Bruce Lee The Man And The Legend
Oday Forster
Smith spent the first 15 years of his 19-year career in Buffalo, where he was an eight-time First Team AP All-Pro selection and an 11-time Pro Bowler. With 200 career sacks, Smith is the NFL's all-time sack leader and one of the best to ever step onto the gridiron.
Smith played college football at Virginia Tech and won the Outland Trophy during his senior season. He was selected by Buffalo with the first overall pick in the 1985 draft, beginning a legendary career.
In Buffalo, Smith was an integral part of four consecutive AFC Championship teams. Smith started all but four of his 217 games played in blue and red. Smith finished his career playing four seasons in Washington and passed Reggie White's then NFL record 198 sacks in 2003.
Smith currently lives in Virginia Beach and works as a large-scale hotel designer. He also works with fellow Bills legend Thurman Thomas on Legends Energy Group, an energy company specializing in solar panel installations.
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Truth is there is no one like Bruce Lee till date. There was a time when I loved Bruce Lee, the actor, today I admire Bruce Lee, the man & the legend. His life's story is un-parallel to anything I have come to read about or know of.
1953 (Age 13): - Hong Kong - After being beaten up by a street gang, Bruce began to take Kung-Fu lessons, despite local Hong Kong laws, outlawing street-fights. This was the first & the last time Bruce ever lost a fight. He began to train under Sifu Yip Man, another legend and a master of the Wing Chun system of Kung-Fu. (The Famous Movie IP Man 1 & 2 captures the story)
1959 (Age 19): Bruce arrived in the United States, living with an old friend of his father's. He worked odd jobs around the various Chinese communities. Later, he moved to Seattle to work for Ruby Chow, another friend of his father's.
He taught any person of any race. (Most Asian Martial Arts schools would only teach people of their own race). Chinese Idealists in US & China shunned this move and created a huge uproar on the same and abolished him from all Chinese gatherings and cultural events as well as publicly denounced him.
The conditions for fighting were: If Bruce loses, he will, either close his school, or stop teaching Americans; and if Jack loses, he will stop teaching. Jack Man Wong had a strong clout & name for his fighting skills amongst Chinese in US, he was considered impossible to be defeated in a fight/ a match.
His condition was so severe, Doctors told him, that he would never be able to kick again and will possibly have to use support to even walk. Bruce took his condition as a personal challenge and started to chart his own journey to recovery, he started to document his training methods and his philosophy of Jeet Kune Do & yes, he was able to recover & get back on his feet again defying the medical conditions pronounced upon him.
1973 - April (Age 33): Hong Kong - Filming of Enter the Dragon is completed. Bruce was at Golden Harvest Studios in Hong Kong dubbing his voice for "Enter The Dragon". Bruce took a break to go to the bathroom and he is found on the bathroom floor. Bruce is rushed to a nearby hospital.
Though the world in general is always curious and interested enough to talk of how Bruce died under mysterious circumstances, I personally find enough meaning from the way he lived his life. The question that I am sure you have on your mind, is why Bruce Lee was so famous, and why is he still thought of as the Master of Chinese Martial Arts?
Actually, Bruce criticized Karate for its broken motions, and Wing Chun for its flashy techniques. Both, he said, were not ideal to use in actual combat. This is the reason for the creation of Jeet Kune Do (JKD). JKD was designed to be used in real life situations.
It's style was no style. The goal of JKD is not to master certain techniques, but to let your body express the techniques in its own way. Everyone has his own style, and JKD is a form of bringing it out.
When you go with a particular style, you're expressing that style. You are not expressing yourself. What a statement and what a reflection of a life led with a purpose of being one with oneself.
Robert Clouse recalls Bruce : "The first time he would meet you, you'd expect him to shake hands but instead he'd step back and flick out his foot so fast you could feel the air move right at the tip of your nose. Then he'd take your hand and place it on his stomach. It was kind of his calling card."
As a man, he was so agile and fast, that there were researches done on the same, his mind control was so impactful that in the most severe of fights with tens of people, he always insisted on being hit as bad as it can get and never used a double.
So over the years , and much phone talk , the property owner agreed to meet me at the Boulder Creek Museum this past May 31st. Lisa Robinson, the Museum President, wooed Him as he stepped foot in the door. She showed a short video of Santa Cruz Lumber in1923, now called RedTree their 100 year anniversary. He was given the grand tour, and then he donated the steam donkey to the museum.
I had always planned on having a local logger help me get it out and delivered. With a D-6 caterpillar tractor we would skid it 2 miles up to the better ridge road, load it on a flatbed lowboy truck, and unload it at the Museum, right on HWY 9.
So knowing it was expected for a logger like me to get this out, I decided to let Charlie Brown or local legend and mover have the move job. After all, Charlie can move a piano into a bell tower. Ok!
Additionally Roaring Camp railroad in Felton donated the rail ties for the new perch for the stream donkey. Our Steam Donkey recovery date was Friday May 23rd. With no injuries, this was to be a big successful event in my life personally.
Though Bruce sadly passed away from old age in December, the Richmond SPCA, Legend Brewing and the Goddard family proudly join together in celebration of his spirit with a Bavarian Pilsner as light, lively and as crisp as the legend himself.
IF THIS STORY WERE a prizefight, Bruce Buffer would get introduced first. He's the challenger, after all, the baby brother by 13 years. Coming up in the shadow of a legend drove him to find his own voice, conquer his own sport, be his own Buffer. And so he should enter the arena to something suitably UFC, something suitably Bruce. "Jump Around," by House of Pain, let's say. Bruce jumps around. Nods his head. Raw energy wafts off of him in squiggly lines.
And now it's time for the champ. The lights dim, and as he makes his way toward the ring, the speakers blast something suitably Michael Buffer. "Diamonds Are Forever." The Shirley Bassey version, not the Kanye one with just the hook that the kids prefer. Michael takes his time. He knows how to enter a room. He makes the VIPs at ringside feel glad they dressed up. He doesn't have to charge himself up once he enters the ring because he was born for this. It's effortless. All he has to do is open his mouth.
What a family story, right? Two brothers who've scaled different peaks in the same range, Michael in boxing, Bruce in UFC. A pair of mountain GOATs. The full story, though, is more like a great American saga, not quite rags to riches but close enough, filled with money and guns and fights, foster homes and family mysteries, global plagues and cancerous tumors, Dana White and Donald Trump and James Bond, beer, bourbon, celebrity poker and -- date TBD this fall -- officially licensed bathroom products. If the Buffer brothers' lives were a movie script, it would come back with a note to tone it down about 25%. Yet every word is true. Almost every word.
FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT at cageside, all Bruce Buffer could see by the very end of Conor McGregor's obliteration of Donald "Cowboy" Cerrone this past January was the backside of referee Herb Dean, who was crouched beside them like an obstetrician trying to decide when to take over and pull the rest of this baby out himself. Cowboy took a foot to the face in the fight's opening seconds, and McGregor pounced like a cheetah and bashed Cowboy's head until Dean had seen enough. McGregor by TKO.
Forty seconds! It took longer for Bruce to introduce the fighters, and it wasn't as if he was milking it. Bruce's trademark catchphrase, the two little words he has used to open more than 200 UFC main events, might not seem like much: "It's time!" That's it. But he delivers those two words in a primal growl that has become famous across the sport, a crescendo-decrescendo one-two punch, like he's scaling a cliff and then BASE jumping off of it, elongating each "I" within an inch of its life:
And then everybody loses their damn minds. In the run-up to his climactic roar, Bruce bounds around the ring, getting in the fighters' faces as he introduces them to audiences around the world, executing 180-degree spins that make his bright paisley smoking jacket shimmer. (A word about the jacket: It's custom-made, let's call it $4,000, from his go-to clothier, King & Bay, and it's such a densely packed combo of blue, lavender and purple that it sort of blurs into blavendurple.) On a dare years ago, Bruce landed a 360 spin, but he is 62 now, and those were the spins of a younger man. Twice he has blown out his knee in the ring, and he takes pride that neither blowout kept him out of duty. He is an announcing autodidact, and one of his tricks is to add an "H" to as many words as possible. "FHIGHTING out of the blue c-horner!" -- Bruce spins 180 degrees and points to the blue corner. "FHIGHTING out of the rhed c-horner!" -- Bruce spins 180 degrees back the other way and points to the red corner.
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