Never Before Seen AMAZING Footage of the JKD Legend Bruce Lee

VIDEO: This awesome never before seen footage of Bruce Lee in action will blow your mind!

Others have had difficulty in verifying his story on this point. But what all informed commentators agree on is the fact that Norris was competing in point karate, rather than in full-contact Karate. In other words, Norris was a champion in a style of Karate in which you could be penalized for hitting someone with full force. To my way of thinking, this is no different to being declared a champion of doing Kata; while it may be a rewarding pursuit for other reasons, say… fitness and health reasons, it tells you nothing about whether the champion in question can actually fight.

Judging by footage of Norris’ Karate fights, they appear to be ludicrously unrealistic by most standards.

A person who competes in point karate might be able to fight, or he/she might not… you- and they- will never know until they actually fight for real. I hate to skim close to perpetrating a fallacious appeal to authority, but it’s worth examining why fighters like Joe Lewis agree with me on this point:

“They called point tournaments fighting but how can you fight without contact? I’ve worked on my midsection all my life so I could take a punch or kick. Then I go to a tournament and my opponent might be 150 pounds but if he hits me in the midsection he gets a point for a killing blow. That’s nonsense.”
– Joe Lewis (link)

– To contrast this, Bruce Lee’s only commonly accepted contact with competitive fighting was in his adolescence; he was an amateur boxer. Some assert that he won a local-level Hong Kong boxing championship title at that time… but this is impossible to truly verify to a nicety, as local records for the period are scarce to non-existent. For me, it is sufficient to know that Lee probably competed in a full-contact arena, with some success, more than once. After all, a single full-contact boxing match tells you more about a person’s ability to actually fight than any number of non-contact competitions could, whether they allow kicking or not.

– Bruce Lee started training in submission grappling by 1967, with the legendary “Judo” Gene LeBell, a generally acknowledged master of Judo ne-waza and Catch Wrestling. LeBell had been taught the rapidly dying art of Catch by legendary fighters such as Lou Thesz and Karl Gotch, and had studied Judo with luminaries such as Ishikawa in Japan. LeBell was a Judo champion several times over when he first met Lee on the set of Lee’s TV Series the Green Hornet. It’s hard to imagine a more skilled and illustrious teacher than LeBell. Bruce Lee therefore had developed a knowledge of submission grappling which was quite rare in the esoteric martial arts scene at the turn of the nineteen-seventies. He included many of the moves that LeBell taught him as finishers to his on-screen fight scenes, in Enter the Dragon, Way of the Dragon (vs. Chuck Norris) and the unfinished Game of Death. Lee’s compatriot- and to many, spiritual successor- Dan Inosanto states that Lee was also particularly good at integrating his striking and grappling game, in a way that was rare at the time:

“One of the things that made him [Lee] unique was his ability to move from kicking range to punching range to trapping range to grappling range. At that time, most martial artists really shined in one particular range. If you kicked, you didn’t punch or grapple much. If you punched, you didn’t kick or grapple much. And if you grappled, you didn’t have the same skill level in striking. Sifu Bruce was way ahead of his time in how he was training himself and his students to be adept at bridging the gap between ranges.”– Dan Inosanto

– To contrast, while Chuck Norris did study Judo when he was in the army, though far less intensively than he studied Tae Kwan Do, he apparently only gave serious thought to studying submission grappling in 1982, when he first encountered the Gracie family in Brazil.

– In terms of physical attributes and conditioning, reports indicate that Bruce Lee was 5’7″ and weighed as little as 135lb, whereas Norris was 5’10” and weighed 160lb during his competitive career. Norris would have enjoyed both a weight and reach advantage over his smaller adversary. However, Lee was famous for innovating new training methods and conditioning himself physically to a level associated only with top athletes. From two-finger pushups to a ridiculous degree of static strength, Lee seems to have exemplified a philosophy of training which was well ahead of its time. No similar stories concerning Norris have surfaced.