Davis Miller - The Tao of Bruce Lee: A Martial Arts Memoir

S ECTION O NE
Enter the Fetus

S ECTION T WO
A New Life

S ECTION T HREE
A Little History

S ECTION F OUR
The Secret Death of an American Dragon

S ECTION F IVE
Riding the Ghost Train

Thanks first and foremost to Will Sulkin
without whom Id still be a lowly sports writer

To Doug Pepper
The Man with the U.S. plan

To Jennifer Hunt
for holding me to the rigorous sweetness in this story

To Mel Berger
for not giving up this ghost

To George Tan
who has lived this story more than I

To Peter Nelson
for the right Curse of the Dragon contracts

And to
Aaron Copland, Dennis Kennedy,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Jidu Krishnamurti,
Siddhartha Gautama, Bodhidharma, Alan Watts,
Tom Simons

A ring center bow to Professor Joe Lewis

For my martial mentors: Tony Lopez, Kathy Long, Li Siu Loong,
Eric Nolan, John Chung

To Jesse Glover, and in memory of Ed Hart

To Dr. Donald Langford

To Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard

To Laura Shepherd, Jan Wenner, Greg Williams, Bob Love, Kerry Shale,
Glenn Stout, John Rasmus, Tobias Perse

To Jerry Douglas, Bla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, and Russ Barenberg
for organic and uncategorizable musical inspiration.

To Harry Crews, Joan Didion, Nick Hornby, Tim OBrien, Tom Robbins, and Tom Wolfe for being pointing fingers.

To Holly Haverty-Woolson, for being my friend and for giving me one of the best lines Ive ever stolen.

And to everyone who has let me know how much my Ali stories have meant in their lives.

Ive been rigorous with what Ive written of Bruce Lees life. I have not, however, allowed day-to-day details to get in the way of the larger truth of my own story.

A story must take on its own reality, a kind of story-reality. No story is accurate; many tell the truth.

Parts of this tale dont fit with other stories. Look at the edges of even the hardest, most immutable facts. Look long enough, look honestlythe edges will shimmer.

Show me a wonder
That you cant be sure of.

FROM A SONG BY W ALTER H YATT

O N M ONDAY , S EPTEMBER 27, 1973, I was a drowsy-eyed, twenty-one-year-old freshman at Lees-McRae Junior College in Banner Elk, North Carolina. It was a miserable time in my life. I had few friends, inside or outside class. I lived vicariously through Superman comic books and the outsized deeds of Muhammad Ali.

I was five-foot-seven and weighed ninety pounds. For a decade I had endured almost daily humiliation and bullying. Guys in my high school had nicknamed me Fetus, a moniker which, after kids in the dorm read my senior annual, followed me to college. I was punched in the stomach, pushed into girls restrooms, had my skinny bones stuffed into lockers, or was plain ignored. Although most of my contemporaries were preparing to graduate from university and proceed into the real world, I was maturing slowly (if, and there was real doubt about this, I was growing up at all).

That September marked the first time Id been away from my fathers house for longer than a weekend. I was homesick. To relieve my misery, I spent time in Banner Elks only movie theater, drawn to the mystery and the power that lighted screens and hidden speakers have when placed at the front of large dark rooms.

Though Banner Elks movie house was named the Center Theater, Lees-McRae kids called it the Bijou. Had it not been for them, the village of fewer than three hundred residents could not have supported a cinema. Directly behind my dorm and at the end of the parking lot, the Bijou was about the size of, and maybe half as clean as, a greasy old two-car garage. Movies at the Bijou cost twenty-five cents. A different feature opened every three days. Since the beginning of the semester, Id seen almost every movie that played at the Bijou.

The picture that night was Enter the Dragon. The house lights dimmed, flickered, went out. The red Warner Brothers logo flashed.

And there he stood.

There was a silence around him. The air crackled as the camera moved toward him and he grew in the center of the screen, luminous.

This man. My man. The Dragon.

One minute into the movie, Bruce Lee threw his first punch. With it, a power came roiling up from Lees belly, affecting itself in blistering waves not only upon his on-screen opponent, but on the movie audience.

A wind blew through me. My hands shook; I quivered electrically from head to toe. And then Bruce Lee launched the first real kick I had ever seen. My jaw fell open like the business end of a dump truck. This man could fly. Not like Supermanbetterhis hands and his feet flew whistling through sky. Yes, better: this wasnt simply a movie, a shadowbox fantasy; there was a seed of reality in every Lee movement. Yet the experience of watching him felt just like a dream.