye-witnesses at the alleged tournament. The reason it gets banded around so much is because the Bruce Lee Foundation claims it:

And more specifics were promoted by his family, eye-witnesses, and his general acquaintances – and this got spread all over the internet.

And then there are quotes like these that are well documented and confirmed that make you really think – if not about the truth of his amateur boxing career - about the potential career he could have had as a western boxer:

It’s a done deal that Bruce studied western boxing and competed somewhat while he was in high school, but the notion that he was offered a pro contract and that he beat a 3-time champion is hard to verify. It comes down to if you trust the anecdotes of his family and the few eye-witnesses testimonies you can find online. If there is a printed record of Lee’s bouts I wish someone would try to dig it up. Unfortunately all this stuff happened in the days when there was no internet or even good cameras.

I agree that there were others who promoted cross-training way before Lee was even born. The concept of cross training originates well before Bruce Lee and that’s an undeniable fact, but Lee was the one that made it popular and influential to the world audience and contributed the most to the idea. Generally that’s why he’s considered the “Father of MMA”. It’s like saying that while the spy-thriller genre existed well before the James Bond books and movies, Ian Flemming kind of has to be credited as the father of the spy-thriller because he made it popular and influential.

 

Does it look to you like one of those bags is filled with feathers? I have sleeping bags with denser packing than what Bruce is hitting.

 

If you look at the way it reacts when Wong hits it i suspect it may be denser than it first appears, although Dempsey clearly has a more solid one

 

I think it is an old bag where all the packing has sunk to the bottom. The way the bag moves is a dead give-away. Also, the bag seems to be hung very low. That combined with the fact that Bruce is punching high on the bag means his fists sink dramatically into the bag, and the fact that he is bareknuckle accentuates the effect. That being said, it's not terrible bag work, he moves in and out of range and seems reasonably light on his feet. His power generation is odd, he seems to rise into his punches with little hops, rather than sit into the punches like a boxer would. He does throw punches with his chin up, and no guard at all. His reliance on flurries of punches and lack of any guard is unsurprising given his wing chun background.

 

Im sorry but bruce was not strong never competed in body building and he wasn’t the first to show a lean sculptured body. Sandow had a body to put bruce to shame and the strength to go with it and this was a century before bruce, he was the first to show you didn’t need to be bulky and the first to have a really cut body, Grimek and the rest of the york lifers won body building contest and strength contests and showed the world that strong lifters could also be athletic and agile way before bruce was on the scene

The york courses of the 40s and 50s was designed to build strong proportioned bodies not to create bulk whatever the cost, and this was 30 years before bruce was popular and had a much greater impact on the public in terms of strength training than he did, thousands followed their courses.

Bruce didn’t smash the notion that being a body builder hurt athletic performance because he wasn’t an athlete or a bodybuilder he was an actor, a lot of coaches still believe body building isn’t necessary a good think and for certain weight class sports they are right, it was Russian research brought to the west by siff that showed STRENGTH training (not body building) would not build a bulky body but actually help an athlete’s development explosiveness and flexibility

As for bruce having one of the most incredible bodies of all time…ok if you say so……

As for being the father of modern MMA, well outside of JKD circles (which lets be honest isn’t that big a proportion of the MA world) who else did he influence into cross training? The vast majority of Martial artists (and the general public) were still believing one style had all the answers and that the deadly styles were better that the sport styles and cross training wasn’t needed (nor sparring come to that) right up until the UFC started in the 90s (and for a few years after if we are honest), his impact on encouraging people to cross train and spar realistically was no greater than the founder of CLF as mentioned above, because outside of his JKD students both the public and other martial artists still widely held the same beliefs as they always had, it was 20 years later that these attitudes started to change, and that should be attributed to the Gracie’s and those that followed and not Bruce

Lees biggest impact on the martial arts world if we look at it objectively in terms of numbers wasn’t in encouraging sparring in tcma, or cross training, or in spreading the world of JKD, it was in turning an obscure close range limited form of combat popular on an island outpost into the most popular form of Chinese martial arts in the world….., wing chun masters jumped on his dead coattails and rode him hard to become the premier chinese martial art in the west…. far more people practise that art than JKD and that’s directly down to Bruce, quite ironic really as it’s the one chinese art which doesn’t encourage sparring, says it has all the answers to everything and has the most lineage problems… not too sure if he would be happy with that legacy

 

Even within JKD the sense of rigid clinging to old dogma is still present in a lot of lineages sadly...despite their claims otherwise

Bruce's death so young made his legacy take on a lot more significance than it would have done has he died older. He left us with a the single best fight scene ever filmed and a canon of movies that are pretty flat other than when he is fighting, when they come alive

On screen he is one if the most visually stunning performers ever - and try still stand up to fight scenes today. Off screen he was a philosopher, martial artist and seeker...it is that which draws me to his writings (well "notes") and teaching

Strangely Bruce's real legacy may actually be in the form of Guro Dan -arguably the finest martial artist of the modern age. I look to Guro Dan more than Bruce; Bruce is a figurehead and legend and perhaps that is all he needs to be

 

IMO the single best fight scene i've ever seen was in The Raid

 

It was good....but it is not THAT scene

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isnu0wtZHGc"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isnu0wtZHGc[/ame]

 

Bruce had a reputation for street fighting in Hong Kong that got him into a lot of trouble and was one of the reason he left Hong Kong so I don't understand people posting comments about him not being able to fight for real.

"In the spring of 1959, Lee got into yet another street fight and the police were called. Until his late teens, Lee's street fights became more frequent and included beating the son of a feared triad family. Eventually, Lee's father decided for him to leave Hong Kong to pursue a safer and healthier avenue in the United States. His parents confirmed the police's fear that this time Lee's opponent had an organised crime background, and there was the possibility that a contract was out for his life.

"The police detective came and he says "Excuse me Mr. Lee, your son is really fighting bad in school. If he gets into just one more fight I might have to put him in jail".

—Robert Lee (Bruce Lee's brother)

 

naaaaah the adbul jabar one is my favourite of lee's scenes. he does an arm triangle!