Why is Bruce Lee important in MMA, despite not being a fighter?

Was Bruce Lee highly influential to MMA?

  • Total voters
    35
He isn’t important to MMA. People just like to say that for some reason. Technically Steven Seagal is more important to MMA because he trained greats like Anderson, Machida, and Poatan.
 
I'm betting his films inspired a number of mixed martial artists.

The Tao of Jeet Kune Do is an amazing read.
 
fries in the bag said:
would he get wrestlefucked by 135 lb merab?
no disrespect.
Click to expand...
he wasn´t an mma fighter. He might be the first one to have the idea for different styles to compete vs each other. His dragon bite technique was so cool, you know that scene where he kept grabbing the due like cobra bites, squeezing his meat, and won. What was the movie called ? Enter the cobra ? Let me find the scene, no you find it. Man when you are 11 and see his movies it feels tense as fuck.
 
fries in the bag said:
would he get wrestlefucked by 135 lb merab?
no disrespect.
Click to expand...
Well, he pre-dated MMA by decades, so "not being a fighter" is kind of a stupid dismissal.

But, even then, he was a pioneer in full contact sparring, vs point sparring, so we know he had legitimate skills.

He was important because he was a pioneer, in wanting to take anything useful from a variety of martial arts disciplines, which is, literally, what MMA is.

If someone makes what happens today possible, then they're important, even if people decades later are more advanced. Without Dr J, Michael Jordan probably doesn't start with emulating what he did, and doesn't surpass him. and none of the players today are doing anything close to what they are, now, without both of them setting the bar where they did. People who are foundational are important because what follows wouldn't have happened, when it did, without them laying the foundation.

Would Bradbury Robinson even be a decent high school QB today? No way. He'd suck. But he's important to the NFL because he's the first guy who ever made a legal forward pass in American football.

Jesse Owens, who was the most dominant track athlete in his day and humiliated Hitler at the Berlin Olympics was barely faster than the women's world record today.

Johnny Weissmueller, of classic Tarzan fame, won 5 gold medals and had the world records. His 100M and 100 yard freestyle records are slower than the national records for 11-12 year old girls, today. He was still great, and he raised the bar in those events, at that time.

Being able to dominate today, if they competed at the level of execution that they had in their day, a half century after they were relevant, isn't a legitimate metric for any sport.

 
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Doesn't matter if he wasn't a fighter, his philosophies, methods and approaches were pioneer.

He was one of the first to integrate different styles, different martial arts.

The guy is a legend and highly influential regardless, if he didn't have an official fight.
 
He isn't. Mma fans want to make that connections because they grew up with Bruce movies. If he was alive today nobody would bring him up in that conversation.
 
Without Bruce Lee, we would never have had The Crow, and without The Crow, we would never have had The Crow remake.
 
I've been told by some martial artists that jeet kun do is a style that lee helped develop and is the first martial art to take concepts from world wide martial arts and find the basic concepts that exist within all and teach it as one form so some say it's the original mixed marital art
 
Bruce Lee was a fighter who competed. Even MMA fighters and coaches draw inspiration and technique from Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee would show to his opponents what he would beat them with and still win. He was an MMA guy before MMA. He was a big boxing fan and even had a movie where he went to Thailand and fought a Muay Thai guy and won by armbar. Also won by submission in Enter The Dragon. He knew and used a lot of martial arts is why he's still associated with MMA. Also I believe his family has sold rights to UFC and One to use his likeliness like in UFC games and sell merch
 
I think his importance is overstated because of his popularity and the UFC tries to leverage that by claiming to be part of his lineage. He didn't popularize MAs in the US, Judo was so huge in the early 20th century that you had guys like Teddy Roosevelt and James Cagney openly practicing them, Cagney even showcased Judo in some of his movies. Beyond that karate experienced an explosion in popularity immediately after WW2, Korean styles followed after the Korean War, which is when Chuck Norris got his start. So it wasn't that people weren't exposed to eastern MAs before Lee.

Even the claim that he was the first to mix and match styles is pretty bogus. People have been doing that for eons but among his contemporaries during this time period, there were those who were even more forward thinking and actually mixed multiple stypes into a coherent MMA system, like Jim Arvantis who mixed Judo, wrestling, boxing and MT (all styles that had proven track records in full contact competition). But Arvantis isn't a Hollywood actor so nobody gave a shit.

If you wanna claim Lee revolutionized MAs in that he was the first "mixed martial artist" then you have to square that with the fact that the early UFCs were full of one-dimensional TMA guys. Did they not get the memo about mixing arts? History shows that Lee wasn't all that influential here apart from, ironically, getting people interested in rigid traditional styles and in particular Chinese styles
 
mraa1 said:
I think his importance is overstated because of his popularity and the UFC tries to leverage that by claiming to be part of his lineage. He didn't popularize MAs in the US, Judo was so huge in the early 20th century that you had guys like Teddy Roosevelt and James Cagney openly practicing them, Cagney even showcased Judo in some of his movies. Beyond that karate experienced an explosion in popularity immediately after WW2, Korean styles followed after the Korean War, which is when Chuck Norris got his start. So it wasn't that people weren't exposed to eastern MAs before Lee.

Even the claim that he was the first to mix and match styles is pretty bogus. People have been doing that for eons but among his contemporaries during this time period, there were those who were even more forward thinking and actually mixed multiple stypes into a coherent MMA system, like Jim Arvantis who mixed Judo, wrestling, boxing and MT (all styles that had proven track records in full contact competition). But Arvantis isn't a Hollywood actor so nobody gave a shit.

If you wanna claim Lee revolutionized MAs in that he was the first "mixed martial artist" then you have to square that with the fact that the early UFCs were full of one-dimensional TMA guys. Did they not get the memo about mixing arts? History shows that Lee wasn't all that influential here apart from, ironically, getting people interested in rigid traditional styles and in particular Chinese styles
Click to expand...

He trained with Gene Labell who was an even earlier mixed martial artist who fought judo against a top 3 boxer of his day. Gene was heavily involved in early mma/ufc
 
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