Bruce Lee would have been 73 today . Bruce Lee would have been 73 years old today. He was born Lee Jun-fan on 27 November 1940, in San Francisco, and died known to the world as Bruce Lee, on 20 July 1973 in Hong Kong. When Bruce Lee started martial arts, it was a collection of countless strictly organized and controlled contradictory sets of beliefs and practices, each of which believed itself to be clearly superior to the others. It was, truly, a field in which everyone was better than average. He left a legacy that truth in unarmed combat lay outside of fixed systems. He showed the world a contest with fighters in fingered gloves, using strikes, takedowns, and tapping out to submissions on the ground. In short, he left a world that was ready to embrace mixed martial arts. When MMA came along, a new system was created for the refining of technique. It is as simple as wheels on luggage - to figure out if something works in a fight, just fight. If a technique doesnt work for you, youll know, because you will get hit in the face. The name Bruce Lee gave to his approach - Jeet Kune Do, or The Way of the Intercepting Fist - captures that reality. And if there was no Bruce Lee, you wouldnt be reading this, as there would be no UG. I was 13 years old, the youngest kid in class, about 110 pounds, and spending the summer with pops in the mountainous Kingdom of Lesotho, Africa. I watched Enter the Dragon at the Holiday Inn Maseru, and since that moment, I have not wanted to do anything else for a living. Pop got me into training with two South Korean 6th degree black belts. Then I went back to mom in the US and walked in the Suk Chung Institute of Tae Kwon Do and first thing you see is a pic of Mr. Chung and Bruce Lee arm in arm. Did TKD and wrestled in high school. College dropped wrestling the year I started so I did martial arts only, and bought into a studio when I graduated. Did that full time for a decade. Then one night we all got together at a condo to watch UFC 1 on PPV for $14.95. I started learning everything I could about the new sport with a guy at the gym named Dave Roy. We put everything we figured out in a notebook. In 1996 Dave set up an aol site called The Art of NHB Fighting, with a Technique of the Week in it, drawn from the notebook. Eventually hundreds of people every week were checking out the aol site, so we decided to turn our fighters notebook into The Fighters Notebook, and self-publish it. We decided to set up a website to market the book, so I grabbed a few urls, including mixedmartialarts. I was upset that Disney beat me to NHB by a few weeks, and passed on MMA for $200. We partnered with FightingTalk and the owner suggested we call ours The Underground. Sounded OK to me, we self published the Notebook and went live with the site in the summer of 1998. And here we are. If there was no Bruce Lee, there would be no UG. I am sad that he never got to see his vision become a sport. He would have loved it. “Spirit-wise, he would support it 1,000 per cent,” said his brother Robert, recently. “It’s what he came up with. So happy birthday Bruce, and thank you.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 17:42:00 +0000
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