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Originally Posted by -King-
I'm only 30 so I didn't grow up around the Bruce Lee hype so I've never understood how an actor became so revered when it comes to fighting. I'm sure he was a great martial artist but everything around him is hypothetical because no one has ever seen him in an actual fight. It's so fascinating. It's like the Chuck Norris memes except no one treats it like a meme.
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Lets not get carried away here. I'm sure Bruce Lee could of been a hell of a fighter if he would have trained for it and gotten into some professional fights. I mean there's stories about him and how quick he was and how hard he hit you just have to Google it. While his films are fiction, you can see he had ability and most of all his intensity was off the charts.
In addition to LeBell, Lee worked for years with the likes of Norris and Joe Lewis, two of the most celebrated non-boxing fighters of their day. Before he became an action star, Norris was the world middleweight karate champion from 1968 to 1974. Lewis won what is regarded as both the first kickboxing match in the U.S. and the bridge between the karate point fighting era and the full-contact kickboxing we know today.
UFC welterweight Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson, unusual among prominent mixed martial artists for being a karate stylist, amassed a 57-0 record as a professional and amateur kickboxer before joining the UFC. He knew Lewis personally and says Lewis told him one of the hardest kicks he'd ever endured was from Bruce Lee. Lewis was a heavyweight kickboxer; Lee was 5-foot-8 and weighed less than 150 pounds.
"You can't tell me that Bruce Lee is not a hard guy, wasn't a good martial artist, wasn't a good fighter, if you got guys like Joe telling me that," Thompson says.
https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id...win-real-fight