Oakland | November 1964
James Lee bolted the door from the inside, the snap of the lock sending a charge through the already amplified atmosphere.
Wong Jack Man had arrived at Bruce Lee’s school at 4157 Broadway in north Oakland with five other people in tow. The many weeks of back-and-forth had finally culminated in a showdown.
Bruce Lee stood facing them at the center of the room, blaring hostility. Behind him James returned to the rear of the studio to stand beside Linda. Outnumbered and unsure of just how many people were bound to show up, James kept a concealed handgun in case things spiraled out of control.
David Chin had driven the Chinatown group over the Bay Bridge in his beige Pontiac Tempest (“three sitting up front and three in the back”) as autumn twilight fell on San Francisco Bay. The martial artists had sat clustered in the front seat: Chin, Wong Jack Man, and Chan “Bald Head” Keung. A well-respected tai chi practitioner, Keung was a longtime fixture of the Gee Yau Seah and was the oldest member of the group, in his midforties.
In the backseat Ronald “Ya Ya” Wu sat with Martin Wong and Raymond Fong. They were all at least a decade older than both Wong Jack Man and David Chin and carried the feel of mischievous hanger-on types, people who wanted to feel close to the action (“only there to see the hubbub,” as Wong Jack Man would later explain). Yet for all the bluster in Chinatown that day, the ride over was unusually quiet.
They arrived at the Jun Fan Institute on Broadway Avenue in the early evening, and approached the two-story brick building. Formerly an upholstery business, the location’s front door was recessed between glass showcase windows, and right inside the entrance a single step led down to the interior floor. The space was narrow: ten to fifteen feet across and about thirty feet deep, before another short step that led up to a partition separating off the back room. Lee had kept the studio simple and uncluttered. A student of his at the time remembers the school as “very unremarkable.”
The Chinatown group stood near the front door, opposite the three Lees further inside, the space between them dense with tension. “It was serious business,” Linda Lee recalls.
In time Wong Jack Man would try to spin the scenario into a more harmless context, asserting that he merely wanted to engage in a friendly sparring match. Chin, like Linda Lee, dismisses this notion as pure revisionism. “It was not a friendly atmosphere,” he asserts. “The challenge was real.”
David Chin stepped forward to introduce Wong Jack Man and articulate their intent. Bruce was having none of it: “Shut your mouth . . . you’ve already gotten your friend killed.” The back-and-forth started in English, then hastily shifted in and out of Cantonese. Bruce pressed Wong on whether he had actually been at the Sun Sing, which he admitted he had not. When Chin tried to interject some ground rules, Bruce kept the tone harsh: “You came to my school to challenge me and now you want to set the rules?”
The Chinatown crowd briefly turned inward to confer. Perhaps they had finally begun to realize that Bruce’s often-cited cockiness didn’t stem from shallow egotism but from a genuine confidence: he really did believe he could beat any and all challengers. In this regard it was difficult to determine which fighter was underestimating his opponent.
Bruce barked toward their huddle, letting them know that high noon was the wrong hour for second guesses. “As far as I’m concerned,” Bruce shouted, “there are no rules. It’s all out!”
However contested the actual reasons for the fight were, the match-up itself had a singularly spectacular symmetry: two highly promising twenty-three-year-old kung fu practitioners wielding inverse styles of Shaolin and representing opposite shores of the bay.
Their appearances alone spoke to the yin-yang-like dynamic that existed between them. At five feet seven and a mere 140 pounds, Bruce stood in a tank top and jeans. Like the fight with Yoiche in Seattle, his opponent had arrived formally dressed. At five feet ten and about the same weight as Bruce, Wong Jack Man wore a traditional black jing mo, making him look far more handsome and naive than formidable or menacing.
Although fairly new to the area, Wong had an unassuming and low-key personality that quickly endeared him to many in Chinatown. Bruce, on the other hand, was entirely polarizing. He was known by many to be cocky, hyperactive, and outspoken. His close friends, by contrast, regarded him as charismatic, highly motivated, and fiercely loyal.
If the old boxing adage, “Styles make fights,” was true, then the impending bout would be stellar. As a practitioner of the Northern Shaolin arts, Wong Jack Man’s abilities were expansive, acrobatic, and oriented around long-range attacks. He was known for his kicking abilities, which—according to one student—could be delivered with “blinding speed and crushing power.” Conversely, Bruce practiced a Southern Shaolin style—Wing Chun—which was short, linear, and economical. His abilities were anchored around an uncanny agility of the hands and otherworldly displays of speed, manifested in barrages of direct punches. Whereas Bruce had refuted the practicing of forms as “dry-land swimming,” Wong was said to have mastered “close to a hundred of them at the time.”
Both men had spent their early years growing up in Hong Kong, learning kung fu from established Chinese masters, before transplanting to the Bay Area. Whether intentional or otherwise, Wong Jack Man was representing the long-established and more traditional martial arts culture of Chinatown, while Bruce was a member of a very new and modern camp in Oakland.
Up until that very moment, the two men had actually never met.
“Step forward,” Bruce demanded in Cantonese.
As Wong Jack Man emerged forth, Bruce was intent on replicating his eleven-second victory in Seattle from a few years earlier. Like so many other of their viewpoints, Bruce shared a similar philosophy with James, who was known to often articulate these situations in stark terms: “If you get in a fight, you’ve got to take the guy out in the first ten seconds. You can’t give him a chance. Just destroy him.” So whether it was this Oakland street-fighter code of quickly putting an opponent down or the old notion of a true master defeating an opponent in three moves or less, Bruce sought to end the conflict quickly.
Now in the late stages of pregnancy, Linda Lee watched with detached cool. “I suppose I ought to have been nervous,” she recounted later in a memoir, “Yet, the truth is that I felt quite calm and composed under the circumstances. . . . I had no doubt that he [Bruce] could take care of himself.”
Wong stepped into range, and Bruce took the initiative. As in the demonstration he so often exhibited, Bruce saw his chance to quickly close the gap and land a blow. Even in light of his recent failure with the technique at the Sun Sing Theater, Bruce didn’t hesitate to seize on the opening and execute it, but instead of a mere tap to the head, he darted in and delivered a sharp punch to Wong’s temple, just narrowly missing his eye. The tone of the fight was set. As Wong would convey to one of his students years later, “He really wanted to kill me.”
Bruce pressed in, anxious for a fast resolution. Wong resorted to defensive maneuvers, sidestepping to avoid Bruce’s straight assaults and using his forearms to deflect the blasts. By Chin’s account Bruce employed low kicks to close in and then advanced with a flurry of punches. The melee soon moved through the building as Wong sought to evade his enraged attacker.
Shifting to offense, Wong delivered a wide diagonal blow—“like an ax punch coming down”—that narrowly missed Bruce’s chin and instead caught him across his lower neck. For Bruce, who had been so untouchable in recent years during both chi sao and sparring, the blow stoked his fury even further. Now approaching a frenzy, he pressed in on Wong with blasts of “chain punches”: a rhythmic succession of rapid blows that keeps the hands high in defense even as they are used offensively.
Despite the seemingly high-quality match-up, opposing a practitioner who had taken to calling his martial arts approach “scientific street fighting” with a Northern expert known for his elegance, the fight was quickly devolving into a wild and sloppy brawl that spilled across the entire room.
Wong sidestepped again as he deflected with his arms. In then backpedaling away from Bruce, he stumbled over one of the small riser steps that came up from the studio floor. Bruce was over him now, relentless with his punches, shouting in Cantonese: “Do you yield? Do you yield?” Having lost his feet, Wong had little choice.
“From there,” explains Chin, “he said he gives up and we stopped the fight. The whole thing lasted . . . not more than seven minutes.”
Wong Jack Man and his mismatched entourage got back into Chin’s car and returned to San Francisco. In Chinatown they went upstairs to the Chin Family Association on Washington Street and applied a hardboiled egg to Wong’s eye as a way to reduce the bruising. The mood was sullen.
Back in Oakland the atmosphere was far from triumphant. “After the fight, Bruce sat down on the stairs in the back of the studio,” explains Linda Lee, “and he told me that he was so disappointed in himself, because the fight lasted way too long, that he couldn’t get him [Wong] down right away, and that he was winded from running around.”
Even as Linda would maintain that Wong was “soundly defeated,” the fight was a far cry from Bruce’s dominant victory over Yoechi years earlier in Seattle. After expounding all year in front of so many other martial artists about the ineffectiveness of so many practitioners and their techniques, Bruce now sat quietly in his school, wrestling with his own shortcomings.
The following afternoon Bruce’s childhood friend Ben Der returned to Chinatown anxious to catch word of what had transpired.
“The day before, everybody was talking about it,” he recalls, “saying how exciting it was gonna be. So I purposefully went down to Chinatown the next afternoon to see what everyone was saying. And it was dead quiet. Nobody was saying anything. And that’s how I knew Bruce Lee won that fight.”