I remember when I first became a Bruce Lee fan as a teenager friends & I would compare Bruce's fighting abilities with those of any other famous martial artists we read about or saw in movies. Chuck Norris? He's pretty good but Bruce Lee could've beaten him. Jackie Chan? He's better than Chuck but Bruce Lee could've easily beaten him, too. Of course we really had no idea what we were talking about, we weren't expert martial artists or fighters at all & had never trained or sparred with any of the people we were talking about. You'd think people would outgrow these kinds of silly, speculative comparisons, but I just recently read in an article in Muscle & Fitness magazine various MMA competitors opinions of how Bruce would've fared in something like the UFC. It seems to me when we do this kind of thing we're "concentrating on the finger pointing away to the moon, & missing all that heavenly glory". Yes, Bruce was a great martial artist & deserves to be remembered as such, but it's his practical ideas & the ways in which he was a good example (having great committment, determination in the face of obstacles, & willingness to work incredibly hard, for instance) that fans can learn from, don't you think? How much does it really matter who he could or couldn't have beat up?
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