Bruce Lee is one of the most iconic and influential martial artists in the world. Although world renowned for his speed and technique, Lee very rarely competed or sparred full contact. In this rare footage, you can really get a sense of how fast he was and how far ahead his technique was amongst his contemporaries:

Lee found martial arts as a collection of countless strictly organized and controlled contradictory sets of beliefs and practices, each of which believed itself to be clearly superior to the others. It was, truly, a field in which everyone was better than average.

He left a legacy that truth in unarmed combat lay outside of fixed systems. He showed the world a contest with fighters in fingered gloves, using strikes, takedowns, and tapping out to submissions on the ground.

In short, he left a world that was ready to embrace mixed martial arts.

When MMA came along, a new system was created for the refining of technique. It is as simple as wheels on luggage – to figure out if something works in a fight, just fight. If a technique doesn’t work for you, you’ll know, because you will get hit in the face.

The name Bruce Lee gave to his approach – Jeet Kune Do, or The Way of the Intercepting Fist – captures that reality.

About Bruce Lee

Iconic actor, director and martial-arts expert Bruce Lee was born Lee Jun Fan on November 27, 1940, in San Francisco, California, in both the hour and year of the Dragon. His father, Lee Hoi Chuen, a Hong Kong opera singer, moved with his wife, Grace Ho, and three children to the United States in 1939; Hoi Chuen’s fourth child, a son, was born while he was on tour in San Francisco.

Lee received the name “Bruce” from a nurse at his birthing hospital, and his family never used the name during his preschool years. The future star appeared in his first film at the age of 3 months, when he served as the stand-in for an American baby in Golden Gate Girl (1941).

In the early 1940s, the Lees moved back to Hong Kong, then occupied by the Japanese. Apparently a natural in front of the camera, Bruce Lee appeared in roughly 20 films as a child actor, beginning in 1946. He also studied dance, winning Hong Kong’s cha-cha competition, and would become known for his poetry as well.

source: biography.com