When Bruce Lee trained with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
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The old, history doesn't repeat, but rhymes, etc.
I've been around since the 70's and it's the same as it ever was. The local library has a thing where you can access historical versions of the local newspaper. I read the newspaper headlines from when I was a kid. Nothing is different now from what it was then.
Nothing has changed and nothing has been learned and no one cares.
https://archive.org/details/mad-magazine-166-1974/page/n25/m...
America is still dealing with many of the same issues a half-century later.
When I was in growing up in the 90's 00's ... I distinctly remember saying to myself: I know, logically, that racism exists but I cannot remember the last time I experienced direct racism, if ever. I know it existed, indirectly, but I, nor my close family or friends, experienced it. The first time I did experience, and increasingly so, has been in the last 10 years.
I think it was terrible until the 70's and 80's (history and family anecdotes prove this, you're right) ... it went relatively underground in the 90's and early 00's which made life great ... and when society was strained by the global financial crash, etc, things have swung back again.
I really put this whole reality at the feet of the bankers and it's amplified by social media. They were the lead dominos in all of this. They released the wankers and populism.
And getting back on topic, society has broken apart again and exposed racism again. You're right. Nothing has changed. But life is better when the assholes are in their caves stewing their hatred rather than emerging and sharing it with everyone.
As above, it's different in how it manifests at the moment, but it definitely rhymes, and at its heart, it's the same hatred manifest in a different way.
The only thing we can hope for is the pendulum swinging back, so the wankers are put back in their caves and we can get on with a relatively normal life again.
...skip ahead to a minute in and give a listen. This is kids, in a movie, in the preview!
50 years of progress, such as it is.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/kareem-abdul-ja...
Naturally we also have our issues on this side as well, unfortunately.
Morgan Freeman once said the way to kill racism is to stop talking about it. He may be right.
I see how it goes in Portugal and the few European countries I lived in, including having experienced myself xenophobism in first hand in some of those countries, and stop talking isn't how it gets sorted out.
There are openly racist white supremacists and that's how it should be - they are allowed to voice their opinions (thanks to free speech). They aren't a significant minority and they know their day has passed. Best to let such movements die out.
Actor Morgan Freeman said, in answer to a question about how to get rid of racism, “Stop talking about it.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/morgan-freeman-black-histo...
It may be too handy and too easy to use racism as a political weapon for some to let go of. For others it may be a crutch they never needed yet perhaps are unwilling to lay down.
Talking to some younger liberals today you'd thing that they actually lived and personally experienced the US's periods of racial turmoil (all the way back to the Civil War and to the establishment of the original 13 colonies). Their outrage is fresh and full-blown. But that suffering was done by their ancestors (the black ones, in particular) not by them. And remember that the Civil War alone in the United States cost many, many white lives: 698,000 by one estimate - most of whom were white.
Racism is also facilitated by people pointing to the crack pots and saying, we swear we're not like them... oh, also wear this band for your safety... so we know how to easily identify you.
Open racists do not scare me. Plus, I am 100% sure we have very different definitions of what is an open racist. Worse, having that discussion is tiring and ultimately pointless semantics that slows down the actual discussion of important issues.
What scares me is this milquetoast won't everyone just calm down and we really need to turn the temp down and agree to talk...
This while the mid-tier of Side-A is re-posting gas chamber memes, playing the victim card, and calling everything they don't like porn. And Side-B, ever the dutiful neo-liberal centrists, lean into the characterization that they are the resistant or some s-star-star-t because it gives them the tingles.
It is the same everything is normal cosplay over and over again. I am tired of having to, again, entertain the rational suggestion that "racism is a crutch" of the next person in costume that fancies themselves an iconoclast because they are brave enough to say they don't like seeing the homeless in SF.
Sigh, this is boring...
Seemingly we are learning here something new about Bruce Lee, that outside observers can't understand, most notably western ones. This decelaration of time also happened to me two times spontaneously, when I was attacked on surprise, hence I believe this verbatim. In both cases, that got me plenty of time, to decide what to do and was able to save myself without a scratch. However it never occurred to me,that that had something to do with my Chi force...
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-time/201707/th... and tons if other articles.
Also see Guy Brown's The Energy of Life: The Science of What Makes Our Minds and Bodies Work.
For example they had a different model of Anatomy/Physiology in spite of the fact that they were aware of the various circulatory and nervous systems. Their approach was more holistic and empirical rather than reductionist and analytical. So even though you might not have a one-to-one correspondence to concepts in modern science there is enough studies/research done to establish that there is something to those ideas and hence their various practices (especially Yoga and Acupuncture) are now used in Healthcare to treat various ailments.
Some resources;
1) Perception of Subtle Energy “Prana”, and Its Effects During Biofield Practices: A Qualitative Meta-Synthesis - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10498708/
2) The Science of Tai Chi and Qigong as Whole Person Health-Part I: Rationale and State of the Science - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40091656/
I am not a fighter or physically brave, but I completely disarmed him, put him in a headlock and threw him to the ground.
He's a chess champion and push hands champion and discusses how to learn. Basically as you become and expert in something you learn to pay less attention to the surrounding environment and only focus on what matters, which allows you to see it in "slow motion". This applies to chess champions where masters eye movement focuses on a much smaller part of the board than a beginner, and also in push hands or BJJ where experts fighting for a tiny bit of grip change is what matters but a novice might just see the whole body not moving or doing anything that matters.
Very worthwhile read.
Is this Chi
I always thought of it as muscle memory, the movement becomes so ingrained in your body that you can focus on things at a higher level. Keep going up the levels and at some point everything looks like trivial details
That's it, experience and focus. Even if you mastered something, someone can keep distracting you and you will find it returns to difficult without focus. Even if you focus a lot, hard things have to be repeated to master them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_recognition_(psycholog...
Joey : I think you're the greatest, but my dad says you don't work hard enough on defense.
[Kareem gets angry]
Joey : And he says that lots of times, you don't even run down court. And that you don't really try... except during the playoffs.
Roger Murdock : The hell I don't! LISTEN, KID! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
Incidentally, for anyone that didn’t know, the film Airplane was an almost shot for shot remake of a film called Zero Hour [1] and the copilot in the original film was a famous NFL player (Elroy ‘Crazy Legs’ Hirsch), hence why they’ve got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to play the copilot in Airplane.
We have clearance Clarence. Roger, Roger. What's our vector Victor?
https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-rewatchables/2025/09/...
https://www.mlb.com/cut4/kareem-abdul-jabbars-role-in-airpla...
There is so many layers of jokes!
It looks like an ad-libbed scene to me: "Leon" was absolutely struck dumb by the move.
- and Leon's getting laaaaarger.
-- Stephen Stucker as Johnny
“Bad news, the fog is getting thicker”
“And Leon’s getting laaaarger!”
certainly unreliable reports of him doing well in informal rooftop bouts amongst the various Wing Chun students in Hong Kong
there are also stories of him getting his ass kicked by William Chung and Wong Shun Leung (others of Yp Man's students) and being a petty little bitch and getting kicked out of Yp Man's school
Who knows. It's all apocrypha at this point
There are still people alive who witnessed these events first hand. I don't think first-hand accounts should be labeled apocrypha. But... maybe it means you doubt them? Fair enough.
Is apocrypha a reasonable word to use for that?
I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
That's what the Gracie family did with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Except they actually proved it worked by dominating the early years of UFC before they even introduced weight classes.
My interest over the years of Bruce Lee was much more from this perspective. Many stories talk about how hard he trained, and other aspects of essentially an underdog story. Combined with his communication[0], he comes across very thoughtful, and very grounded in many ways. Putting anyone on a “legend” status pedestal is always fraught with issues, but definitely a figure that inspired a lot of people.
That's consistent with your comment getting down votes.
Snowflakes.
On the other hand, if you watch the movie until the end, it’s obvious that the movie has an unreliable narrator. We all know how the Tate/Labianca murders actually turned out. Not at all like the movie…
It kind of does though? I was a bartender at a very, very popular college bar. Often I was the only employee working Monday/Tuesday. I was a very scrawny, nerdy child-looking 20-year old.
I had to learn how to kick out championship D1 football stars, even pro NFL (actual) stars, if they happened to become belligerent those nights. We had all types of customers, including ones who specifically came in with intention to fight.
There was always some specific way to interact with them to make them leave of their own volition. Often with the biggest guys, it was to be aggressive and psychically “larger” than them. The smaller “fighty” dudes were usually the toughest, as they often felt they needed to prove themselves and I had to use a different tactic.
But what you describe “talking tough” was by far the most successful with the “much bigger guys”.
There is also another story where Gene supposedly choked out Steven Segal (who claimed his training would prevent it).
I have no idea if either is true, but personally if I was required to place a bet on a contest between a well trained and experienced grappler/shoot wrestler that outweighed his opponent (Kung Fu practitioner) by 75lbs…my money is on the grappler all day long.
> At first, Bruce told Mito that Big Lew was slow, his arms were weak, and he wasn’t good at chi sao. A reporter who witnessed one of their workouts was more impressed with Bruce than Big Lew. He wrote that Bruce could “leap and kick over Alcindor’s head, and says he can defeat him by taking advantage of his shin and thigh with a kick.”
> But Bruce soon realized all that was irrelevant. Even if he could get inside Big Lew’s reach, it wasn’t easy. And with his front kick, Big Lew could rattle the rim of the basket. Bruce’s Wing Chun skills were all but useless. He joked with Doug Palmer, “Try doing chi sao with someone when you’re staring at his belly button.” Bruce called Taky and told him not to focus on chi sao in the school anymore.
> “Bruce and I sparred regularly,” Kareem remembered. “But we didn’t compete; I was like a drawing board on which he could work out his theories and he was instructing me how to deal with people and attack him.”
Side note. Interesting typo. Both B and M are voiced bilabial consonants. Are you using a speech-to-text device by any chance?
the day Bruce learned about Bullshido
Note that it isn't the Chinese word for "teacher", which is 老师 laoshi. (Same "shi".) Shifu is a different title.
ABC provides these glosses:
-----
师傅 shīfu
1. master worker
2. tutor of a king/emperor
3. [PRC] general term of address in the late 70s and 80s
4. [courteous] term of address for service workers [such as a carpenter]
-----
The Tuttle Learner's Dictionary provides this note:
> 师傅 shīfu is [] a polite form of address to a worker. For example, an electrician or a mechanic can be addressed as 师傅, or, if his family name is 李, 李师傅.
It is how martial arts instructors are addressed, but not how teachers are addressed. Teachers are white-collar.
† In the movie, it's pronounced with the FLEECE vowel, as if it were the English words "she foo", for no reason that I can understand. To an English speaker, the Mandarin word will sound like "shiffoo", using KIT and not FLEECE in the first syllable.