Before kung fu fame, Bruce Lee won a Hong Kong cha-cha championship
In 1958 teenage Bruce Lee collected two very different titles in Hong Kong. He knocked out the reigning champion to win the schools boxing tournament, and he also won the Crown Colony Cha-Cha Championship. That same year a rooftop brawl brought police to his door, and his parents decided to send him to America.
Lee Jun-fan was born in San Francisco's Chinatown on 27 November 1940, while his father, a Cantonese opera star, was on tour, and the birthplace gave him American citizenship. The family went back to Hong Kong when he was four months old, shortly before Japan seized the city. His stage name meant Little Dragon, because by the Chinese zodiac his birth year and birth hour both belonged to that sign. Through his father he acted from infancy, appearing in 20 films by eighteen.
At thirteen a friend introduced him to the Wing Chun master Ip Man. Because his mother had some European ancestry, he was at first refused, and later many fellow students would not train with him, so he continued privately with Ip Man and senior pupils. His teenage street fights grew frequent, and after one rooftop clash left a rival missing a tooth, a detective warned that one more fight could mean jail. In April 1959 he sailed to join his sister in San Francisco, then moved to Seattle, working as a live-in waiter.
In Seattle he began teaching his own take on Wing Chun, with a student group more racially mixed than any Chinese martial arts class before it, and devised his famous one-inch punch. He enrolled at the University of Washington in 1961, officially as a drama major rather than philosophy, as often claimed, and washed dishes to get by. At the 1964 Long Beach karate championships he stunned onlookers with push-ups on a thumb and one finger. In Los Angeles his pupils included Chuck Norris and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Playing Kato in The Green Hornet introduced him to American viewers. Returning to Hong Kong in 1971, he starred in The Big Boss, then Fist of Fury, and directed The Way of the Dragon. He died of brain swelling on 20 July 1973, aged 32, around the time Enter the Dragon was being released.
Source: Bruce Lee
