The article is about two things: Kareem & Bruce, and Kareem & racism. Very much like "Sunday Best" (Ed Sullivan & racism) on Netflix. If you have a sub, be sure to watch it. Younger folks today have a hard time understanding the depth of racism around the 60s. Couple of scenes in SB will help to provide some understanding. Kudos to Kareem (and Ed) for many things.
I know you are correct, but I can't help but feel like there's been a resurgence - at least in the US. Or maybe not a resurgence, but at least they don't feel like they have to hide their feelings and beliefs as much anymore. There's plenty of examples of white supremacists marching about openly in the US.
I’ve been around since the 70’s and it’s improved dramatically. Big difference. That isn’t recognized nor celebrated like it probably should be. But like the CGP Grey video showed, hate seems to spread farther faster on the internet. I think it was called “You won’t like this video”.
>> I’ve been around since the 70’s and it’s improved dramatically
I've been around since the 70's and it's the same as it ever was. The local library has a thing where you can access historical versions of the local newspaper. I read the newspaper headlines from when I was a kid. Nothing is different now from what it was then.
Nothing has changed and nothing has been learned and no one cares.
>Bruce helped the young athlete understand his movements in a way that seemed to decelerate time. “Bruce showed me how to harness some of what was raging inside me and summon it completely at my will. The Chinese call it chi; the Japanese, ki; the Indians, prana—it is the life force,” he said. “I was quite amazed to find, after working with Bruce, that when I really had my presence of mind, when I did control my life force, that’s what I saw, things coming at me in slow motion with plenty of time to get out of the way.
Seemingly we are learning here something new about Bruce Lee, that outside observers can't understand, most notably western ones. This decelaration of time also happened to me two times spontaneously, when I was attacked on surprise, hence I believe this verbatim. In both cases, that got me plenty of time, to decide what to do and was able to save myself without a scratch. However it never occurred to me,that that had something to do with my Chi force...
I have had the same experience when attacked. A football hooligan smashed a bottle on my head from behind. Time slowed down. I turned around and could see everything he was doing in slow motion and I was completely calm. I knew what he would do before he could do it.
I am not a fighter or physically brave, but I completely disarmed him, put him in a headlock and threw him to the ground.
Josh waitzkin breaks this down really well in his book the art of learning.
He's a chess champion and push hands champion and discusses how to learn. Basically as you become and expert in something you learn to pay less attention to the surrounding environment and only focus on what matters, which allows you to see it in "slow motion". This applies to chess champions where masters eye movement focuses on a much smaller part of the board than a beginner, and also in push hands or BJJ where experts fighting for a tiny bit of grip change is what matters but a novice might just see the whole body not moving or doing anything that matters.
Interesting, I wonder if this is the thing that happens to while playing this videogames.
At some point after hours (30+) struggling against the same boss,you realize you see everything in slow motion,at that point you know it's the end, you mastered it. I literally say "ok it's done, time to defeat it".
Is this Chi
I always thought of it as muscle memory, the movement becomes so ingrained in your body that you can focus on things at a higher level. Keep going up the levels and at some point everything looks like trivial details
As a kid I had this happen in sports fairly frequently. What feels like seconds is really a fraction of a second. It helps a lot. I'm not sure I would ascribe it to some mystical thing like chi or ki, just something funky going on with our brains.
Personally I think our eyes and senses input a lot of information then our brains discard what it feels is unnecessary without processing it. But some people can train the brain to process more of the information like a formula 1 driver.
no, chi and centrifugal force do not really exist. But because everything we percieve is essentially a metaphor, a model of reality,
sometimes chi or loosy goosey uses of the word 'energy' really can be a valid heuristic for the things that you can do to optimise your 'ability to do work'.
As long as you remember its a vague, subjective, context restricted heuristic, and don't try shooting chi bullets, I say max your chi flow friend.
It's super interesting, I have had it the most in a car accident saw my seatbelt snap and slide off of me like it was a sleepy snake, watched the stuff in my backseat get hang time that would have made MJ jealous, and thankfully managed to not die.
I had something similar happen when I was a passenger in a car accident. I had been asleep and woke up just before the impact. I watched the car's front end crumple in slow motion and was able to protect my head and "roll" with the collision to come out unscathed.
I wonder if we should take seriously the idea that the brain can process information faster in emergencies, rather than this just being our perception. After all, we know our neurons work orders of magnitudes more slowly than transistors, so there would seem to be plenty of room for increase. Obviously there must be some biological reason why we're not usually faster, but perhaps it doesn't preclude a temporary speedup.
Roger Murdock : ROGER MURDOCK. I'm an airline pilot.
Joey : I think you're the greatest, but my dad says you don't work hard enough on defense.
[Kareem gets angry]
Joey : And he says that lots of times, you don't even run down court. And that you don't really try... except during the playoffs.
Roger Murdock : The hell I don't! LISTEN, KID! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
I absolutely love his performance in Airplane, the facial expressions are perfect and the way he looks around after “the hell I don’t” shows he really has great comedic timing and movement.
Incidentally, for anyone that didn’t know, the film Airplane was an almost shot for shot remake of a film called Zero Hour [1] and the copilot in the original film was a famous NFL player (Elroy ‘Crazy Legs’ Hirsch), hence why they’ve got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to play the copilot in Airplane.
We have clearance Clarence. Roger, Roger. What's our vector Victor?
Airplane! was just on The Rewatchables, one of The Ringer podcasts, and the co-pilot role was originally written for Pete Rose but he couldn't do it because they filmed during baseball season.
It seems funnier with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar because at 7’2” the idea he’d be able to slyly get away with moonlighting as an airline pilot is even more ridiculous!
I never understood the obsession with Bruce Lee as a fighter (not considering his acting/stunt scenes here which deserve to be judged on their own merit), it seems any half decent Judoka or amateur boxer would have probably beaten him in a fight.
Tarantino wanted to prove that his stunt double character was a bad-ass, so he had him fight Bruce Lee on a movie studio back lot, and win. Tarantino said that Bruce Lee fans dragged him through fire, insisting that Lee would have won. Tarantino said, it's my fantasy damn it, my guy can win if I want him to!
That's consistent with your comment getting down votes.
That was supposed to be inspired by a supposedly Hollywood legend that claimed that Gene LeBell easily manhandled Bruce Lee on the set of Green Hornet.
There is also another story where Gene supposedly choked out Steven Segal (who claimed his training would prevent it).
I have no idea if either is true, but personally if I was required to place a bet on a contest between a well trained and experienced grappler/shoot wrestler that outweighed his opponent (Kung Fu practitioner) by 75lbs…my money is on the grappler all day long.
In the flick Tarantino made it seem like Lee was all bluff, that he could just talk tough and make some fancy moves and much bigger guys would all back down. The world doesn't work like that.
> he could just talk tough … and much bigger guys would all back down. The world doesn't work like that.
It kind of does though? I was a bartender at a very, very popular college bar. Often I was the only employee working Monday/Tuesday. I was a very scrawny, nerdy child-looking 20-year old.
I had to learn how to kick out championship D1 football stars, even pro NFL (actual) stars, if they happened to become belligerent those nights. We had all types of customers, including ones who specifically came in with intention to fight.
There was always some specific way to interact with them to make them leave of their own volition. Often with the biggest guys, it was to be aggressive and psychically “larger” than them. The smaller “fighty” dudes were usually the toughest, as they often felt they needed to prove themselves and I had to use a different tactic.
But what you describe “talking tough” was by far the most successful with the “much bigger guys”.
On the one hand, in interviews, Tarantino always seems to have contrarian opinions about everything. When Kill Bill came out, he’d verbally knock Lee and praise lesser known movie practitioners.
On the other hand, if you watch the movie until the end, it’s obvious that the movie has an unreliable narrator. We all know how the Tate/Labianca murders actually turned out. Not at all like the movie…
I think there's a story about him beating a white kid from a rival private school in a boxing match
certainly unreliable reports of him doing well in informal rooftop bouts amongst the various Wing Chun students in Hong Kong
there are also stories of him getting his ass kicked by William Chung and Wong Shun Leung (others of Yp Man's students) and being a petty little bitch and getting kicked out of Yp Man's school
There are still people alive who witnessed these events first hand.
I don't think first-hand accounts should be labeled apocrypha.
But... maybe it means you doubt them? Fair enough.
The only thing I'd ever heard of was him beating the defending scholastic champ in Hong Kong. But AFAIK that was the only boxing match where there is any sort of record.
Well, that's the thing. He never fought any of those people in a real competition, so the question could remain in someone's mind whether he would have won or not. Combine that with the general mystique of Asian martial arts in the 1960s, and his early death, that has the makings of a legend.
I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
> I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
My interest over the years of Bruce Lee was much more from this perspective. Many stories talk about how hard he trained, and other aspects of essentially an underdog story. Combined with his communication[0], he comes across very thoughtful, and very grounded in many ways. Putting anyone on a “legend” status pedestal is always fraught with issues, but definitely a figure that inspired a lot of people.
> I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
That's what the Gracie family did with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Except they actually proved it worked by dominating the early years of UFC before they even introduced weight classes.
I disagree. Bruce Lee treated it as a learning experience as well.
> At first, Bruce told Mito that Big Lew was slow, his arms were weak, and he wasn’t good at chi sao. A reporter who witnessed one of their workouts was more impressed with Bruce than Big Lew. He wrote that Bruce could “leap and kick over Alcindor’s head, and says he can defeat him by taking advantage of his shin and thigh with a kick.”
> But Bruce soon realized all that was irrelevant. Even if he could get inside Big Lew’s reach, it wasn’t easy. And with his front kick, Big Lew could rattle the rim of the basket. Bruce’s Wing Chun skills were all but useless. He joked with Doug Palmer, “Try doing chi sao with someone when you’re staring at his belly button.” Bruce called Taky and told him not to focus on chi sao in the school anymore.
> “Bruce and I sparred regularly,” Kareem remembered. “But we didn’t compete; I was like a drawing board on which he could work out his theories and he was instructing me how to deal with people and attack him.”
Both learned from each other, but if you read the article Lee was training Jamar in martial arts. Jamar was not training him in basketball, he was just being a tall prop for Lee to train himself.
If you're going to use a foreign word for teacher, shifu would likely be more appropriate than sensei. Lee's martial arts were rooted in Chinese tradition, not Japanese.
That's more accurate. Shifu is just intended to translate the English "master".†
Note that it isn't the Chinese word for "teacher", which is 老师 laoshi. (Same "shi".) Shifu is a different title.
ABC provides these glosses:
-----
师傅 shīfu
1. master worker
2. tutor of a king/emperor
3. [PRC] general term of address in the late 70s and 80s
4. [courteous] term of address for service workers [such as a carpenter]
-----
The Tuttle Learner's Dictionary provides this note:
> 师傅 shīfu is [] a polite form of address to a worker. For example, an electrician or a mechanic can be addressed as 师傅, or, if his family name is 李, 李师傅.
It is how martial arts instructors are addressed, but not how teachers are addressed. Teachers are white-collar.
† In the movie, it's pronounced with the FLEECE vowel, as if it were the English words "she foo", for no reason that I can understand. To an English speaker, the Mandarin word will sound like "shiffoo", using KIT and not FLEECE in the first syllable.
The article is about two things: Kareem & Bruce, and Kareem & racism. Very much like "Sunday Best" (Ed Sullivan & racism) on Netflix. If you have a sub, be sure to watch it. Younger folks today have a hard time understanding the depth of racism around the 60s. Couple of scenes in SB will help to provide some understanding. Kudos to Kareem (and Ed) for many things.
I know you are correct, but I can't help but feel like there's been a resurgence - at least in the US. Or maybe not a resurgence, but at least they don't feel like they have to hide their feelings and beliefs as much anymore. There's plenty of examples of white supremacists marching about openly in the US.
Kareem is also a really good writer.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/kareem-abdul-ja...
Bad News Bears (1976) - https://youtu.be/w1DDuN_eYlg
...skip ahead to a minute in and give a listen. This is kids, in a movie, in the preview!
50 years of progress, such as it is.
Well, I think they're starting to get an idea now.
The old, history doesn't repeat, but rhymes, etc.
I’ve been around since the 70’s and it’s improved dramatically. Big difference. That isn’t recognized nor celebrated like it probably should be. But like the CGP Grey video showed, hate seems to spread farther faster on the internet. I think it was called “You won’t like this video”.
>> I’ve been around since the 70’s and it’s improved dramatically
I've been around since the 70's and it's the same as it ever was. The local library has a thing where you can access historical versions of the local newspaper. I read the newspaper headlines from when I was a kid. Nothing is different now from what it was then.
Nothing has changed and nothing has been learned and no one cares.
>Bruce helped the young athlete understand his movements in a way that seemed to decelerate time. “Bruce showed me how to harness some of what was raging inside me and summon it completely at my will. The Chinese call it chi; the Japanese, ki; the Indians, prana—it is the life force,” he said. “I was quite amazed to find, after working with Bruce, that when I really had my presence of mind, when I did control my life force, that’s what I saw, things coming at me in slow motion with plenty of time to get out of the way.
Seemingly we are learning here something new about Bruce Lee, that outside observers can't understand, most notably western ones. This decelaration of time also happened to me two times spontaneously, when I was attacked on surprise, hence I believe this verbatim. In both cases, that got me plenty of time, to decide what to do and was able to save myself without a scratch. However it never occurred to me,that that had something to do with my Chi force...
I have had the same experience when attacked. A football hooligan smashed a bottle on my head from behind. Time slowed down. I turned around and could see everything he was doing in slow motion and I was completely calm. I knew what he would do before he could do it.
I am not a fighter or physically brave, but I completely disarmed him, put him in a headlock and threw him to the ground.
Josh waitzkin breaks this down really well in his book the art of learning.
He's a chess champion and push hands champion and discusses how to learn. Basically as you become and expert in something you learn to pay less attention to the surrounding environment and only focus on what matters, which allows you to see it in "slow motion". This applies to chess champions where masters eye movement focuses on a much smaller part of the board than a beginner, and also in push hands or BJJ where experts fighting for a tiny bit of grip change is what matters but a novice might just see the whole body not moving or doing anything that matters.
Very worthwhile read.
Interesting, I wonder if this is the thing that happens to while playing this videogames. At some point after hours (30+) struggling against the same boss,you realize you see everything in slow motion,at that point you know it's the end, you mastered it. I literally say "ok it's done, time to defeat it".
Is this Chi
I always thought of it as muscle memory, the movement becomes so ingrained in your body that you can focus on things at a higher level. Keep going up the levels and at some point everything looks like trivial details
I think Senna biopic mentioned him saying road moves in slow motion when he gets into the groove.
TIL! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_hands
As a kid I had this happen in sports fairly frequently. What feels like seconds is really a fraction of a second. It helps a lot. I'm not sure I would ascribe it to some mystical thing like chi or ki, just something funky going on with our brains.
There is no such thing as Chi force, so it wasn't that. The perception of time is malleable though.
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-time/201707/th... and tons if other articles.
Personally I think our eyes and senses input a lot of information then our brains discard what it feels is unnecessary without processing it. But some people can train the brain to process more of the information like a formula 1 driver.
no, chi and centrifugal force do not really exist. But because everything we percieve is essentially a metaphor, a model of reality, sometimes chi or loosy goosey uses of the word 'energy' really can be a valid heuristic for the things that you can do to optimise your 'ability to do work'. As long as you remember its a vague, subjective, context restricted heuristic, and don't try shooting chi bullets, I say max your chi flow friend.
It's super interesting, I have had it the most in a car accident saw my seatbelt snap and slide off of me like it was a sleepy snake, watched the stuff in my backseat get hang time that would have made MJ jealous, and thankfully managed to not die.
I had something similar happen when I was a passenger in a car accident. I had been asleep and woke up just before the impact. I watched the car's front end crumple in slow motion and was able to protect my head and "roll" with the collision to come out unscathed.
I always assumed the slowing down of time effect was induced by hyper alertness from the dose of adrenaline you get when in trouble.
You might want to study Bioenergetics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergetics and Bioenergetic Systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergetic_systems if you want to understand Prana/Qi/Chi/Ki in the modern scientific context.
Also see Guy Brown's The Energy of Life: The Science of What Makes Our Minds and Bodies Work.
I wonder if we should take seriously the idea that the brain can process information faster in emergencies, rather than this just being our perception. After all, we know our neurons work orders of magnitudes more slowly than transistors, so there would seem to be plenty of room for increase. Obviously there must be some biological reason why we're not usually faster, but perhaps it doesn't preclude a temporary speedup.
This website is super annoying
https://archive.ph/L4g8w
Roger Murdock : ROGER MURDOCK. I'm an airline pilot.
Joey : I think you're the greatest, but my dad says you don't work hard enough on defense.
[Kareem gets angry]
Joey : And he says that lots of times, you don't even run down court. And that you don't really try... except during the playoffs.
Roger Murdock : The hell I don't! LISTEN, KID! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
Roger, Roger.
That's Clarence Oveur. Over.
Mixed up a few lines there...
That's Roger Murdock. He's the co-pilot.
I absolutely love his performance in Airplane, the facial expressions are perfect and the way he looks around after “the hell I don’t” shows he really has great comedic timing and movement.
Incidentally, for anyone that didn’t know, the film Airplane was an almost shot for shot remake of a film called Zero Hour [1] and the copilot in the original film was a famous NFL player (Elroy ‘Crazy Legs’ Hirsch), hence why they’ve got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to play the copilot in Airplane.
We have clearance Clarence. Roger, Roger. What's our vector Victor?
[1] https://youtu.be/8-v2BHNBVCs?feature=shared
Airplane! was just on The Rewatchables, one of The Ringer podcasts, and the co-pilot role was originally written for Pete Rose but he couldn't do it because they filmed during baseball season.
https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-rewatchables/2025/09/...
https://www.mlb.com/cut4/kareem-abdul-jabbars-role-in-airpla...
It seems funnier with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar because at 7’2” the idea he’d be able to slyly get away with moonlighting as an airline pilot is even more ridiculous!
I am learning some of these facts in my adulthood, and I never thought it possible that film could get any funnier.
There is so many layers of jokes!
I'm sorry son but you must have him confused with someone else.
I never understood the obsession with Bruce Lee as a fighter (not considering his acting/stunt scenes here which deserve to be judged on their own merit), it seems any half decent Judoka or amateur boxer would have probably beaten him in a fight.
Tarantino wanted to prove that his stunt double character was a bad-ass, so he had him fight Bruce Lee on a movie studio back lot, and win. Tarantino said that Bruce Lee fans dragged him through fire, insisting that Lee would have won. Tarantino said, it's my fantasy damn it, my guy can win if I want him to!
That's consistent with your comment getting down votes.
That was supposed to be inspired by a supposedly Hollywood legend that claimed that Gene LeBell easily manhandled Bruce Lee on the set of Green Hornet.
There is also another story where Gene supposedly choked out Steven Segal (who claimed his training would prevent it).
I have no idea if either is true, but personally if I was required to place a bet on a contest between a well trained and experienced grappler/shoot wrestler that outweighed his opponent (Kung Fu practitioner) by 75lbs…my money is on the grappler all day long.
I’m just going to leave this here
https://youtu.be/3aCMTpJx2cs?si=1roXwjjWxsxQb3P1
In the flick Tarantino made it seem like Lee was all bluff, that he could just talk tough and make some fancy moves and much bigger guys would all back down. The world doesn't work like that.
> he could just talk tough … and much bigger guys would all back down. The world doesn't work like that.
It kind of does though? I was a bartender at a very, very popular college bar. Often I was the only employee working Monday/Tuesday. I was a very scrawny, nerdy child-looking 20-year old.
I had to learn how to kick out championship D1 football stars, even pro NFL (actual) stars, if they happened to become belligerent those nights. We had all types of customers, including ones who specifically came in with intention to fight.
There was always some specific way to interact with them to make them leave of their own volition. Often with the biggest guys, it was to be aggressive and psychically “larger” than them. The smaller “fighty” dudes were usually the toughest, as they often felt they needed to prove themselves and I had to use a different tactic.
But what you describe “talking tough” was by far the most successful with the “much bigger guys”.
On the one hand, in interviews, Tarantino always seems to have contrarian opinions about everything. When Kill Bill came out, he’d verbally knock Lee and praise lesser known movie practitioners.
On the other hand, if you watch the movie until the end, it’s obvious that the movie has an unreliable narrator. We all know how the Tate/Labianca murders actually turned out. Not at all like the movie…
That's not unreliable narrator, it's alternative history. Like when his heroes kill Hitler and end the war early saving millions of lives.
You not liking the thing that I like negatively impacts me liking the thing.
All too true for too many people these days.
Snowflakes.
Bruce Lee competed in and won boxing tournaments as a teenager...
any reliable record for this?
I think there's a story about him beating a white kid from a rival private school in a boxing match
certainly unreliable reports of him doing well in informal rooftop bouts amongst the various Wing Chun students in Hong Kong
there are also stories of him getting his ass kicked by William Chung and Wong Shun Leung (others of Yp Man's students) and being a petty little bitch and getting kicked out of Yp Man's school
Who knows. It's all apocrypha at this point
> It's all apocrypha at this point
There are still people alive who witnessed these events first hand. I don't think first-hand accounts should be labeled apocrypha. But... maybe it means you doubt them? Fair enough.
It’s difficult to establish veracity of any of these accounts. Some of them are real, some aren’t, but the two are mostly indistinguishable.
Is apocrypha a reasonable word to use for that?
The only thing I'd ever heard of was him beating the defending scholastic champ in Hong Kong. But AFAIK that was the only boxing match where there is any sort of record.
I read this in wiki too, but couldn't trace where this came from.
A boxer might well have beaten him at boxing
Yep, but I thought he touted his martial skills as being able to beat any discipline.
In a contest where both were allowed to actually use their own martial arts style.
Well, that's the thing. He never fought any of those people in a real competition, so the question could remain in someone's mind whether he would have won or not. Combine that with the general mystique of Asian martial arts in the 1960s, and his early death, that has the makings of a legend.
I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
> I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
My interest over the years of Bruce Lee was much more from this perspective. Many stories talk about how hard he trained, and other aspects of essentially an underdog story. Combined with his communication[0], he comes across very thoughtful, and very grounded in many ways. Putting anyone on a “legend” status pedestal is always fraught with issues, but definitely a figure that inspired a lot of people.
https://youtu.be/uk1lzkH-e4U?si=Uu44M-UC1tKYv894
> I think people also like the idea that there can be these systems in place for hundreds of years, and an individual can come along and intelligence and hard work, can turn the systems upside down or develop something better.
That's what the Gracie family did with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Except they actually proved it worked by dominating the early years of UFC before they even introduced weight classes.
The article's headline is incorrect. It was Kareem Abdul -Jabbar who trained with Bruce Lee. After all, Bruce was the sensei and Kareem the student.
I disagree. Bruce Lee treated it as a learning experience as well.
> At first, Bruce told Mito that Big Lew was slow, his arms were weak, and he wasn’t good at chi sao. A reporter who witnessed one of their workouts was more impressed with Bruce than Big Lew. He wrote that Bruce could “leap and kick over Alcindor’s head, and says he can defeat him by taking advantage of his shin and thigh with a kick.”
> But Bruce soon realized all that was irrelevant. Even if he could get inside Big Lew’s reach, it wasn’t easy. And with his front kick, Big Lew could rattle the rim of the basket. Bruce’s Wing Chun skills were all but useless. He joked with Doug Palmer, “Try doing chi sao with someone when you’re staring at his belly button.” Bruce called Taky and told him not to focus on chi sao in the school anymore.
> “Bruce and I sparred regularly,” Kareem remembered. “But we didn’t compete; I was like a drawing board on which he could work out his theories and he was instructing me how to deal with people and attack him.”
Both learned from each other, but if you read the article Lee was training Jamar in martial arts. Jamar was not training him in basketball, he was just being a tall prop for Lee to train himself.
> Jamar
Side note. Interesting typo. Both B and M are voiced bilabial consonants. Are you using a speech-to-text device by any chance?
>told him not to focus on chi sao in the school anymore
the day Bruce learned about Bullshido
If you're going to use a foreign word for teacher, shifu would likely be more appropriate than sensei. Lee's martial arts were rooted in Chinese tradition, not Japanese.
Sifu, rather, which would be the Cantonese version (Lee was a Cantonese speaker and didn't speak Mandarin)
Weird the red panda's name is Master Shifu
Yeah, that's "Master Master", just like Chai Tea, which means "Tea Tea" and East Timor, which means "East East".
You mean Timor Leste, which still means 'East East', but they decided to replace the English bit with Portugese.
The master teacher.
Ahh I took it as master master
That's more accurate. Shifu is just intended to translate the English "master".†
Note that it isn't the Chinese word for "teacher", which is 老师 laoshi. (Same "shi".) Shifu is a different title.
ABC provides these glosses:
-----
师傅 shīfu
1. master worker
2. tutor of a king/emperor
3. [PRC] general term of address in the late 70s and 80s
4. [courteous] term of address for service workers [such as a carpenter]
-----
The Tuttle Learner's Dictionary provides this note:
> 师傅 shīfu is [] a polite form of address to a worker. For example, an electrician or a mechanic can be addressed as 师傅, or, if his family name is 李, 李师傅.
It is how martial arts instructors are addressed, but not how teachers are addressed. Teachers are white-collar.
† In the movie, it's pronounced with the FLEECE vowel, as if it were the English words "she foo", for no reason that I can understand. To an English speaker, the Mandarin word will sound like "shiffoo", using KIT and not FLEECE in the first syllable.
Why weird? That movie is also set in China.