Before a training session, Bruce Lee stretched. After a training session, he stretched again. On days when injuries or scheduling compressed everything else, he still stretched. His flexibility work was the one component of his training that was genuinely non-negotiable, because he’d thought through the math: a inflexible kicker is a slower kicker, a shorter…
The photographs that exist of Bruce Lee’s forearms are almost uniformly startling. Taken in 1972 and 1973, during the period when he was at his physical peak, they show forearm development that looks disproportionate to his overall frame: thick, heavily veined, with the flexor and extensor muscles forming visible ridges from wrist to elbow. He…
Brandon Lee was eight years old when his father died (the sudden loss explored in The Mystery of Bruce Lee). He grew up in Los Angeles with his mother Linda, his younger sister Shannon, and the peculiar inheritance of being Bruce Lee’s son: recognized everywhere, assessed constantly, given access that required performance to justify. He…
In the summer of 1972, Bruce Lee had a problem that most directors would envy: he’d negotiated complete creative control over his next project from Golden Harvest, the Hong Kong studio that had made him the highest-paid actor in Asia. He had a concept, a structure, a philosophy he wanted to put on screen. He…
Alan Watts died on November 16, 1973, four months after Bruce Lee. Neither man knew the other personally, as far as the historical record shows, though they inhabited overlapping intellectual worlds in 1960s California and shared at least one patron: the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where Watts lectured regularly and where Lee’s ideas circulated…
Every morning at 6 a.m., before his students arrived, before the phone started ringing, Bruce Lee ran. The route varied depending on which city he was living in, but the habit didn’t. In Seattle it was the hills above the university district. In Oakland it was the neighborhood streets before the traffic came. In Los…
The Green Hornet ran for 26 episodes on ABC between September 1966 and March 1967 (a defining milestone in how Bruce Lee changed Hollywood for Asian actors). It was cancelled due to low ratings. Bruce Lee walked away from it with something more useful than a long run: the foundation of a screen persona that…
In 1965, an obscure magazine called Black Belt published a brief profile of a 24-year-old martial arts instructor working out of Oakland. The article is mostly forgettable, a standard profile of a local teacher. But there’s one line where Bruce Lee describes a punch he can deliver from one inch away with enough force to…
Bruce Lee’s break with Wing Chun is one of martial arts history’s most instructive ruptures. He didn’t abandon the system dramatically or publicly denounce Ip Man. He simply started removing the parts that didn’t work under real fighting conditions, and once he started removing things, he found he couldn’t stop. By the time the process…
The year was 1966. A television producer named William Dozier had just cast Bruce Lee as Kato in The Green Hornet, and someone at ABC decided to advertise the show in Hong Kong as The Kato Show. Not The Green Hornet. The Kato Show. Because in Hong Kong, audiences weren’t coming for the title character….