Undefeated in all competitions for seven years, that's why. That's never happened before so I'll just say it this way: undefeated forever and ever. In the United States, he was undefeated for five years. Officially a combined 882-0-0, he averaged nine major tournaments per year and the maximum number of fights per tournament, sometimes as many as three fights per day depending on seeding. Put it this way, jimmy stopped collecting trophies. He didn't have room for them anymore. So he would either give them back, convince the organizers to make it a standing trophy with engraved names, or donate it to charity somehow. He probably even sold one or two for scrap.
By the time he was fourteen, Jimmy'd won five straight national championships and five straight world championships in three different disciplines: karate, judo, and kung fu. Then he won a scholarship to the most prestigious martial arts academy in Hong Kong: Fire Mountain School. It was in all the papers. They taught all the southern styles of kung fu. Had been doing it for hundreds and hundreds of years. Lots of people had no idea how difficult that must've been, relocating to HK after spending most of his life out on the plains. But Jimmy went, left his parents, moved halfway across the world, sucked it up, and went to work.
After training for six months within the school, Jimmy began competing on the local circuit in every tournament available. Same result. Not a single loss. He tore China up en route to two more world championships in FIVE different disciplines. And he would have won all the Chinese championships as well if not for the fact that he was barred from certain ones for not being a citizen. That didn't stop people from idolizing him, wanting to be near him, politicians from using him to curry favor with the masses. It must've been a crazy time. Jimmy found himself the national spokesman for a noodle company, and a cooking sauce company. They made sweet-and-sour sauces and stuff like that, put them in bottles and sold them for home use. He sent the money to his parents because rules at his school forbade the live-in members from earning. They were only there to train.
It probably goes without saying that Jimmy was the most famous kid in the world of martial arts. They even put his face on a Chinese edition Coke can without his permission. That's how famous Jimmy was: fifteen years old and the legend of all legends. Kids would play tournaments in their backyards and actually get into real fights over who could be Jimmy Chang, All American, All World, All Invincible.
So why did everyone at Kung Fu know him? Because Jimmy Chang isn't real. He's a myth: the kid who couldn't lose. You probably heard about piano prodigies who can start playing at four or some ridiculous age, well Jimmy was like that, except with martial arts. His dad started him out at three, training him in the fields. See, his dad was a farmer and a good one but somehow he found time to run a farm and train Jimmy at night. He started Jimmy out with simple Tiger Fist forms, just practice stuff to do in the morning and at night in the barn. Of course, it didn't take him long to progress. He was on to full contact by the time he turned six. So his dad taught him what he knew of Hung Gar and Yong Chun styles. By the time Jimmy was eight he was competing.
When he quit just before his sixteenth birthday, his record was 2,412-0-0. He was a ghost. Never been injured. Never even been thrown. And for his last full year on the mat in Hong Kong, NEVER EVEN BEEN HIT. Get your head around that. Not a single opponent scored a hit on him. All the scorecards are kept in the main tournament hall in HK. You can go look if you want. But that's not really necessary, because if you saw Jimmy's final fight to defend his world championship in the open category (any style was acceptable), you would've seen everything you'd ever need to see. That was the day he fought The Bulgarian.
Nobody I know knows The Bulgarian's real name and if they did they couldn't pronounce it, so everyone, even the TV announcers, just called him The Bulgarian. Supposedly he was the biggest-ever threat to Jimmy's domination of the sport. Cue and I didn't believe that for a second. We heard the same thing every year. It was all just hype. We knew Jimmy couldn't be defeated. It didn't matter that The Bulgarian had been stolen from his gypsy parents and taken off to Mongolia when he was a kid and raised in the mountains like some wild, latter-day Genghis Khan warrior.
The World Championships were being held in London that year and there was this huge procession in front of Buckingham Palace and then down in front of Big Ben, I remember watching that. The best part though was the standing room only in the giant event hall. There must have been twenty thousand people in there. Serious. The atmosphere was ridiculous. People were even singing: "Hey throw that fellah / We said a-hey throw that fellah / Jimm-y throw that fellah / hey throw that fellah," to the tune of "Guantanamera." But Jimmy didn't throw that fellah. He looked disinterested for much of the match, and it was amazing to watch him avoid full-strength spinning kicks by centimeters, and hammer-throw punches by millimeters. The timed first and second rounds ended with no points scored and the third and final round was much the same until the last two seconds.
To this day, every person who saw that fight swears Jimmy somehow teleported himself behind The Bulgarian to score the hit that won it. They showed it on television for months on super-slow-motion replay but watching it was like watching a jumpy old movie that was missing frames somewhere. See, Jimmy was in front of The Bulgarian, not two inches from him, with his heels on the out-of-bounds line, as the big challenger opened his arms wide and was bringing them down on Jimmy. There was no way he could escape. There was really no room, nowhere to go. I remember grabbing Cue's leg in the shady bar we had snuck into to watch the match on pay-per-view at one in the afternoon. I knew he had had it. Cue knew it was over. Everyone watching knew it was over.
The announcers were even starting the sentence, "A remarkable run has finally en—," when Jimmy disappeared/reappeared behind The Bulgarian, extended his right leg, and executed a perfect kick to the back of his opponent's weight-bearing knee and sent him sprawling forward onto the out-of-bounds part of the mat. I'd love to be able to tell you that I jumped and screamed and shouted and was so happy that Jimmy won, but I didn't. My mouth was just as open as Cue's and we were trying to figure out how he did it. It was shocking for real.
The cameras timed it afterward. Jimmy literally disappeared for a thousandth of a second before reappearing and winning the match. This didn't go over too well. Back in China, a leading priest denounced Jimmy as a dark spirit and people really got scared.
His time at Fire Mountain School ended and Jimmy returned to the farm. His dad was real sick by then though, so Jimmy took care of him day and night for three months until he finally passed away. Lung cancer. His dad never went to the hospital because he said he didn't believe in it. That was less than a year before he came to live with us. Me and Cue talked about it once and in a way, we think that was Jimmy's first loss ever. Because after that, Jimmy went a little crazy and got in that brawl that forced his mother to make him promise never to fight again and also, to send him here.
So as far as any person at Kung Fu was concerned, Jimmy Chang was Count Dracula, Houdini, and Bruce Lee all rolled into one when Cue and me walked him out into the unusually bright sunlight for early winter to find that every single student at Kung Fu had circled up. Kids were packed in sixteen deep, all the way to the front of buildings. People had dragged tables out of the cafeteria and were standing on them. I could see that Ridley had positioned himself in the usual place so that he could look down on the circle from the second-floor bay windows of the main building, in what used to be the guidance office. Even Dermoody was on the far end of the quad with Cap'n Joe, just standing still and observing like they were Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. They knew this was Ridley's time. They wouldn't interfere with the circle. It was moving, as people pushed against shoulders and bodies, stuck their elbows in ribs to get a glance at Jimmy, to size him up. I could tell the conclusion they were all coming to: he was so much smaller in real life.
From high enough above the Kung Fu quad, it must've looked like some kind of growing tropical storm rolling toward an unseen coast. These students, these fighters, just pinpoints of streaming cloud mass pushed by hurricane winds around a silent center, had been waiting.