Oakland | 1963
Leo Fong worked the heavy bag in James Lee’s garage on a Friday night, still trying to chase down the “the ultimate.” Or at least, that’s how he liked to phrase it. Even with his extensive background in American boxing, Fong had spent the past few years making the drive to study at martial arts schools around the San Francisco Bay, looking to expand his repertoire and cobble together some kind of uniquely sublime fighting style.
He studied at Hung Sing with Lau Bun, with T. Y. Wong down in Kin Mon, and now with Jimmy Lee in his garage on Monticello Avenue in North Oakland. Like a small but ever-increasing number of young American men in those days, Fong was compelled by the allure of Asian martial arts, surmising that there were some superior fighting secrets to be unearthed. As a result he was contemplating a “radical overhaul” of his martial arts focus, despite his success as a boxer. So in addition to his Bay Area training, Fong had even clocked time studying tae kwon do and jujitsu in recent years, as well.
Fong practiced his main boxing combo to keep it in tune: drop down for a fake to the body with the right, then lights out up high with a left hook to the jaw. Jimmy’s garage now echoed with a sharp “pah-pah . . . pah-pah,” as Fong delivered the technique repeatedly to the bag. He had racked up eighteen knockouts with that particular move in his college days, and he could still throw it with devastating effectiveness.
Currently assigned to a church in Vallejo, Fong’s parish duties as a Methodist minister left him with little free time, making Friday nights one of the few parts of his week that he could dedicate to martial arts. These odd hours rendered him an outsider to the typical class structure, leaving him to work out in quiet, scarcely populated sessions while the main class members and senior students were busy with extracurricular weekend pursuits. This suited Fong just fine, who had spent the majority of his life as an outlier to the groups around him.
So with little company beyond the unique contraptions that populated Jimmy’s garage, Fong worked the heavy bag. Pah-pah . . . pah-pah. Another Friday night chasing the ultimate. It was the same story throughout Fong’s entire life: always in the ring but forever outside the box.
At the age of fifteen, Leo Fong’s first “smoker” fight was against the high school’s varsity quarterback, a kid named Dave Hodge. As soon as he had been approached with the opportunity to fight, Fong knew that he was clearly outweighed in the match-up (118 pounds to Hodge’s 175), but the guys setting up the fights minimized the concern and scheduled him anyhow. In boxing terminology Fong was being set up as a “tomato can,” a fighter who is being put in the ring just to fill out the card and lose to a superior opponent.
The match was held in an abandoned schoolhouse in the town of Widener, Arkansas. About fifty local men were in attendance, drinking and smoking (hence the “smoker” slang), and betting twenty-five cents a fight. The ring was merely a loosely hung rope along three sides. The fourth side was the schoolhouse wall.
When the bell (or whatever makeshift apparatus) had rung, Fong aggressively raced over to attack Hodge and was met with a few stiff jabs before getting his head bounced off that schoolhouse wall. The fight lasted a few more lopsided rounds before the organizers realized they were obligated to intervene. Fong walked home depressed, wondering why he had lost so badly.
The residents of Widener had never known what to make of Fong. They assumed he was Mexican or Native American or maybe African. The sign out front of town read “Population 92”—even though in reality there were close to four thousand African Americans residing there—and few locals had ever actually encountered a Chinese person before. The kids at school, however, understood where he was from, and on his first day of school, in 1934, they heckled him with a “Ching Chong Chinaman–kinda chant.” Later that day Fong related the incident to his dad, thinking the boys were praising him. His father had to explain that it was actually ridicule.
Starting the very next morning, Fong got into a lot of schoolyard fights, responding to taunts by hitting kids quickly before they even knew what was happening. This typically resulted in the principal taking a paddle to Fong for his actions, but it made little difference. Certain slurs were simply fighting words, paddle or not, and before long his childhood was riddled with these types of incidents.
Fong and his family were the only Chinese for miles, running a local grocery in the hostile atmosphere of pre–civil rights Arkansas. (“The racism was so deep,” explains Fong, “you would not believe it.”) In addition to the regular schoolyard fights, two other events would shape the remainder of his life. First, he suffered a horrible fever around the age of eleven, which lasted for close to two weeks. It was so severe that it prompted Fong to promise God that he would become a minister if restored to health. He was, and he eventually did. Next, he found the book Fundamentals of Boxing by former world champion Barney Ross. For a kid who already had a way with his fists, Fong’s formal interest in boxing grew with each page, and his fighting abilities were bolstered by the book’s detailed instruction. He would hang a pillow up in his room and work on the punch combinations each night as detailed by Ross.
So walking home after that first smoker fight, the teenage Fong had to wonder where he had gone wrong. Regardless of his opponent’s superior size, the loss had taken him unexpectedly. His mistake—namely, his impatience in the ring—finally dawned on him late that night.
Fong sought out the smoker organizers the next day and requested another fight, much to their surprise. This time around he slowed the pace down, hanging back and hanging back and waiting for his opponent to show a flaw. When he did, Fong lit him up with a one-two straight out of the Barney Ross manual, securing the first knockout of his career. He felt right walking home that evening.
From there he began fighting in the smokers regularly. He would slip around his parents on Saturday nights and fight in all kinds of underground venues, rickety barns and weed-infested backyards. Sometimes the fights would be heavily attended; other times he would fight in front of ten people in someone’s garage. He was matched against local kids who didn’t have formal training but who were “raw bone strong,” conditioned tough from years of bailing hay and herding cows. Having at one time regarded him as a “tomato can,” the organizers soon had trouble finding Fong a willing opponent.
Fong pursued boxing formally in college, training under Kirby “KO” Donohoe—the school’s scrappy-minded coach. Once, after getting battered by an opponent throughout the first few rounds, Fong asked his coach to throw in the towel, but instead Donohoe just pushed him back out for another round. Fong won that fight by knockout in the next minute while on the ropes, learning the lesson of “a sliding right” maneuver against an advancing opponent, shifting his right foot backward even as he threw a punch forward with his right hand. Yet even with a record of 22-3, his losses in the ring contributed as much to his evolution as his many victories, not unlike his experience with the smoker fights.
Later the Methodist Church assigned him to a parish along skid row in Sacramento (one of the few congregations that would take a Chinese minister), relocating him out of the American South and over to California in 1954, when he was still in his twenties. It was around this time that Fong gained exposure to other types of martial arts and fighting styles, causing him to wonder if there was a better approach than boxing. After training at various schools with numerous teachers, Fong walked out of Kin Mon with James Lee in 1962 during the fallout with T. Y. Wong.
Now in Oakland, Fong found common cause with James in trying to distinguish what worked, what was real, and what was just hype. Fong’s recent training experiences had already provided him with some evidence, even if he struggled to glean what it actually implied. While Fong sparred with his prior kung fu classmates, his boxing instincts immediately picked up on easy openings in his opponent’s defense, and he tagged them up with little difficulty. But he never chalked it up to the merits of his boxing abilities. Instead Fong figured that they were just going easy on him.
It was actually Bruce Lee, in the coming year, who would urge Fong to differentiate between martial arts fact and fiction.
There were two notable martial arts books published in 1963. They were extremely different from each other but equally significant in their own way. One would gain momentum over time and eventually be reprinted for decades to come, while the other would enjoy an initial popularity before slowly falling into obscurity.
After months of enthusiastic collaboration, James Lee published Bruce Lee’s first book, Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense. Similar to T. Y. Wong’s book a few years earlier, it was among the very first titles published in English on the Chinese martial arts. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Bruce played it safe, publishing more of a primer for beginners than something that better reflected his far more modern and nuanced outlook. The book opened with short author testimonials from James Lee, Ed Parker, and Wally Jay. In addition to the illustrated instructions (both drawings and photographs), Bruce committed space to his philosophical perspective, emphasizing the concept of yin and yang in the execution of the techniques. He not only showcased some basic styles and technique apart from Wing Chun but also included some of the “classical” approaches that he was becoming so openly critical of in that period. Compared to the increasingly confrontational content of Bruce’s demonstrations at the time, the book itself was straightforward and fairly innocuous.
Conversely, Secret Fighting Arts of the World, by John F. Gilbey, was billed as “a book crammed full of secret fighting techniques never before divulged in print.” Gilbey’s book hopped around the globe from chapter to chapter, detailing all kinds of highly unusual fighting styles, such as the “The Liverpool Nutter” (profiling a British master of the head butt) and the “Ganges Groin Gouge” (fairly self-explanatory). A chapter about “The MVD Special” explains how a former Soviet secret service agent (kicked out twice for “over-zealousness”) had perfected an open-hand slap more powerful than a well-thrown fist. In the realm of the Chinese arts, Gilbey chronicles the oft-rumored technique of Dim Mak, “the Delayed Death Touch,” in which a master could merely tap an opponent at a certain point on the body during a certain hour to ensure his demise days or even weeks later. The “About the Author” section explains how Gilbey was “an heir to a textile fortune” who “knows self defense like no other man.”
If it all sounds a bit ridiculous, it’s because it was—the book was a hoax. Gilbey was the farcical pen name of Robert W. Smith, a unique figure and prolific writer in the early days of martial arts in America. Like Gerda Geddes (and at about the same time), Smith was one of those rare Westerners who through special circumstances became an early student of the Chinese martial arts.
A World War II veteran with a degree in history, Smith spent time in the Red Cross before joining the U.S. intelligence services. In 1959 he was stationed in Taiwan, as a liaison to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government. With a background in boxing and judo, Smith spent his free time during his Taiwan assignment seeking out local Chinese martial artists. Most notably, he studied tai chi under Chen Man Ching (who like Geddes’s teacher, Choy Hak Pang, was a student of renowned Yang-style master Yang Cheng Fu). When Smith returned to the United States, he began a long teaching tenure as one of the early tai chi instructors in America and would publish numerous books on the martial arts for many years to come.
In its simplest form Smith’s Secret Fighting Arts of the World was the result of a vivid mind and incredibly wry sense of humor. But the parody of it all was actually quite significant. Smith wrote the book as a way of illustrating the many far-fetched and outlandish tales that populate the martial art landscape, as well as the pervasive inclination for Westerners to wholeheartedly believe them. Unsurprisingly perhaps, a great number of readers took the contents of Secret Fighting Arts . . . quite seriously. For years to come Smith would receive letters addressed to Gilbey on all manner of peculiar topics seemingly related to his book.
Anthropologist and martial arts historian Thomas Green remembers encountering Smith’s book as a college student not long after it was first published: “What we were reading in that book was exactly what we all wanted to have. What young man doesn’t want to be invulnerable? And here are all these fantastic secret arts. The book contains such a mix of things that appear to be accurate, alongside things that are just absolute fantasy, that it keeps you guessing. I really wanted it to be true, as did my friends . . . and for a while I ran into it everywhere I went.” Whereas a few decades earlier Tang Hao had tackled the same issues of folklore and hyperbole in the martial arts, Smith had taken a sly approach, applying a Mark Twain sense of satire to the issue (and as a result, evading blowback from the community).
Yet while these two books from 1963 differed in a variety of ways, the authors shared common ground in that they would both dedicate themselves to the same sort of reformist efforts as Tang Hao had years earlier, by conveying candid and often unpopular assessments of trends within the world of the martial arts. As Smith would later write in his memoir: “So much of what passes for the fighting arts in America and Asia is bogus. Except for judo, which has fairly consistent standards, one is lucky to get the authentic in a sea of chicanery. Always and everywhere it is hard to distinguish the thing from the version of thing.” In the days to come, Bruce would prove unflinching in voicing these sentiments not only to colleagues like Fong but to a very wide cross section of the martial arts community.
At the end of the year, Bruce made the drive from Seattle to Oakland with his girlfriend Linda Emery shortly after the Christmas holiday. Emery was a freshman at the University of Washington who had begun taking lessons with Bruce in Seattle earlier in the year, and while on break, they planned to travel down to Pasadena to watch the Huskies in the Rose Bowl (though really, Bruce just wanted to visit Ed Parker). Upon their arrival in Oakland, James presented Bruce with a finished copy of his book for the first time. It marked the end of an eventful year.
In numerous ways 1963 had been good for Bruce. He had found a location for his school in Seattle and given it the eponymous title, The Jun Fan Institute of Gung Fu. The business had enabled him to finally step away from the menial work of waiting tables and stuffing inserts into newspapers.
Over the summer Bruce had traveled to Hong Kong for the first time since he boarded an ocean liner in virtual exile four years earlier. It was a triumphant homecoming. Having left beneath a cloud of teenage trouble, Bruce returned a university student and a business owner, with gifts and money for his family. They marveled at how mature he had become and, most importantly, Bruce’s father beamed with pride at his son’s growth into adulthood.
Now, at the year’s end, Bruce had also become a published author, with testimonial support from a reputable array of modern martial artists. Perhaps it was the sum total of these successes that would shape Bruce’s tone in the year to come, when he would so openly air his criticisms of what he saw as the static and ineffective nature of the martial arts in America.
With James Lee, Allen Joe, and Linda in Oakland, by the lights of the Christmas tree, Bruce toasted to the year ahead—to the Year of the Dragon. It would be one of the most eventful and pivotal years of his life.