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There's no question that Bruce Lee was a really good martial artist. He was strong and fast and lived and breathed the martial arts, developing his own style even, and had a lot of innovative ideas. But he has been legendized as the best or one of the best. That has been debated in martial arts circles. Some say he is way overrated and that there is no proof that he was one of the best and that he was untested since he didn't fight in tournaments or against the best to prove himself.

What do you think?

Here's what I heard.

Critics argue that Bruce Lee's record in fighting for real is based mostly on anecdotal evidence from those who saw him fight in street brawls. In his junior years, he got into a few amateur boxing matches (none of which was taped), but after that he never entered any tournaments. Lee's explanation is that tournaments had too many rules, such as no jabbing in the eyes or kicking in the crotch, which made them unrealistic. Critics say that was a total copout.

I admit that that's a bit odd. Why would he want to hit eyes and crotches in a tournament? I thought he was really into Chinese philosophy that taught peace and balance? Why can't he enter a tournament and play by the rules and win that way?

Maybe what Bruce said was taken out of context? I don't know.

There is also a rumor among Bruce Lee's fans that he was able to close 10 feet on an opponent in 1/4 of a second. Critics charge that this claim has never been caught on camera. The explanation is because he was so fast that the camera could not catch his speed. However, there is no reason why he couldn't demonstrate it on camera by simply moving from point A to point B in 1/4 of a second to at least try. I mean if he was too fast for the camera, you might not be able to see him moving in transition, but at least you could see the beginning and end points.

One thing in Bruce Lee's favor is that allegedly, the top martial artists in the US said he was the best they had ever seen and none of them think they could have beaten him. For example, Chuck Norris, Bill Wallace, supposedly made comments attesting to that. But I'm not sure if they are just trying to be nice to someone who died tragically young, or if they really meant that. Or if they said that before he died or not.

What do you think?

Wow check out this lost footage of Bruce Lee's speed. The footage looks like it might be speeded up though. Is it?

Bruce Lee was insanely fast. That was the feature he displayed in his movies. There must have been a genetic component to this in addition to his rigorous training. But, in a real fight, speed isn’t always the most important thing. He did the right thing for his movie career to not compete and keep himself mysterious. Bruce Lee was also right that competitions have rules which make them artificial. For example, the rules of MMA favor grappling, so that many fighters have now convinced themselves that karate is ineffective just because it doesn’t work well under MMA rules. It’s just bullshit and has no bearing on what would work in a real street fight. The rules are set to optimize entertainment and not to show what fighting technique is more effective.

Bruce Lee was a skinny boy. That is why he was so fast. A fly is also fast. Does not mean much. Bullshido does not work.

But I don't understand. Why couldn't Bruce Lee use his super fast speed and skill to win tournaments within the rules? If he was good and fast, he should have been able to win within the rules right? It's unusual for an Asian or Chinese guy to be opposed to rules. They are usually very strict and rule oriented. Society and games have to have rules, otherwise they won't work if it's anything goes. Wasn't Bruce Lee civlized? Didn't he understand that?

Gali wrote: ↑

August 25th, 2021, 11:10 am

Bruce Lee was a skinny boy. That is why he was so fast. A fly is also fast. Does not mean much. Bullshido does not work.

Not true. Most skinny boys I know are not fast at all. It's not their thing. I can beat kids in the hand slap game even though I'm overweight. Actually I can beat any kid at it and have never lost before. No joke. Did I post the video of me playing it? Rock took a video of me playing it long ago. Also if you see my karate videos in my karate thread, I can move a lot faster than other people my weight and faster than most skinny people too. It's natural for some.

Winston wrote: ↑

August 25th, 2021, 11:26 am

Gali wrote: ↑

August 25th, 2021, 11:10 am

Bruce Lee was a skinny boy. That is why he was so fast. A fly is also fast. Does not mean much. Bullshido does not work.

Not true. Most skinny boys I know are not fast at all. It's not their thing. I can beat kids in the hand slap game even though I'm overweight. Actually I can beat any kid at it and have never lost before. No joke. Did I post the video of me playing it? Rock took a video of me playing it long ago. Also if you see my karate videos in my karate thread, I can move a lot faster than other people my weight and faster than most skinny people too. It's natural for some.

Anecdotal evidence is bullshido. You can not vibe with fit guys so your statistics are off. Look a heavy weight boxing vs flyweight.

Gali wrote: ↑

August 25th, 2021, 11:32 am

Winston wrote: ↑

August 25th, 2021, 11:26 am

Gali wrote: ↑

August 25th, 2021, 11:10 am

Bruce Lee was a skinny boy. That is why he was so fast. A fly is also fast. Does not mean much. Bullshido does not work.

Not true. Most skinny boys I know are not fast at all. It's not their thing. I can beat kids in the hand slap game even though I'm overweight. Actually I can beat any kid at it and have never lost before. No joke. Did I post the video of me playing it? Rock took a video of me playing it long ago. Also if you see my karate videos in my karate thread, I can move a lot faster than other people my weight and faster than most skinny people too. It's natural for some.

Anecdotal evidence is bullshido. You can not vibe with fit guys so your statistics are off. Look a heavy weight boxing vs flyweight.

Not true. Anecdotal evidence is real scientific evidence IF it's in the aggregate. The medical industry tests new drugs and their efficacy by using anecdotal evidence. Aspirin was proven effective with meta-analysis and anecdotal evidence in the AGGREGATE. You are spouting BS atheist pseudoskeptic propaganda that is black and white and easily debunked. It's obvious.

Fit guys are not always fast. For example, a football star is good in football, but he may not be able to win an average Asian guy in ping pong or thumb wrestling, because he's too slow in that. A tennis star may not be able to do fast side kicks like I do, even though the tennis star is more fit than me. Do you think John McEnroe or Jimmy Connors or Andre Agassi can do fast karate like me or Bruce Lee just because they were professional athletes? I doubt it. Just because you are good in one sport doesn't mean you are good in every sport.

In thumb wrestling I can beat 99.99 percent of people whether they are fit or not. Just being honest. You are mixing things that don't relate. That is fallacious.

Why do you never learn? Are you A.I. and not a real human with a real soul?

That is why team Bullshido lovies anecdotal evidence

When compared to other types of evidence, anecdotal evidence is generally regarded as limited in value due to a number of potential weaknesses,

Similarly, psychologists have found that due to cognitive bias people are more likely to remember notable or unusual examples rather than typical examples.[4] Thus, even when accurate, anecdotal evidence is not necessarily representative of a typical experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Wtf are you talking about? The point is a sumo sized fit guy can not be a good table tennis player as a fit skinny guy because of speed, physics, gravity, science.

Anecdotal evidence is valid. It's admissible in a court case, and in medicine, it is used to test the efficacy of drugs. As long as it is in the aggregate, then yes it is real evidence. You are wrong. Sorry. That is BS pseuoskeptic logic. Real people don't believe that. That's CSICOP type fiction.

See my full essay about anecdotal evidence below:

https://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page5.htm

Winston wrote: ↑

August 25th, 2021, 11:59 am

Anecdotal evidence is valid. It's admissible in a court case, and in medicine, it is used to test the efficacy of drugs. As long as it is in the aggregate, then yes it is real evidence. You are wrong. Sorry. That is BS pseuoskeptic logic. Real people don't believe that. That's CSICOP type fiction.

See my full essay about anecdotal evidence below:

https://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page5.htm

I have no time for Bullshido. Genius guys made studies about it not some weirdos who live in their own world.

he was far from the best. the best are going to be martial artists who live in the mountains and are one with nature. theyre not going to parade around their skills in front of a screen

Winston wrote: ↑

February 16th, 2009, 9:09 am

There's no question that Bruce Lee was a really good martial artist. He was strong and fast and lived and breathed the martial arts, developing his own style even, and had a lot of innovative ideas. But he has been legendized as the best or one of the best. That has been debated in martial arts circles. Some say he is way overrated and that there is no proof that he was one of the best and that he was untested since he didn't fight in tournaments or against the best to prove himself.

What do you think?

Here's what I heard.

Critics argue that Bruce Lee's record in fighting for real is based mostly on anecdotal evidence from those who saw him fight in street brawls. In his junior years, he got into a few amateur boxing matches (none of which was taped), but after that he never entered any tournaments. Lee's explanation is that tournaments had too many rules, such as no jabbing in the eyes or kicking in the crotch, which made them unrealistic. Critics say that was a total copout.

I admit that that's a bit odd. Why would he want to hit eyes and crotches in a tournament? I thought he was really into Chinese philosophy that taught peace and balance? Why can't he enter a tournament and play by the rules and win that way?

Maybe what Bruce said was taken out of context? I don't know.

There is also a rumor among Bruce Lee's fans that he was able to close 10 feet on an opponent in 1/4 of a second. Critics charge that this claim has never been caught on camera. The explanation is because he was so fast that the camera could not catch his speed. However, there is no reason why he couldn't demonstrate it on camera by simply moving from point A to point B in 1/4 of a second to at least try. I mean if he was too fast for the camera, you might not be able to see him moving in transition, but at least you could see the beginning and end points.

One thing in Bruce Lee's favor is that allegedly, the top martial artists in the US said he was the best they had ever seen and none of them think they could have beaten him. For example, Chuck Norris, Bill Wallace, supposedly made comments attesting to that. But I'm not sure if they are just trying to be nice to someone who died tragically young, or if they really meant that. Or if they said that before he died or not.

What do you think?

My opinion as somebody trained in MMA:

Bruce Lee was undoubtedly a good amateur, an incredible physical specimen and was an unusually forward-thinking philosopher of martial arts but he wasn't the best by any stretch of the imagination and his abilities have been exaggerated to a large degree. As we all know, a legend was created around him through his career in Hollywood and it's likely that other actors and friends of Bruce Lee like Chuck Norris are simply exaggerating in order to keep that legend alive.

Bruce Lee wasn't about "bullshido". That fool @Gali doesn't know what he's talking about. Bruce Lee understood the limitations of the traditional Chinese styles in which he had been trained and therefore added techniques and training methods from Western boxing and other fighting systems to his own training and even strived to create his own fighting system which aimed to incorporate all of the techniques that he considered the most useful. In fact his eclectic philosophy was revolutionary. At that time the tendency was for martial arts to consider themselves separate and distinct styles but Bruce Lee was one of the early proponents of cross-training and eclectic blending and in that regard his philosophical contribution was valuable to the extent that some even consider it a precursor of MMA.

With regard to the level of Bruce Lee's technique, his striking was very crisp and his speed was impressive although still not on the level of a professional boxer or kickboxer. This can be deduced from footage of him hitting a heavybag. All of the talk of Bruce the man being able to close X distance in X seconds is purely a gimmick to make Bruce the actor appear more mysterious. Movement like that is physically impossible even for the fastest fighters. Bruce Lee also learned some grappling from "Judo" Gene LeBell and other high-level grappling instructors. However, from the accounts which I've read, it seems that Bruce only studied some individual techniques from those masters and incorporated them into his own system but didn't actually do much real grappling training (what in Jiujitsu we call "rolling" or live practice). His knowledge of grappling was mostly theoretical. In fact I've also read that Bruce preferred to surround himself with the point fighting striker crowd since this kind of training favored his own forte of striking and speed. He most likely knew that a competent grappler could expose him.

Bruce Lee wasn't just a skinny guy either. He was extremely strong and well-conditioned for a guy of his size and was also an early proponent of strength training for martial artists at a time when most people thought that all you need to win in a fight is good technique.

rul wrote: ↑

May 1st, 2022, 8:14 am

he was far from the best. the best are going to be martial artists who live in the mountains and are one with nature. theyre not going to parade around their skills in front of a screen

I agree. Bruce Lee was good no doubt, but not as good as people imagine him to be, definitely not invincible. He was also not spiritual either. A spiritual person is not obsessed with fame and stardom like he was. No spiritual person I know is.

Also, his famous quote about "emptying your cup and being like water" is not original. It's basic Taoism. I don't understand why that quote is attributed to him. It's been part of Taoist teaching for thousands of years and is nothing new.

Moreover, he had a really hot temper and spiritual people learn to control their temper. A bad temper is one of the things in life that you can learn to control, and does not involve changing who you are at the core. Chuck Norris was quoted in Black Belt magazine as saying, "Bruce Lee would get mad at the drop of a hat. It took a lot more for me to get mad, but once I do, watch out!" The way Norris is is how a real man is. Real men do not lose their temper easily, but once they do, they can be strong and fierce.

I'm not surprised that he was rejected for the role in the Kung Fu TV series, which was given to David Carradine. Carradine knew how to act like a spiritual person. Bruce Lee did not, not even in his own movies that he directed.

What's very telling is that in the movie "Return of the Dragon" while Bruce Lee is walking around in Rome with his Chinese female host, he looked at all the beautiful architecture in Rome and said that it was a waste of space and should be torn down to make money. That's what he would do if he were in charge, he said. That's very telling. Why would he put that quote in his own movie which he had total control over? It obviously means he's very materialistic and money oriented, like typical Asians are, not spiritual or soulful at all.

rul wrote: ↑

May 1st, 2022, 8:14 am

he was far from the best. the best are going to be martial artists who live in the mountains and are one with nature. theyre not going to parade around their skills in front of a screen

Why do you believe that?

I don't believe Bruce Lee was the best, but how can somebody be a good martial artist if they never test their skills against a resisting opponent. Otherwise it's no different to dancing or theatre. Pure hypothesis without pressure testing.

I'm no tough guy, but I've gouged people's eyes in 2 fights I've been in. Based on my little experience, I believe I can tell when someone is talking pure hypothesis when it comes to eye gouging and when they've actually done it. There's things I learned about how people respond which I didn't hear a single teacher talk about when they spoke about attacking people's eyes.

I've also seen teen girls taught absolute garbage when it comes to self defence from these teachers who have never pressure tested what they are teaching IRL. It would be better for them to learn to play soccer/football or tag American football so they can learn how to run fast and manoeuvre around objects/people, in order to get away from someone trying to attack them.