Straight Lead. Teri Tom
receiving end of a straight lead thrown by the master himself. (© Linda Lee Cadwell)
An inspiring teacher, Lee never forced students to learn more than they could handle. He taught in stages, encouraging each student to understand and absorb at his or her own pace. By accepting only a small number of students, Lee sought to gradually impart his art, an art that was new and revolutionary for its time—one that could easily be misinterpreted or sloppily executed if not cultivated in the proper way. As a student and friend of Bruce Lee, and as a teacher of JKD for some thirty-five years, I continue to admire the realism, effectiveness, and physical and intellectual beauty of his fighting system.
Lee was an extremely precise person. In everything he did he paid attention, almost obsessively, to detail. There’s no question that he saw the big picture in relation to JKD— what it represented, and what it delineated. This is evident in his writing, in his speaking, and in the way he presented himself to the world. But as with anything new and original, imitators and pretenders to the throne are rife. Without Bruce Lee here to combat them, the integrity of JKD has been undermined over time.
I choose not to forget what is genuine and true to Bruce Lee’s legacy—what I was taught. What has been needed, for years, is a clear-cut approach that can rectify and correct the muddled interpretation and unnecessary additions to JKD. A step in that direction is offered here by Teri Tom who, with exacting care, lays out the straight lead—where the punch came from, how it operates, and how it’s connected to the heart and soul of JKD. She backs up her instruction with extensive research that parallels Lee’s own.
Teri Tom approached me almost seven years ago for lessons in JKD. A slight young woman with no prior knowledge of martial arts, Teri posed a challenge. But I believed that with proper instruction, the principles of Lee’s system could work for her. At each step of the learning process, Teri surprised me again and again, with her committed resolve and perceptive application of the discipline. She has been a dedicated student, logging in over one thousand hours of instruction, as well as many more hours of sparring. And in those hours of sparring, she has developed a picture-perfect straight lead. Truthfully, I have not seen anyone else—with the exception of Bruce Lee, that is—throw a lead punch that is as fundamentally sound and technically refined. She’s a natural straight shooter with both the front and rear hand. She also happens to pack a mean right hook. What she may lack in physical strength and size, she makes up in technical know-how.
Teri’s physical prowess is matched by an intellectual strength. Showing a sincere curiosity about the origins of JKD, she read and absorbed the published works of Bruce Lee and the authors who inspired him. When she proposed a book on the straight lead punch, I encouraged her to take up the task. I gave her access to my own archive of Bruce Lee materials, which includes photocopies of many rare books and notes from Lee’s own library—all highlighted and annotated by Lee himself. Using this material has allowed Teri to see how he came to the conclusions he did regarding Western boxing and fencing, and what aspects he chose to integrate into his unique fighting system.
In retracing Lee’s footsteps, Teri is thoughtful and clear in her words. Altogether, she presents a truly accurate perspective on the development of the straight lead, and a truly meaningful contribution to the study and appreciation of Jeet Kune Do and the man who created it, Bruce Lee.
—Ted Wong, October 2004
I N T R O D U C T I O N
“T H E C O R E O F J E E T K U N E D O”
It may seem a bit excessive to devote an entire book to a single punch, but as Bruce Lee himself declared, “The straight punch is the core of Jeet Kune Do.”1 To write a book on the Jeet Kune Do straight lead, then, is to write a book on the most basic, fundamental principles of JKD. In fact, the entire structure of the art was designed around the most efficient and forceful delivery of the straight punch. Strategically, you must have a strong lead hand for both offense and defense. Other weapons—hook punches, rear crosses, uppercuts, and kicks—are of little use without a good lead hand to set them up.
The culmination of years of scientific study, the straight lead is a biomechanical marvel maximizing the potential for leverage, accuracy, acceleration, and force production. Once you have grasped the mechanical principles behind the straight lead, you will be able to learn other JKD punches and kicks with greater ease.
N O M Y S T I Q U E
By Bruce Lee’s own admission, though, the straight lead is the most difficult technique in the Jeet Kune Do arsenal, and of the art itself, he said, “Only one of 10,000 can handle it. It is martial art. Complete offensive attacks. It is silly to think almost anyone can learn it.”2 And as Ted Wong has said of straight punching, “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”3
However, the exclusivity of JKD has nothing to do with exotic, ancient hoodoo voodoo. There are no mysterious secrets steeped in mythology or rigid classicism. No, these are the very things Bruce rebelled against. If anything, Jeet Kune Do laid everything about the martial arts out in the open. Instead of being shrouded in mystery, its principles are rooted in the sciences of biomechanics, physics, and fencing strategy.
The scientific principles behind JKD are not difficult to grasp, nor is the physical conditioning required to practice it particularly difficult to achieve. What makes Jeet Kune Do and the straight lead so challenging is the patience needed to take a few simple techniques and stay with them—the perseverance to refine, refine, refine, knowing that you will never achieve true perfection. Even so, the problem is not necessarily that people lack discipline. In many cases, they just haven’t been given the scientific information to convince them to stick it out.
In writing this book, then, I am stating the case for simplicity and refinement. Everything presented here starts with Bruce Lee, and where possible, I have referenced his published work. Because of Bruce’s untimely death, however, he never left us with a comprehensive guide to the straight lead, so wherever I could, I have traced Bruce’s writings to their original sources in the works of Aldo Nadi, Jack Dempsey, Jim Driscoll, Edwin Haislet, Roger Crosnier, and Julio Martinez Castello. All other material appearing in this volume is what I have learned directly from Ted Wong.4
The purpose of this somewhat academic approach is to demonstrate that Jeet Kune Do is not a mere smorgasbord of styles. It is true that Bruce was heavily influenced by Western boxing and fencing, and, yes, he incorporated some grappling techniques into his system. But he did not haphazardly throw styles together, as some would like to believe. No, Jeet Kune Do is its own system, with its own set of carefully researched and honed techniques. As you will see throughout this book, those things Bruce chose to incorporate evolved from a history of fighting science that dates back thousands of years.
You will also notice that Bruce did not choose everything. He went with the thumbs-up-power-line punch over the more modern boxing jab, the rebellious cocked left heel over the orthodox grounded heel, the rapier over the broadsword. There were reasons behind these choices. It is the aim of this volume to reveal those reasons.
T H E R O O T S O F J K D
No technical Jeet Kune Do book would be complete without first looking at what Bruce called the roots of JKD. They are:
1. Physical ingredients
2. Underlying ingredients