All type of knowledge ultimately means self-knowledge.
INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm.
So, therefore, they're coming into--
and asking me to teach them not so much of how
to defend themselves, or how to do somebody in.
Rather, they want to learn to express themselves
through some movement, be it anger...
be it, uh, determination, or whatsoever.
♪ (WESTERN ROCK MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
(SWORD RINGS)
SHANNON LEE:
his training had been in
and then, when started teaching, he called what he taught,
Jun Fan Gung Fu,
it was like Bruce Lee's Kung Fu.
But it was essentially
His first student was Jesse Glover,
He was an African-American man.
Taky Kimura, who was a Japanese man,
he really took on anyone who had a real desire to learn.
His school was very revolutionary in that way.
BRUCE LEE:
SHANNON:
in Oakland. He was part of a community
of martial artists who were really interested in playing
with tradition and really talking more about what works,
as opposed to staying within the lines of form.
BRUCE:
SHANNON: Already, he had
so he's going around touting this all the time.
And he had an open-door policy,
and he was teaching this to anyone.
The San Francisco Chinatown community
did not appreciate that. There were the old guard,
and they wanted to shut him down.
They issued a challenge to him, and they said,
"We're gonna bring over our champion
and we wanna fight you.
And if you lose, you have to stop teaching."
I was born in Oakland's Chinatown,
and I started to study kung fu at a very young age.
And the master, Jack Man Wong, has this mythical fight
with Bruce Lee, so I remembering hearing people say,
"Hey, our teacher fought with Bruce Lee."
You know, that was really just mind-blowing.
BRUCE:
After the fight, even though he had won,
he was very disappointed. He was winded,
and his traditional, rigid training had not prepared him
for a fight of this nature. Out of that, he decided
to do away with his traditional training.
Because I do not believe in styles anymore.
I mean, I do not believe that there is such thing
as like Chinese way of fighting, or the Japanese way of fighting,
or whatever way of fighting
because unless human beings have three arms and four legs,
we will have a different form of fighting.
And he literally studied boxing, the simplicity of it.
Fencing for the ability to bridge the gap quickly,
but also Newtonian physics.
He studied biomechanics and kinesiology.
So, he was really revolutionary in just looking
at the human body and saying, "If I wanna optimize this
for combat, what do I do?"
If it is a sport, now you're talking about something else.
You have regulations. You have rules
but when we're talking about fighting,
-as it is, with no rules. -INTERVIEWER: No rules with real fighting.
Well then, baby, you better train every part of your body.
Bruce Lee is a smart fighter. He's not just a good fighter
because I think, in martial arts,
some people train so hard to be strong,
but they don't know, actually, in a fight,
it's the mind that needs to be better than the skill.
Here is the natural instinct, and here is control.
You are to combine the two in harmony.
One of his students was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
who was, you know, over seven feet tall,
and from working with him and training with him,
he gained a huge new perspective of how he would have to change
his approach to encounter someone like that
and how to also teach someone whose body is that way.
When you want to move, you're moving.
And when you move, you're determined to move.
Not to taking one inch, not anything less than that.
If I want to punch, I'm gonna do it, man,
and I'm gonna do it, you see.
He wanted to bridge the gap between thought and action.
To be so in tuned with your instincts
that you are expressing yourself honestly right now.
He really saw himself as an individual guide
to his students to say, "How do you wanna express yourself
as a fighter? I can show you what I know,
but ultimately, you have to test it
and figure out what works best for you.
Here I am, you know, as a human being,
how can I express myself?
Totally and completely. Now, that way...
You won't create a style
because style is a crystallization, you know.
I mean, that way, is a process of continuing growth.
(SWORD RINGS)