up with a second lady at that place where people go to do the things with the drinking companions. As for the fight with Luke Sun, yeah…that did not happen. Johnny and Luke Sun were a characters they made up for the movie…I guess so they wouldn’t have any trouble from Wong Jack Man. So if Luke Sun wasn’t a real person, then how come I said there really was a fight like the one in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story? Well see, the real fight didn’t happen while Bruce was filming “The Big Boss.”
It actually happened while Bruce was working on “Enter the Dragon.” When Bruce was filming “Enter the Dragon,” Warner Brothers came up with an idea to also release a 10-minute documentary on television about “The Making of Enter the Dragon” to promote the movie before its release. Henry Wong was tasked with recording the footage, and Henry Wong said he filmed at least 5 hours worth of behind the scenes footage which included Bruce Lee working with the actors for their fight scenes, Bruce Lee teaching martial arts on set,
and even Bruce Lee getting into a few scraps with some of the extras on the set. In a previous video on Bruce Lee’s real fights on the set of Enter the Dragon, Henry Wong is on the tennis courts with Bruce Lee’s personal assistant, Madelena Chan, where they recalled the fight when the kid challenged Bruce Lee and proceeded to get his teeth knocked out.
Bolo Yeung and Director, Robert Clouse, also have stories about that particular fight, but whenever Henry Wong talks about the fights he witnessed while filming the Behind the Scenes of Enter the Dragon, he always mentions a fight that Bruce didn’t want anyone to see that is a different incident from the one where the kid got kicked in the mouth.
Henry Wong never really went into the details of that particular fight in the interviews that I’d read until I just happened to be reading Robert Clouse’s book on “The Making of Enter the Dragon,” where Henry Wong went into all of the details around the fight from how it started to what happened.
After I got all of the details, it finally started to make sense why they managed to find a way to slip this story into “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” even though it was nothing like the incident in that Bruce Lee Biopic. So this is what really happened with the fight Bruce Lee didn’t want anyone to see, and I apologize to you guys because it starts out sounding like a Beerdy story, but I promise you, it’s coming directly from Henry Wong.
Henry Wong said that filming had wrapped for the day and most of the crew had already cleared out. Robert Clouse, the director, and Chaplin Chang, an assistant director, were already gone. Well, this extra came over to ask Bruce for help with a kick he was trying to learn. Wong called the extra “kelefei” which is a word I’ve only heard from Alex Richter on the Kungfu Genius Podcast. It means extras on set, but it also means “a nobody” or an unimportant person.
I just think it’s funny that we’re calling this guy who got into a fight with Bruce Lee “a nobody,” because at this point no one remembers his name or anything. Well anyway, the extra is asking Bruce for help with a kick, and Bruce is taking time out to teach this guy, but at some point, Bruce is like “hey man, it’s been real, keep it trill, I gotta bounce.
” Well the extra says no, I want to show you what I’ve learned, why don’t you fight me? Bruce shakes his head saying no, no fight. I’m done, I gotta bounce, man. So the extra calls Bruce a coward and he’s all like “Come at my bro!” Well at this point, the other extras who are still around are watching. Dude’s mom is there to get him, and she’s watching.
Now I love Asian culture. Heck, I live in Asia, my wife and kids are Asian…well, my daughter is half, but just go with it. My nieces and nephews that I take care of, they’re asian…so I love Asian culture, but one thing I don’t like about Asian culture, is the whole giving and saving face thing.
Y’all who deal with this stuff in martial arts, or maybe with family, y’all know exactly what I mean. Well, Bruce Lee got caught up in one of those situations where he didn’t want to fight this kid, but it’s like if he walks away, they both end up losing face, so to save face, Bruce agrees to fight the extra.
Well, the fight didn’t last very long at all. Henry didn’t give the details on the fight at all, but he said Bruce Lee kicked the guy and broke his ribs. Fight over. After that, Bruce felt bad for him, so he gave him money to go to the hospital, and he gave the guy’s mother about $4000 and an apology for breaking her son.
Well, Bruce sees Henry with his camera, and he asks if it was rolling because if it is, he wants Henry to get rid of the film. Well, Henry says he can’t get rid of it because he’s shot other things that day, and even if he didn’t, it’s technically not his property, so he can’t destroy it. and that’s where we got this story of Bruce getting into a fight on the set of a movie and then trying to destroy the film so that no one would see what really happened.
Bruce stayed behind to give this kid a personal kungfu lesson, and then he tried to walk away when the kid disrespected him, but nothing worked, and he ended up breaking the guy’s ribs with a kick. Now I know with all these stories about fights on the set of “Enter the Dragon,” it might sound like Bruce Lee was some kind of a bully who was going around fighting the extras all the time, but this wasn’t the case at all.
What I’ve learned is that pretty much all of the extras were Triad members. Some of them belonged to rival Triad groups, and you just had quite a few knuckleheads running around who were even trying to fight each other. Sometimes the disrespect got completely out of hand to the point that Bruce got irritated and taught a few of them a lesson, but he really didn’t respond to the majority of the times he was challenged.
The truth is that, minus a few knuckleheads, Bruce was loved on the set by these guys. When the folks from Warner Brothers were eating meals at some fancy hotel restaurant, Bruce was with the extras eating rice and barbecue pork. Bruce was chewing out the people in charge of catering for not giving the guys enough meat in their meals.
Bruce was always fussing at Raymond Chow to get extra pay for some of the guys who were working really hard. Some of the stories from some of these other Bruce Lee channels make it sound like Bruce Lee was fighting people every day he was on set. I’ve even seen one video claiming Bruce Lee fought one of the actual stuntmen who was really a guy who knew Bruce growing up. He was literally like one of Bruce Lee’s little brothers.
And I mention Tony Liu as being like a little brother to Bruce Lee because pretty much everyone viewed Bruce Lee as Big Brother. Even the guys who got out of line and had to get smacked up, from the stories I’ve heard, Bruce didn’t want them to get fired even though they tried to fight him.
If he marked them up too much, he was willing to pay for their hospital visit, and in the case of this cat who got his ribs broken, Bruce gave his mother enough money to take care of his family for a hot minute. $4000 in 1973 adjusted for inflation has the buying power of almost $28k today. So that’s just something to think about when you hear some of these stories about Bruce Lee fighting people behind the scenes of Enter the Dragon — he didn’t want anyone to know the details of the fights, and he always took care of the guys who got smacked up.
