1. “Bruce Lee's interactions with very different people and his desire to learn made him a good ally,” explains Bao Nguyen, director of a documentary on Bruce Lee titled, of course, Be Water. This is the latest installment of the prestigious 30 for 30 series, famous for placing great sports and athletics totems in their sociocultural and political context.
In Lee's case, Nguyen continues, that means exploring his status as an anti-racist symbol, born out of his understanding of the systemic injustice to which African-Americans are subjected in his adopted country, the United States, as well as his interest in the battle for civil rights.
One of his first students, Jesse Glover, had been a victim of police violence, so the main reason that led him to learn martial arts was self-defense against future incidents. “That really informed Bruce about race relations in America and the kind of fragility that comes with it,” says the director. Glover became his first North American gym assistant instructor.
2. Later, Lee himself experienced racism firsthand, especially in the film industry. Most of the roles Hollywood offered him were villainous henchmen more adept with fists than words, something that eventually convinced him that if he wanted to play the hero in an American production, he would have to write that project himself.
And so he did, but both Warner and Paramount rejected the bible of a series, The Warrior, which looked suspiciously too much like Kung Fu, David Carradine's television classic. His widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, is convinced executives ripped off her idea and released it after he died.
3. As shown in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), Sharon Tate was a friend and student of Bruce Lee, who taught her all the karate moves she does in the movie Mansion of Seven Pleasures (1968). Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Steve McQueen also attended her classes, and we even know that the latter helped carry the pall (along with James Coburn, Chuck Norris, and George Lazenby) at his colleague's funeral.
4. even though Quentin Tarantino's portrayal of him in his film was controversial, we know that Lee was very, very smug. For example, he always maintained that he only lost one match in his entire life. And it happened when he was thirteen years old.
5. He is the inventor of the Unstoppable Punch, too fast to be blocked by any opponent. The technical name for him was "One Inch Punch", as studied in wing chun, a martial art based on speed and specific techniques that allow you to subdue your opponent in the least amount of time possible.
Hence, the Unstoppable Punch always had to be delivered from a very short distance, going from zero to a hundred in a thousandth of a second: instead of using acceleration, as in a normal punch, Bruce Lee used the entire mass of his body to make this move.
6. He graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Washington. Where did you think “Be water, my friend” came from? We're talking about a bloody philosopher. In fact, Lee liked to say that his wrestling moves were a simple reflection of his philosophical ideas, a metaphor. The kind of metaphor that knocks a man down in one fell swoop.
7. Despite having extensively studied the teachings of the Buddha or Taoism, Bruce Lee defined himself as an atheist. When, in 1972, he was asked if he believed in God, his answer was: "To be perfectly frank, the truth is that he does not."
