Why did sugar ray robinson like to use the long hook alot?

**SRR** · 12-13-2014 06:07 AM

Originally Posted by Master

Now explain some of Bruce Lee's MMA moves.

Not sure if you're serious? But if people want to talk about Bruce Lee and MMA it might make an interesting topic for discussion, although he didn't do MMA per se, even though many of the current generation of mixed martial artists consider him to be one of the forefathers of the sport. He did, however, experiment with and research many different martial arts and then make an attempt to synthesise what he had learned over 15-20 years of training into a single system of fighting, known as Jeet Kune Do, or, translated, 'Way of the Intercepting Fist', although he denied that it was really a system of fighting at all and preferred to think of it as a way of enabling people to express themselves through the medium of their bodies.

I believe what he was referring to is the transcendence you experience when you are finally able to free yourself of any preconceived notions of how you should fight or react in particular circumstances, and simply impose your character on your opponent, reacting naturally to their movements rather than in the way you believe you should, or your instructor believes that you should. This doesn't mean that you should not make use of the foundations of a given style, but simply that you do not follow a set pattern and you do not, necessarily, adhere to classical applications of techniques. In those moments you are free of styles, free of the restrictions of sets of rules that force you into particular patterns of behaviour; you are expressing yourself uniquely, extemporaneously, like a poet in nature, moved by his surroundings to pen a poem, the inspiration for which fades out of existence almost before he has time to capture it in words. This is what Bruce is getting at with his constant references to 'water' as being the ultimate metaphor for a martial artist - he is referring to a substance which cannot be 'broken', always finds and exploits a weakness and does so in the most flowing, effortless fashion. So in this context Jeet Kune Do is really a philosophy which enables those who subscribe to it to understand what they are striving for and how to achieve it, because you can never truly fit a person into a style, but you can fit a style into a person. What they go on to do with that style is entirely up to them and will depend on the particular circumstances, like a dancer responding to the rhythmic cues of different pieces of music; there is no set choreography, it is merely the continuous honest expression of oneself at a given moment in time.