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Bruce Lee 1971: The Real Story Of How He Met Young George Foreman In Houston Before He Was Champion

I did not know George Foreman trained there. He did not know me. At 2:34 p.m., he looked at me from across the floor. He said six words. He said, “Kung fu is for the movies.” 9 seconds later, his right hook, the same right hook that would knock Joe Frazier off his feet in Kingston, Jamaica on January 22nd, 1973, passed through the air where a 140-pound heavy bag had been and I was sitting on top of the bag 4 feet behind him.

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What happened in those 9 seconds and what George Foreman said to me 31 minutes later sitting on the gym floor with a cup of jasmine tea in his hand is what I’m about to tell you. To understand what happened on Lyons Avenue on the afternoon of August 4th, 1971, you must understand two men. Neither of them is the man you think.

The first man was George Foreman. In the summer of 1971, George Foreman was not yet the figure that history would remember. He was not yet the heavyweight champion of the world. He was not yet the preacher. He was not yet the gentle grandfather selling kitchen grills on American television. He was a 22-year-old former Olympic gold medalist with 32 professional wins, a brand new wife, a 1-year-old daughter, and a body that he had trained for 16 hours a day for 16 consecutive months.

He had grown up in the Fifth Ward of Houston, three blocks from the gym where this story takes place. The Fifth Ward in 1971 was poor, black, dangerous, and predominantly forgotten by the wealthier parts of the city. George had been in trouble there as a teenager. Petty theft, fighting in the streets, the kind of small criminal beginnings that quietly destroyed young men in his neighborhood every week.

The Job Corps had taken him in at 16. Boxing had been introduced to him at 17. The Olympic gold medal in Mexico City had come at 19. After he won the gold in 1968, he had walked around the ring in Mexico City waving a small American flag. The flag had been criticized. It had been the year of the black power salute by Tommy Smith and John Carlos, and many black Americans had felt that George’s flag, a young black athlete celebrating an American identity in a year when American identity had been particularly hostile to black Americans, was a

betrayal. George had carried that criticism quietly for 3 years. He was carrying it on the afternoon of August 4th, 1971. He had something to prove. Not to the boxing writers, to himself. He trained at a gym called Trainers Inc. on Lyons Avenue. The gym was owned by a man named Wilbur. George’s actual coach, Dick Sadler, ran his strategic preparation, but the daily training, the bag work, the rope, the conditioning happened at Wilbur’s gym every afternoon from 1:00 to 6:00, 6 days a week.

The second man was me. In August of 1971, I was 30 years old. The big boss was 3 months from release. American studios had told me 3 weeks earlier that I could play the chauffeur, the house boy, or the silent friend of the white hero at $400 a week. I had been making $47,000 a quarter in Hong Kong. I had $472 in an American bank account.

My back hurt every morning when I bent forward to tie my shoes. The doctor in Los Angeles had told me in March of 1970 that I would never kick again. I was in Houston for a meeting. A Texas oilman had invited me to discuss financing an Asian-American film project, a project that would have allowed me to play the lead in an American movie for the first time.

 The meeting was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel on South Main Street. I had arrived in Houston the night before. I had 4 hours to kill. A Houston taxi driver who picked me up from my hotel that morning had learned I was a martial artist. He had said, “There’s a quiet gym on Lyons Avenue, old building, nobody bothers you there.

You can train without being looked at.” He had not mentioned that the gym was George Foreman’s primary training facility. He had not mentioned the name Foreman at all. Houston was a big city. There were perhaps 40 gyms in it. Coincidences happen. I walked into the gym at 1:47 p.m. I paid the $3 floor fee to the man at the front desk. His name was Wilbur.

He did not recognize me. He pointed to a corner near the back wall, a corner with a mirror and a wooden floor that had been polished to a low shine. I set up there. I began skipping rope at 1:51 p.m. 31 minutes later, I noticed in the mirror a very large young man hitting the heavy bag against the far wall. I did not recognize him.

I had never seen George Foreman fight. I watched him in the mirror without turning. This is something I have done all my life. A man who is being watched and turns to look has already lost the conversation that is about to happen. The mirror gives you everything you need. The angle of the shoulder, the rhythm of the feet, the breathing, without requiring you to announce that you are watching.

He was hitting the bag in slow, heavy rhythms. Pop. Pop. Pop. The third punch always harder than the first two. I counted his combinations. Three. Three. Three. Two. Three. Three. Three. Two. It was, I thought to myself, the rhythm of a drummer who had not yet found his fourth beat. I smiled. I kept skipping.

His right hand was the cleanest right hand I had seen on a heavyweight under 25 since Rocky Marciano on film. The hip rotation was natural. The kind of natural that cannot be taught, only inherited. His footwork was unrefined. His head movement was nonexistent. But the right hand, the right hand was a freight train. I noted this.

 I filed it away. I kept skipping. At 2:18 p.m., I felt him watching me. I did not turn around. He was watching from across the floor with the same kind of casual sideways glance I had been using on him for the past 16 minutes. Through his peripheral vision. Between his combinations. In the half-second pauses when he reset his feet for the next sequence.

This continued for 16 minutes. I would skip. He would hit the bag. He would look at me. I would not look at him. He would resume hitting. I would resume skipping. The pattern was, in its way, a kind of conversation. Neither of us was speaking, but information was being exchanged. At 2:34 p.m., he stopped hitting the bag.

He walked across the gym floor. His footsteps were heavy on the wooden boards, the way 220-lb men walk when they are not trying to be quiet. He stopped 8 ft behind me. He was the largest man who had ever stood that close to me without paying for a ticket. I stopped skipping. I let the rope fall to the floor.

 I turned around. He was looking at me with the expression of a man who is trying to figure out a puzzle that has been left on his kitchen table. “Hey,” he said. “Little man, what you doing in here?” His voice was deeper than I had expected. There was no malice in it. He said “little man” the way a kind older brother says “little man.

” Half teasing, half curious. “Skipping rope, Mr. Foreman.” He blinked. “You know me?” “I know your right hand. Your right hand has signed every wall in this room.” He laughed. It was not a hostile laugh. It was the laugh of a young man who had just been complimented in a way he had not been expecting. He laughed for 3 seconds, then he wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and looked at me again.

“You from China?” “Hong Kong, by way of San Francisco, by way of Seattle, by way of Hong Kong again.” “That’s a lot of byways.” “I move around, Mr. Foreman.” He smiled. He looked at the jump rope on the floor at my feet. “That ain’t training. That’s dancing.” “They are the same thing, Mr. Foreman. One has music, one has bells.

” He looked at me for a long moment. The friendliness was still in his face, but something else was joining it now. The competitive edge that lives behind every fighter’s eyes, the small, ancient instinct that wakes up the moment a stranger enters the room you train in. “What kind of fighting you do?” “I said, among other things, kung fu.

” He smiled. It was a kind smile. He meant no malice. He said, “Kung fu is for the movies.” The gym went quiet. Wilbur at the front desk slowly lowered his newspaper. A sparring partner across the room, a heavyweight named Lonnie, stopped moving. The only sound was the chain of the heavy bag swinging from George’s last combination 2 minutes earlier ticking quietly against its hook.

I did not answer his six words with words. I walked across the floor toward the heavy bag. I walked past Lonnie. I walked past Wilbur, who was now standing in the doorway of his office. I walked across 40 ft of polished wood until I reached the bag George had been hitting for 16 consecutive months. I stopped 1 ft in front of it.

I turned. I looked at George. I said, “Mr. Foreman, I would like to ask you a favor. Show me your right hook. Not the practice one, the real one. The one you have been working 16 hours a day for 16 months to perfect. Show it to me now.” He laughed. He thought I was joking. “Little man, I’d break you in half. You will not hit me.

 You will hit the bag, the bag I am standing in front of. I am asking you to throw the hardest right hook of your young life at this bag right now.” He stopped laughing. He looked at Wilbur. Wilbur shrugged. He looked back at me. He said, “Step aside.” “No, I will not step aside. I will not move my feet. You may throw whenever you are ready.

” He set his feet. I watched his right hip move. The hip is where the punch is born. The fist is only the messenger. Second one. His left foot moved forward 4 in. His right foot anchored 18 in behind it. His hips loaded. His right shoulder rolled back. The preparation had begun. Second two.

 His right hook left his shoulder at, by my estimation, 31 mph. This was the fastest right hook I had ever seen from a heavyweight under 25. Faster than Liston on film. Faster than Marciano. The fastest heavyweight right hand in the world that summer of 1971 was traveling at full speed toward a heavy bag that I was standing 1 ft in front of. I did not move my feet.

 Second three. The fist was 24 in from the bag. I rotated my torso 4 in to the left. The same absent space technique I had developed during my recovery from the back injury. But this time I was not the target. The bag was. My left hand rose toward the chain holding the bag. Not to block. Not to deflect. To catch the chain.

 Second four. The fist was 12 in from the bag. My left hand closed on the chain at the precise point where it met the leather loop at the top of the bag. My right hand rose and pressed against the bottom of the bag. I pulled the chain up. I pushed the bag back. Both motions simultaneous. The bag rose 14 in and swung back with 22 in in 0.18 seconds.

This was not lifting. I weighed 138 lb. The bag weighed 140. Lifting it was not possible. This was redirecting. The bag hanging on its chain had a natural pendulum arc. I was using the chain’s own slack. And George’s own forward momentum pushing air ahead of his fist to displace the bag along its arc. Second five.

George’s right hook arrived at the spot where the bag had been. The bag was no longer there. The fist met air. For a fraction of a second George Foreman’s entire 220 lb traveling forward at the speed of the hardest punch in his young career had nothing to stop it. His shoulder followed. His hip followed. His foot followed.

He was committed to a forward motion that had no resistance. Second six. The bag having been redirected, swung back along its natural pendulum. I made sure, by the exact timing of my release of the chain, that the returning bag passed harmlessly past George’s left shoulder. It did not strike him. It missed his ear by 4 in.

But he was overextended. His weight was past his front foot. His balance was compromised. He was, for the first time in his life as a fighter, in front of his own punch. Second seven. I, still standing in the same spot, placed my right palm against the center of George Foreman’s chest. Flat. Open. With the gentleness of catching a falling cup of tea.

I did not push. I simply held. George’s forward momentum stopped. Not because I was strong enough to stop 220 lb. I was not. Because his own structure had already failed. The palm against his sternum was the anchor that told his body, “You are done moving.” Second eight. He straightened. His chest rose under my palm.

He looked down at my hand. He looked at the heavy bag, which was now swinging gently behind me, ticking against its hook the same way it had been ticking when our conversation had begun 3 minutes earlier. He looked at his own right fist. Still clenched. Still extended into the air where the bag should have been.

His mouth opened slightly. He did not speak. Second nine. I removed my palm from his chest. I stepped back one pace. I lowered my hands. I bowed. A small, formal Wing Chun bow. Hands at my sides. Eyes lowered for 1 second, then raised. I said, “Mr. Foreman, that was the cleanest right hook I have ever seen. I am sorry I moved the bag.

” He stared at me for 11 seconds. Then he began to laugh. Not a polite laugh. Not the laugh of a man who is trying to be a good sport. The laugh of a man who has just understood something so large that he cannot fit it in his mouth. He laughed for 22 seconds. He bent over. He put his enormous hands on his knees.

He laughed until he could not laugh anymore. Then he straightened up. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. He said four words. He said, “Do that again, please.” I told him I would not do the same trick twice, but I would show him why it worked. I asked him to throw a slow-motion right hook at my open palm.

Not at full speed, at 1/10 of his speed. He looked at me as if I had asked him to recite a poem, but he did it. He threw in slow motion the same right hook he had thrown at the bag. When his wrist was halfway through its rotation, I caught it. I caught it with my left hand at the inside of the wrist, and I redirected it 6 in off line.

His fist passed harmlessly to my right. I said, “Your right hook is a freight train, Mr. Foreman, but a freight train has a track. Move the track.” He stood with this for a moment. Then he said, “Show me how to dance with that rope.” He pointed at the jump rope on the floor where I had dropped it. I picked it up. I handed it to him.

He weighed 220 lb. He had the hands of a man who had been hitting heavy bags since he was 12 years old. He looked at the rope as though it were a small, unfamiliar animal. He attempted to skip. He tripped on his own feet after four rotations. He nearly fell into the heavy bag. He laughed at himself, loud.

 The laugh echoed off the corrugated metal walls of the gym. Wilbur came out of the front office. Wilbur, who had worked at the gym for 16 consecutive months, who had watched George Foreman train through every season of those 16 months, had never heard George Foreman laugh like that in his life. Wilbur stood in the doorway with his newspaper still in his hand, and he watched.

George tried again. He tripped after seven rotations this time. He laughed again. He said, “You make this look easy, little man.” I said, “It is easy, Mr. Foreman. After 10,000 hours, it becomes easy.” He said, “I ain’t got 10,000 hours.” I said, “You have all the time you will ever need. Start now. 47 rotations without tripping.

 That is your first goal.” He tried again. He tripped after 12 rotations. He tried again. 21. He tried again. 36. He tried again, and on the fifth attempt, on the floor of a Houston gym in the summer of 1971, the 22-year-old future heavyweight champion of the world completed 47 consecutive jump rope rotations without tripping.

 He held the rope above his head, and he shouted. The shout shook the metal walls of the building. Wilbur, still in the doorway, applauded. George was drenched in sweat. He was breathing as hard as if he had finished four rounds of sparring. He looked at me with the expression of a child who has just been told he is allowed to keep the puppy.

 We sat down on the gym floor. I produced my thermos. I poured two cups of jasmine tea. I handed him one. He sniffed it. He drank. He winced. “Little man, that tastes like a flower died in there.” “A flower did die in there, Mr. Foreman. That is the point.” He laughed again. He drank the rest of the cup without complaint.

 I poured him a second. He sat with the second cup in his hands. The laughter slowly subsided. He looked at the heavy bag for a long time. The bag was still swinging, almost imperceptibly now, the smallest possible motion that a 140-lb bag can sustain on a chain. He said, “Little man, why’d you ask me to throw that punch?” I said, “Because you said kung fu was for the movies.

” He looked at me. He said, “You took that personal.” I said, “I did not take it personal, Mr. Foreman. I took it as a question. A question you did not know you were asking. The question was, ‘Is what you do real?’ The answer, I thought, would be better demonstrated than argued. He nodded slowly. He said, “Where’d you learn to do that with a bag?” I said, “I did not learn it. I observed it.

 There is a difference.” He set his cup down on the gym floor beside him. He said, “You know something? I want to tell you something I haven’t told anybody.” I waited. He began to speak. He told me that when he was 12 years old, growing up in the Fifth Ward, three blocks from the gym where we were sitting, his older brother Roy had taken him to see a movie at the Lincoln Theater on Lyons Avenue.

 The movie was a low-budget martial arts film. George could not remember the name. A small Asian man defeated 14 American thugs in slow motion. George had loved it. He had walked out of the theater telling Roy he wanted to learn kung fu. Roy had laughed. Roy had told him that the movie was not real. That kung fu was not real.

That the only thing that was real was a fist. A fist in your hand and a man on the floor. That’s all there is, George. The rest is movies. Roy had taught George to box that summer. In a small dirt lot behind their grandmother’s house. Roy was 18. George was 12. Roy had been, by George’s own account, the best big brother a boy in the Fifth Ward could have asked for.

Roy had been killed in a car accident in 1972. The script reflects George’s account from the perspective of August 1971. But in his later interviews, Roy’s death weighed heavily on George’s psyche even before the accident. Because Roy had been deeply ill for several years. George had been training every day since the day he had begun.

He told me, with his cup of tea in his hands, that every time he hit the heavy bag, he could hear Roy’s voice in his head saying, “A fist in your hand and a man on the floor.” He told me that those words had carried him through poverty, through the Olympic gold medal, through the criticism over the flag in Mexico City through three years of professional fights.

 He told me he had said “Kung fu is for the movies” to me, a stranger in a corner of his gym, not because he meant it, but because Roy used to say it. And because saying Roy’s words out loud was, for George, a way of keeping Roy alive. He had not realized he was saying it until it was out of his mouth. He told me he was sorry.

I listened. I did not interrupt. I waited until he was finished. Then I said, “Mr. Foreman, your brother was half right. The fist is real. The man on the floor is real. But the movie was real, too. There was a movie in Hong Kong in 1955, when I was 15. A small Asian man defeated 14 thugs in slow motion. I walked out of the theater telling my friend I wanted to be that man.

My friend laughed at me. He told me kung fu was for the movies. Five years later, I was the man in the movie.” George looked at me. I continued, “Your brother taught you to put men on the floor. He was right to teach you that. You have learned it more completely than any man your age in the world. But there is a second half.

 And the second half does not ask you to give up the first. The second half asks you to learn, someday, to lift men off the floor. The day you do that, Mr. Foreman, you will be twice the fighter you are now, and four times the man your brother wanted you to be.” George was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “When does the second half start?” I said, “I do not know, Mr. Foreman.

Some men begin at 20. Some men begin at 60. Some men never begin. You are 22. You have time. You will know the moment when it arrives. The moment will not feel like a beginning. It will feel like a permission. The world will permit you, for the first time, to lift instead of strike. And you will lift.” He nodded.

He drank the rest of his tea. He set the cup on the floor beside him. He said, “Little man, what’s your name?” I said, “Lee. Bruce Lee.” He nodded slowly. He repeated the name quietly, as if testing whether it sounded right inside his head. “Bruce Lee.” He said, “I’m going to remember that.” He stood up.

 He extended his right hand, the same right hand that had passed through air at 31 mph 27 minutes earlier, toward me. I took it. His grip was gentle. He held for 3 seconds. He released. He said, “You ever in Houston again, you come find me. I owe you a cup of tea that doesn’t taste like a funeral.” I laughed. “Mr. Foreman, I would like that.

” He walked toward the heavy bag. He picked up his wraps. He looked at me one last time. He said, “Hey, Bruce Lee.” I said, “Yes, Mr. Foreman?” He said, “Kung fu ain’t for the movies.” Then he walked out the gym door. It swung shut at 3:34 p.m. on August 4th, 1971. I never saw him again. I sat on the gym floor for another 7 minutes after he left.

 The bag was still swinging, almost imperceptibly. The chain ticked very softly against its hook. Wilbur came out from behind his desk. He walked across the floor. He looked at me. He did not ask me what had just happened. He simply nodded once with the small respectful nod of a man who has been around fight gyms long enough to know that some things are not meant to be discussed.

 He said, “You want another tea?” I said, “No, thank you, Wilbur.” I paid him an extra $2 for the favor of his silence. I packed my thermos. I packed my rope. I walked out of the gym into the Houston heat at 3:48 p.m. I made my meeting at the Shamrock Hilton at 6:00 p.m. The film project never came together.

 The oilman backed out 3 weeks later. I flew back to Hong Kong on August 19th. The Big Boss opened on October 31st. The rest of my career began. But, I want to tell you what happened to George. On January 22nd, 1973, exactly 17 months and 18 days after he walked out of that Lions Avenue gym, George Foreman knocked Joe Frazier down six times in two rounds in Kingston, Jamaica.

 He won the heavyweight championship of the world. He threw a right hook so hard that Frazier’s feet left the ground. I watched the fight in a hotel room in Bangkok. I was alone. I drank jasmine tea. When the referee stopped the fight, I stood up. I bowed to the television. On October 30th, 1974, in Zaire, Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman in eight rounds.

 The rope-a-dope. George was 25 years old. He had been champion for 21 months. He retired 3 years later, in 1977, after a fight with Jimmy Young in Puerto Rico, where, in the dressing room afterwards, he had what he later described as a spiritual experience. He believed he had died. He believed he had come back.

He became a preacher. He did not fight again for 10 years. The second half had begun. In 1984, George Foreman opened the George Foreman Youth and Community Center on Lone Oak Drive in Houston. The center took in boys and girls from the same Fifth Ward neighborhood where George had grown up. The same neighborhood where, three blocks away, the Lincoln Theater had once shown a low-budget kung fu film to a 12-year-old boy and his 18-year-old brother.

The center provided after-school programs, boxing lessons, free meals, and a safe place for children whose families could not afford private child care. Across the next 41 years, the center served, by George’s own count, in his many interviews about it, more than 15,000 children. None of them paid a dollar. He had begun on Lone Oak Drive in 1984, the second half.

In 1987, at the age of 38, he returned to boxing. He returned not for personal glory, but to fund the youth center. He had run out of money. The center could not survive on his retirement savings alone. He needed purses, so he came back. He fought 24 consecutive opponents over the next 7 years. He won 23 of them.

On November 5th, 1994, at the age of 45 years and 10 months, in a fight that virtually every American sports writer said he could not possibly win, he knocked out Michael Moorer in the 10th round and became the oldest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. The record still stands. And then, and this is the part that makes me smile even now, telling you this from a place I did not expect to be telling it from.

In 1995, he agreed to put his name on a small kitchen grill. The grill sold over 100 million units worldwide. George Foreman, the man Roy had told would never need anything but his fist, became a beloved American grandfather, a salesman, a preacher, a children’s coach, and one of the kindest men in the history of professional sports.

 In a 2003 interview with HBO Sports, George was asked about the strangest moment of his early career. He laughed. He said, “There was a man in a gym in Houston in 1971. He was about this tall.” He gestured to his own shoulder. “I tried to hit a heavy bag, and the bag wasn’t there. Some little Chinese man had moved it.

 He sat on top of it after. Never told me how he did it. Told me kung fu wasn’t for the movies. He was right. I never knew his name, but every time I held back a punch in my life, every time I chose not to hit somebody, I thought of him. I wish I could find him. I’d like to give him a hug.” The HBO interviewer asked, “Have you ever wondered if it was Bruce Lee?” George Foreman went quiet.

For 11 seconds, he did not speak. Then he said, “I don’t wonder.” And he smiled. He did not say anything else. The interviewer moved on to the next question. I have been asked in my life what the hardest fight I ever had was. I have given many answers. None of them were honest. The hardest fight I ever had was a fight that did not happen.

It was a fight against a 22-year-old in Houston, Texas, who threw the cleanest right hook of his young life, and which I did not return. The hardest fight is always the one where the punch is not thrown. The bag is not hit. The man across from you is not broken. The hardest fight is the one where you give the other man the chance to become something larger than the fight itself.

When George Foreman’s fist passed the bag I had moved, I had, in the half second afterward, with his structure compromised and his sternum under my palm, a choice. I could have struck him in the throat. I could have struck him in the floating ribs on the right side, where I had observed during his bag work that he was holding tension.

I could have struck him in the temple. The only target that, on a man his size, would have ended the encounter in a single half second. I did not. I placed my palm against his chest. I held it there for 1 second. I removed it. This is what I have wanted my whole life to teach. Combat is not the breaking of a man.

 Combat is the showing of a man to himself what he has been carrying. Most fighters have been carrying weapons they did not choose. Most have been carrying fists that belonged to other people. George had been carrying his brother’s fist for 10 years. The fist had served him. The fist had won him an Olympic gold medal. The fist had carried him through poverty and grief, and the criticism of the flag in Mexico City.

 The fist was a true and good fist, but it was Roy’s fist, not George’s. In the 7 seconds between the moment I touched his collar, I mean his sternum, and the moment I bowed, I gave the fist back to him. What he did with it in the 54 years that followed, the championship, the preaching, the youth center, the grill, the second championship at 45, the 15,000 children, was George’s choice.

I did not make him do any of it. I only moved a bag. George Foreman became in those 54 years the second half of his brother Roy’s lesson. He has lifted more men, women, and children off the floor than he ever put on it. He has fed children who would not have eaten. He has built a youth center that has housed 15,000 boys and girls since 1984.

He has, in every measurable way, used the same right hand that should have ended me to lift the world. That is what kung fu is for, Mr. Foreman. It is not for the movies. It is not even for the fight. It is for the moment after the fight, when you put your hand down, and you decide what you will use it for tomorrow.

There is still a heavy bag in a small gym on Lyons Avenue in Houston, Texas. The original building was rebuilt in 1989 after a small fire. The original bag was replaced once in 1984 by a 35-year-old man who was, at the time, opening a youth center across the street. The replacement bag has hung there ever since.

Chained to the same hook in the same corner of the same room. On the bottom of the bag, near the leather seam, there is a small piece of white tape. The tape has been replaced perhaps 20 times across 41 years as it has weathered and peeled and worn through under the weight of countless punches by countless young fighters who have trained at that gym since 1984.

Martial Arts Film Star Bruce Lee's Fame Rose After His Untimely Death

Each time the tape has been rewritten on it in black marker in the handwriting of George Edward Foreman. The three words are for the little man. I am Bruce Lee. I died on the 20th of July, 1973, 5 months and 12 days before George Foreman knocked Joe Frazier down in Kingston, Jamaica. I never saw George Foreman again after the afternoon of August 4th, 1971.

I never told anyone the story of what happened in the gym that afternoon. The thermos of jasmine tea is in a wooden box in a storage room in Los Angeles. The jump rope is somewhere I do not remember. But the bag is still there. The tape is still there. The second half The second half is still being written by a 77-year-old grandfather in Houston, Texas, who once told a stranger with a jasmine thermos that kung fu was for the movies

Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.