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I always take delight in pointing out that people like Ed Parker and Bruce Lee were bad people in the martial arts. People always get upset with me and even want to bodyslam me and teach me a lesson. Then, when I tell them what is really what, they can’t do anything but mumble a lot.
Ed Parker apparently never made it to Black Belt in the system taught by William K. S. Chow. Heck, halfway through teaching his students on the mainland, he had to go home to Hawaii because he ran out of material and needed more. And, Professor Chow told him no.
So he made up stuff, hired a kung fu artist to help make up new forms and techniques, restructured his system (five times), and so on. The result was that he could award tenth degree black belts, hold tournaments, start chains of schools, and word has it that he was only a brown belt. And the whole world was fooled into thinking that he was the grand poobah of martial arts, and hardly anybody but a dedicated Kenpoist knows who his instructor was.
And if you think Ed Parker wasn’t very nice, wait until you consider Bruce Lee! Bruce ‘The Little Dragon’ Lee apparently didn’t even complete his Wing Chun studies.
He got embroiled in the street gangs of his native country and his parents finally had enough of his bad ways and sent him to cool off in the UAS of A! In the US, though he hadn’t completed his Ving Tsun training in China, he started teaching that martial art to whoever wanted to learn.
Not knowing the whole Ving Tsun system, he began augmenting it with studies in boxing, fencing, and 24 other martial arts. Yes, he was a sponge, but he was a gung fu teacher outside his community, betraying his race (according to some), and teaching stuff that went beyond the classical and accepted arts. He was teaching a wild eclectic system that went far beyond the forms training of the time.
The upshot of all this was a fight with no winner (Wong Jack Man), and then he throws it all away to try and make it in Hollywood! Is that the mark of a dedicated martial arts instructor? Or is that some unbalanced fellow giving it all up for fame and glory?
Now, it is time for this writer to fess up. Most of you readers know what I am doing anyway. I am engaging in a little yellow journalism for sarcastic sake.
Ed Parker, Bruce Lee, and other true innovators studied sufficient in the classical martial arts to know what it was, then they chose, for their own reasons, their own directions. They then did better than their teachers, and expanded the field of the martial arts to the benefit of all. Yes, Bruce Lee and Ed Parker were treasonous bad guys, as are all true artists, as need to be anybody who wants to go beyond same old same old training methods and delve into the true martial arts.