Bruce Lee: Sifu, Friend and Big Brother. Doug Palmer
p. 39.
38 Glover, Bruce Lee, p. 92.
Bruce and Taky, Blue Cross Parking Garage, Seattle, circa late 1961/early 1962 Courtesy of David Tadman
CHAPTER 3
Seattle Classes
THE WEEK FOLLOWING my encounter with Bruce at Bon Odori, I hitched a ride to his gung fu class with Jacquie Kay’s younger brother, Roger. Roger was only thirteen, too young to drive, so his father took him to practice. By then, Bruce had graduated from Edison and started attending the University of Washington.
The classes then were held once or twice a week in LeRoy Garcia’s back yard. LeRoy lived on the east side of Lake Washington, the long lake along Seattle’s eastern border, in a log cabin he had assembled not long before. My memory is of an unpaved road or alley and a back yard that was more dirt than grass. He was a year or so older than Bruce; most of the other students were even older. LeRoy gave Bruce his first gun and taught him how to shoot it with some other students, but I don’t recall any mention of that.39
There were ten or twelve students altogether, among whom I recognized the three who had helped give the demonstration in Chinatown: Jesse Glover; Taky Kimura, a Japanese-American in his early thirties, as husky as Jesse; and Skip Ellsworth, a white guy who towered over them both.
Jesse impressed me immediately as a laconic, no-nonsense dude, tough and fast. Then only 26, to me (aged sixteen) he seemed a lot older. I knew he was a judo practitioner (by then a black belt40), and he had a tattoo on the back of one hand, as I recall between his thumb and index finger, which someone told me was a “pachuco” tattoo (a cross with dots signifying crimes committed, used by Chicano gangs in California). The tattoo made him seem even tougher. I never asked him about the tattoo, or heard anyone mention it. Since Jesse was (as far as I knew) a Seattleite, and there was no Chicano gang culture to speak of in Seattle then, I had my doubts. But in my mind it served to heighten his aura of quiet lethality.41
The rest of the class was also multi-racial: Jim DeMile (who was part Filipino), Ed Hart, Tak Miyabe, Charlie Woo and several others. Most had some background in the martial arts, mainly judo or boxing, before running across Bruce. At the time, I thought nothing about the racial makeup of the group. It was just like any class I attended at Garfield High School.
That first class I watched was a typical one. Everyone wore regular street clothes, albeit comfortable ones. Only two formalities were observed. The classes started and ended with a stylized salutation to Bruce as the teacher, which he returned. And during class he was addressed as Sifu (Teacher or Master), even though he was younger than all of the students except Roger.
For the salutation, the class formed up in several rows and faced Bruce. They bowed and then executed the salutation with a flourish, fists starting at their sides, hands rolling out in front as they stepped forward to a sort of ready stance, then stepping back and reversing the hands to the starting posture. Bruce executed the same salutation as he faced the class, without the bow. Brief, but elegant.
The salutation was followed by warm-up and stretching exercises, after which the class formed up into two lines facing each other and took turns practicing offensive and defensive moves. At some point, Bruce demonstrated a new technique, and then the class paired off to spar. Sparring was at full speed and power, with no gloves or protective gear. Students were expected to aim their punches and kicks to fall short of their target by an inch or so, in case the opponent failed to block in time. As I saw later, sometimes accidents happened.
The class also practiced a few minutes of what was called meditation. The students adopted the horse stance, with their hands cupped palms-up below the abdomen, eyes closed, and concentrated on breathing deeply, inflating the stomach rather than the chest. I remember Bruce saying later that such meditation technique could develop qi42 which in turn could produce great power in one’s strikes. But he also mentioned that that could take years of practice, if not decades. His punching power didn’t seem to depend on his qi, or at least any qi developed in that manner. To me, the few minutes of “meditation” seemed perfunctory, mildly intriguing but not particularly relevant to the rapid development of fighting skills.43
The class lasted about an hour and a half. When it ended, I was just as enthralled. I let Bruce know that I was still interested in joining the group. He nodded and said okay. At sixteen, I would be the youngest in the class next to Roger, and the only other student younger than Bruce.
THE DECISION TO join the class, however, required me to make an unpleasant choice.
The boxing lessons I had taken since grade school were held on Thursday evenings, the same night as the gung fu. They were conducted in the basement of a Congregational church on Seattle’s Capitol Hill by Walter Michael, whom his students and everyone else called Cap. The boxing classes were free, and open to anyone who walked in off the street, including street gangs who occasionally strolled in to scope it out and challenge some of the regulars.
Cap was a proficient martial artist in his own right, a former professional boxer. Although then nearly sixty, he could still handle any of his students with ease. His career spanned an era when professional boxers fought every week to earn a living. He also had quite a few tricks up his sleeve which were not sanctioned by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.
By then, boxing had been a huge part of my life for the past six years. Cap had been a mentor as well as a coach. I am indebted to him for first showing me how to take care of myself, for giving me the ability to distinguish competence from bluster, and the confidence to deal with dicey situations.
As a kid, my family had moved around a lot. I went to kindergarten in New Haven, first grade in Morristown, New Jersey, second and third grades and part of fourth in two different schools in the Bronx. Partway through the fourth grade we moved to Seattle and I finished fourth grade at one school, then switched for fifth grade to Madrona Elementary School when we bought a house in the Madrona neighborhood. Altogether, six different schools in six years. I perpetually seemed to be the new kid on the block.
In addition, since kids in New York started school earlier than New Jersey then, when we moved to the Bronx halfway through my first grade, I was jumped ahead into the second grade to be with kids my own age. When we moved to Seattle a few years later, we discovered that kids in my class were the same age as kids in New Jersey, rather than those in the Bronx. But it didn’t seem to make sense for me to drop back a grade at that point, so I stuck it out.
Then we moved to Madrona and to an elementary school that was half white and half black, with a few Asians thrown into the mix, a tougher school than I had attended before. I started the fifth grade there not only as the new kid on the block, but also a year or so younger (and smaller) than most of the other kids in the class.
A number of the kids boxed with Cap every Thursday. The frequent uprootings over the past few years had made me somewhat independent; but the need to constantly make new friends also made me conscious of ways to fit in to each new environment. I quickly determined that boxing would help on both scores, especially after getting thrown in a pricker bush one afternoon during an encounter with a classmate on the way home from school. I boxed every week through the end of my junior year of high school, developing a modicum of skill and gaining a lot of confidence, all of which I owed to Cap.
So it was a difficult decision to walk away from the Thursday boxing classes. In the end, however, the lure of Bruce’s gung fu won out. It seemed to be a more complete approach to the martial arts than boxing was, using all parts of the body as potential weapons, without any limits on the method for prevailing over one’s opponent in a real fight. And the insight into a whole new culture that it provided was a bonus.
I never lost my love for boxing, or my