The story is legendary. It was the birth of Jeet Kune Do, and the most verified of the accounts of Bruce Lee actually fighting.

Lee was reportedly the first person to openly teach Chinese martial arts on the USA mainland. He taught Chinese people, African Americans, Japanese, Caucasians, and women. The opening of a formerly closed practice generally breeds resentment, and that was reportedly the case here.

A Chinese martial artist name Wong Jack Man challenged Lee via letter. Wong says it was because Lee had said he could beat any martial artist in San Francisco. Lee’s camp is adamant that it was for teaching Westerners.

Accounts differ too on what happened. Wong said he held back for fear of killing Lee. You can’t make these things up.

Witnesses to the fight include Bruce Lee’s wife, Linda Lee Cadwell, his student James Lee (no relation), and Tai Chi teacher William Chen. Chen said later that the fight lasted 20-25 minutes. Lee’s wife put the time at a far more plausible three minutes.

“People have made comments and written about the story, that has changed so drastically over the years” she explains. “But I was there. I know exactly what happened. I can see it clear as a picture in my head.”

The two came out, bowed formally and then began to fight. Wong adopted a classic stance whereas Bruce, who at the time was still using his Wing Chun style, produced a series of straight punches. Within a minute, Wong’s men were trying to stop the fight as Bruce began to warm to his task. James Lee warned them to let the fight continue.

“A minute later, with Bruce continuing the attack in earnest, Wong began to backpedal as fast as he could. For an instant, indeed, the scrap threatened to degenerate into a farce as Wong actually turned and ran. But Bruce pounced on him like a springing leopard and brought him to the floor where he began pounding him into a state of demoralization. ‘Is that enough?’ shouted Bruce, ‘That’s enough!’ pleaded his adversary. Bruce demanded a second reply to his question to make sure that he understood this was the end of the fight.

In an interview with Black Belt, Lee described the fight as the moment he came to understand Wing Chun was not a reasonably effective means of self-defense.

“I’d gotten into a fight in San Francisco with a Kung-Fu cat, and after a brief encounter the son-of-a-bitch started to run,” he said. “I chased him and, like a fool, kept punching him behind his head and back. Soon my fists began to swell from hitting his hard head. Right then I realized Wing Chun was not too practical and began to alter my way of fighting.”

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.