Bruce Lee Once Faced Anxious Times During Career-Defining Fight Against His Rival

Bruce Lee dreamt of becoming the greatest martial art teacher when he came to America in 1959. In the 1960s, looking for an opportunity to promote himself as a martial art instructor, Lee found the chance to perform a Kung Fu demonstration in New York’s Chinatown Sun Sing Theatre. However, while demonstrating his practical martial art perspective with his student Dan Inosanto, Lee ended up hurting the sentiments of the traditional practitioners in the audience.

As a result of the Chinatown fiasco, martial artist Wong Jack Man challenged Bruce Lee to a battle days after his performance in Chinatown. Although Lee had accepted the fight proposal, it made him anxious till the day of the showdown. Lee’s biography, Bruce Lee: A Life, revealed the pressure that was upon the legend.

Why did Bruce Lee feel anxious ahead of the fight?

When Lee agreed to combat Wong Jack-Man, he kept a condition that his rival had to arrive at his studio in Oakland to fight him. After this, the next two months went into negotiating the conditions, time, and date of the fight. However, as time went on, Lee became highly anxious. Bruce Lee had newly begun attracting students for his Oakland class after his demonstration in Chinatown. Hence, a defeat against Jack-Man would humiliate him in front of the small number of students he had.

Apart from this, he also had a stressful time in his personal life. His business partner with whom he opened his martial art classes, James Lee, had turned to alcohol after his wife, Katherine’s demise. At that time, Lee’s wife Linda was pregnant with Shannon. She took the responsibility of taking care of James’s two grieving children, Greglon and Karena.

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Amidst so many things, Lee knew that losing to Wong Jack-Man might end his career as a martial art teacher. It could also make him go back to his previous job in a Chinese restaurant washing dishes.

So what happened at Bruce Lee’s fight with Wong Jack Man?

Bruce Lee was an ardent believer that repetitive martial art moves were insufficient in real-life fights. Hence, he was confident with his sharp fighting techniques that were practical and much faster than the pre-existing ones.

He was self-assured  that he would easily defeat Wong Jack-Man. But the match results were quite a shocker for Lee. It was a neck-to-neck fight between the two rivals that ended in favor of the Little Phoenix. However, Lee was disappointed with his performance.

Lee’s wife Linda revealed in the biography,  “The fight, he realized, ought to have ended with a few seconds of him striking the first blows —instead of which, it had dragged on for three minutes.” Lee realized that he had to work a lot on his martial art capabilities. For him, it was an ‘ugly win.’  Lee noticed that only modifying a few techniques, would not elevate his fighting prowess. He had to start from scratch and create something more effective. 

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The reality check worked like magic for the master. By 1967, he invented a hybrid martial art form known as Jeet Kune Do. The main idea of JKD was to intercept the opponent’s moves before letting them launch at you. It was a great martial art technique that became highly popular eventually across the globe.