Nice job completely blowing what I said out of proportion.
He completed his high school education in the US...kinda hard to get into college without a HS diploma. As for "lying about his major," there is some question about whether he majored in Drama/Performing Arts...
University of Washington academic records have him listed as a Performing Arts major at the point he dropped out as a junior while he insisted that he was a philosophy major. It's not an issue of being undeclared or changing majors, it's a degree of lying what major you were -- which is trivial but is nonetheless something Bruce insisted on doing. If he could lie about something so minor, who's to say what else he lied about (and there are many, MANY things that both he and his estate have claimed that others have debunked)?
I myself graduated with a BA in Political Science with a Certificate in Public Administration and a Minor in Japanese, but even though I was a Biology major for 1.5 years and fulfilled a good portion of the major coursework, I don't go around telling people I have a BS in Biology. To do so is an abject lie.
[CONT'D] ...but then I guess you never met anyone who changed majors in college, or went "undeclared" and expressing interest in various majors.
...and yet you talk about the guy as if you know how good a fighter he was.
My perception of his fighting ability comes from anecdotal evidence and observations, many from notable contemporary martial artists.
I`m nt saying he was the baddest mo-fo who ever lived, or that he was invincible/unbeatable; William Cheung and Gene Lebelle were known to have bested him. But I think there's ample evidence he was a good fighter.
I said he was intelligent, educated, well-read, and a skilled martial artist. How do you go from there to "saint/demigod?"
If you want a complete lowdown on the knowledge I have about Bruce Lee having personally grown up with many of his contemporaries and associates, as well as being a member of SF Chinatown's Chinese community and having spent a number of years living in Hong Kong, read my posts in this thread:
http://forums.sherdog.com/forums/f11/bruce-lee-rare-video-six-inch-punch-2698493/index2.html
Also, you said of him, "Bruce Lee was, by any fair estimation, a skilled and accomplished martial artist. He was also an educated, highly-intelligent man, a famously voracious reader who applied his intellectual prowess as much as his physical ability towards martial arts and physical fitness." While it may not be to the degree of some other of his fans, this nevertheless baseless and unabashed hyperbole. It's an objective but well-hidden fact that he lacked power in his left leg due to a self-admitted but nonetheless rarely-acknowledged fact that he had a leg length discrepancy. This also accounted for his wide-based southpaw stance. The most you could say about him is that he was very charismatic and devoted his life to the promotion and practice of martial arts and martial philosophy, but he was not particularly well-educated nor especially intelligent, nor was he a perfect physical specimen by his own admission and as proven by his cause of death.
Also, why on earth do you break your posts into multiple posts like that? It's not very conducive to easy reading.
I think part of the reason why people immortalize him is due to him having that image. He is the man who brought the precursor of the MMA ideology to a global scale.
We remember him for that, and his movies, not for his professional fights. I am a big fan of Bruce Lee. I don't think he was the best fighter ever, but I'd be lying if I said I don't pretend he is.
But I think his main goal is to have the world acknowledge kung fu, or martial arts in general. So to me, he will always be the best martial artist there is largely due to the fact that he broadened the horizon for martial arts.
Now this statement I find to be very fair in its assessment of Bruce Lee's achievement and influence, as well as in its acknowledgement that it is a personal opinion as opposed to objective fact (a line of argument that many fans take). Bravo!
As an ethnic Chinese person myself, I'm a fan of what his movies did for Chinese people, culture, and martial arts in the West, but the man himself was a VERY flawed figure that had in reality tried to screw over a lot of his own people but that has been canonized and even deified by many of his rabid fans in the West.