Bruce Lee

By Daniel Rodriguez

Bruce Lee, was born in San Fransisco in November of 1940. His mother named him Bruce, because it means “Strong one” in Gaelic. Bruce was constantly getting into fights, and because of that he looked Kung Fu as a way of disciplining himself. The famous Yip Men taught him his basic skills but no long before he was better than the master. Yip Men was acknowledged to be one of the greatest authorities on the subject of Wing Chun, a branch of the Chinese Martial Arts. Bruce mastered this before progressing to his own style of Jeet Kune Do (The intercepting fist).

At the age of 19, Bruce left Hong Kong to study for a degree in philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, the same place where he would met his future wife, Linda. He began to teach students who could pay him in order to earn some money. Some of the Japanese schools in the Seattle area tried to force him out, and he had to fight many times to remain there. His martial art school grew, and he soon graduated from the university.

Back in Hong Kong producers were desperate to sign Bruce for Martial Arts films, and it was Raymond Chow, the head of Golden Harvest, who produced “The Big Boss.” The rest, as they say, is history.

On July 20, 1973, just one month before the premiere of “Enter the Dragon,” Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong at the age of 32. The official cause of his unexpected death was a brain edema. Controversy surrounded Lee’s death from the beginning, because some claimed he had been murdered. It was also widely believed to have been cursed, a conclusion driven by Lee’s prediction of with his own early death.