The late martial arts movie star Bruce Lee is seen in this 1973 file photo.
Growing up in the 1970s, I was fascinated with Bruce Lee, as was virtually every other suburban kid. Inspired by his jaw-dropping skills in films such as Enter The Dragon, my friends and I set out to make our very own nunchaku sticks (a.k.a. nunchucks) from sawed-off pieces of a broomstick nailed together with short pieces of rope.
After eagerly constructing our crude but effective (not to mention illegal) weapons, we were impatient to start practising all of Bruce Lee's moves as the necessary prelude to beating each other senseless in the forest behind my house. In actual fact, however, we spent most of our practice time inflicting painful blows on our own shoulders, arms, legs, torsos, heads and, of course, groins. We quickly lost interest before we could ever dream of becoming skilled enough to hit someone else with the nunchucks.
As enjoyable as all that mostly harmless mayhem was, eventually I began to feel that I needed more systematic and disciplined training if I was ever going to learn to fight like Bruce Lee. So I started bugging my parents about it at every opportunity until they finally broke down. At dinner one evening, my dad announced that they had enrolled me in a Saturday morning beginner's class in jiu-jitsu at a nearby school.
Sharper than a serpent's tooth must have been my ingratitude on hearing the news. "Jiu-jitsu? What the heck is jiu-jitsu? I want to learn kung fu, Dad! Man, don't you know anything? Hey, Dad, newsflash – kung fu is what Bruce Lee knows, and everything else is useless. If I don't learn kung fu I'll never be able to defeat all my enemies and become Supreme Fighter of the Universe. It's kung fu or nothing!"
At this point I commenced a very un-Bruce-Lee-like fit of angry whining, pouting and sulking, trying to outdo Mr. Lee's legendary Fists of Fury with my own undoubtedly more annoying variation: Fits of Fury.
To his credit, my father kept his cool, calmly informing me that from what he had discovered, jiu-jitsu was the best martial art form anyone could learn, because it included all of the throws from judo, the wrist-locks from aikido and the kicks and punches from karate (the Japanese version of kung fu).
And if all of that wasn't enough to pique my interest, he told me that jiu-jitsu was apparently invented by – wait for it – the samurai. So he was saying, in effect, that if I was willing to commit myself to the serious and sustained study of jiu-jitsu, one day I could potentially become even better than the legendary Mr. Lee.
Despite my deep skepticism about such outlandish claims, I had to admit I was intrigued by the samurai angle. I finally agreed to consider lowering my standards long enough to allow myself to attend at least the first class of what was undeniably not going to be kung fu.
The following Saturday, I arrived for my first jiu-jitsu class feeling excited and impatient in equal measure. On the one hand, I was dazzled with visions of myself soon flying through the air like Bruce Lee, taking on any and all opponents with total mastery and deadly force.
On the other hand, I was burning with the desire to know the answer to the one question surely on the tip of every 12-year-old boy's tongue as he begins his first class in the martial arts: "So, what do you do if you're, like, surrounded by, like, 20 guys with machine guns?"
My sensei (teacher) sighed, smiled, then patiently explained that if he were ever in that unlikely situation, he would quickly hand over his wallet, his watch and his gold fillings, and pray they wouldn't shoot him full of more holes than a truckload of Swiss cheese before tossing his bullet-riddled body in the nearest dumpster.
I stared at him, dumbfounded. This was sheer heresy. I was crushed, deflated and disillusioned before the class had even begun. Clearly, I would learn nothing useful. Yet somehow I managed to swallow my bitter sense of betrayal and disappointment and stick it out for the duration of the class – and the next three years, getting as far as a green belt (fully halfway to the highly coveted but elusive black belt).
As I progressed from white belt to yellow belt, then orange and green, I gradually discovered that the martial arts are defined by that most Zen of paradoxes: The further one progresses in one's study, the less likely it is that one will ever need to use those skills.
I'm proud to say I've never once been involved in a real, serious fight. Is that achievement the result of my three years of training in jiu-jitsu, or the result of good luck, along with the effective deterrence offered by a large, stocky build combined with a peaceful temperament?
At the risk of betraying my 12-year-old self-image, maybe I'm just not a fighter. Looking back on that disappointing first experience in my brief study of the martial arts, I'm filled with admiration for my sensei's good sense. His lifetime of experience had taught him the most important lesson of all, a lesson that I was in no way ready to hear at the age of 12.
In the words of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, another 1970s icon of hyper-violent masculinity (and another of my boyhood heroes): "A man's got to know his limitations."
Mark LeBourdais lives in Port Moody, B.C.