Chinatown. Oakland. California. 1964.
Fledgling Kung fu instructor Bruce Lee has accepted a challenge from Wong Jack-Man, a fellow Wing Chun practitioner who’s also hoping to set up his own martial arts school. Or depending on how you cut it, Wong is responding to a provocative challenge that Lee allegedly put out to everyone in the local martial arts scene after an exhibition in San Francisco. Either way, the stakes are high for both men in terms of career prospects and “face”…
There are at least as many accounts of how the challenge match played out as people who witnessed it, but two things are clear. Firstly, that at least part of the ill feeling between the contestants concerned Lee’s inclusion of non-Chinese (gweilo or “foreign devil”) aspirants on his student rolls. Also, that the fight crystallised Lee’s frustration at the restrictions of traditional Wing Chun, with is repetitive rotas of set moves and stances, which he likened to “swimming on dry land.” He was already well on the way to developing his own, more intuitive “style without a style”, Jeet Kune Do (“the way of the intercepting fist”) a breakthrough that would capture the world’s imagination while further alienating the conservative Chinese martial arts establishment. Nor were their feelings much mollified by his marriage, in August ’64, to WASP Linda Emery, his fellow student at Seattle’s University of Washington.
Wong Jack-Man did not represent the greatest challenge ever faced by Bruce Lee. Nor did Chuck Norris, Kien Shih, the Bobs Baker and Wall nor even the spectre of Jimmy Wang-Yu, his predecessor as Asia’s most prominent action star. Nor, with apologies to Quentin Tarantino, was it any clapped out stuntman who trained on a cocktail of drink, drugs and junk food.