Quotes of the Day

People talk about Bruce Lee's films, or his charisma or his untimely death. They laud his sartorial flair. They trade rumors on the Internet that he was a heavy user of hashish. Trawl the bars and teahouses of Kowloon and eventually you'll meet men and women who claim to have known him, or worked with him, or schooled with him. But the one thing nobody seems to mention is his sheer athleticism. Like Muhammad Ali, Lee defied attempts to separate his dazzling public persona from his sporting brilliance. But he had considerably less time to devote to his sport than the great boxer did. Lee had movies to make, scripts to consider, starlets to flirt with and producers to call.

Had Lee not become a movie star, however, he would still have been a legend. It's just that his celebrity would have been confined to the world of kung fu, which then, as now, is largely hidden from public view. It is not an Olympic sport and kung fu tournaments are hardly ever televised. Instead, kung fu seems to inhabit an exotic parallel universe of flying monks, tattooed toughs and almost mystical feats of endurance.

Lee sprung from this cultish world — and having mastered all there was to master went on to invent his own version of kung fu, known as jeet kune do (way of the intercepting fist). This style of fighting drew on several martial arts traditions — even Western boxing — and outraged purists. But Lee didn't care. He danced upon the parapets of orthodoxy, laughing at those below who were too slow to share his vision of a multi-disciplinary approach to fighting. Today, of course, multi-disciplinary (or "extreme") fighting — in which capoeira champion is pitted against muay thai master, and judo exponent goes head to head against karate veteran — is martial arts' hottest ticket. Lee's own fighting embodied this spirit almost 40 years ago. Has any athlete ever been more ahead of his game?

• Liam Fitzpatrick
• Sometimes we need to forget the film star and remember the athlete