Next thing I knew Brandon was dead, other writers were telling me the story was cursed and Mike was thinking of dropping the idea altogether because there was also a Bruce movie and bio due out soon.

No way, I said. The movie'll be weak (don't know, haven't seen it) and the bio'll be wack (it was written by former Elvis Costello bassist Bruce Thomas and has been delayed indefinitely by St. Martin's Press). And besides, by then I'd figured out why Mike wanted Bruce on the cover in the first place: Bruce Lee is on the cover because Bruce Lee is dope.

And the dopest thing about him is or was his sense of style. Bruce Lee was not just a movie star, he was a Star. That' s why it took until this year for him to be awarded one on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He said his style was "no style," and while that's true it's also misleading. He had more sheer Style with a capital S than anyone since Jimmy Dean or Marilyn.

Consequently he was compared to many other stars. To one critic, he was "the Sean Connery of the East," and to another, he was "the first great physical star since Burt Lancaster in his swashbuckling period." Still another claimed that "he leaped and pirhouetted with the agility of a Baryshnikov." His disciple Dan Inosimto likened him to no less than Ghengis Khan, Houdini, Edison, Jackie Robinson, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Alexander The Great. (Not that I should laugh: I once compared Adrock to Alexander, too).

But personally, Bruce reminds me of Bob Marley. His charisma bordered on the supernatural, what Kenneth Turan called "inhuman magnetism." In fact, just like Bob, Bruce literally wrestled with his demons (what Marley called "duppies," as in his famous Lee Perry-produced song. "Duppy Conqueror"). Robert Clouse, director of Enter The Dragon, recalls in his biography of Bruce that when he was young:

"A ghost appeared as a black shadow and Bruce told of being held down for several minutes, drenched in sweat by the time he was finally released. This is probably one of the few times Bruce had been physically defeated. "

It's also eerily similar to a story about Bob Marley which I'd quote but it's from the biography written by that editor of Billboard who once dissed the Beastie Boys and who wears a bow tie.

Bruce Lee would never wear a bow tie. Actually that's not true. In The Green Hornet, Lee played Kato, mild-mannered manservant of millionaire Britt Reid. As a manservant, Kato wore a white smoking jacket and wack black bow tie. Fortunately, nobody remembers him that way, and it's the Kato as kamikaze karate-kicking sidekick decked out in a blach mask and cap that we all know and love. Literally dressed to kill, Kato was no gung ho schmoe like the Boy Wonder. More like the Eighth Wonder. And he hardly said a word! Didn't have to. The Stare (made all the more menacing by his mask) said it all.

In turn, the stare begat his style.

"He could stare holes in rocks," says Clouse. "Would that we could at once strike with the eyes!" Bruce himself exclaimed. But when Bruce stared he wasn't just giving you the evil eye. He was a master of comic mugging and other facial expressions: the raised eyebrow of amusement, the smirk of contempt, the smug smile of arrogance, the poker face of calm before the storm. You don't even need to read the English subtitles in his first two films. Just watch his face and you'll understand what he's saying.

Not that Bruce couldn't talk (he got the Green Hornet gig because he could pronounce "Britt Reid," and by Enter The Dragon he was cultivating considerable microphone skills). And not that he couldn't act. "The thing about Bruce," screenwriter Stirling Silliphant understood, "was his real ability to entertain and come alive in front of people. Most stars can't entertain. Bruce, by contrast, was a born entertainer. His father was an opium toking comic in the Chinese Opera, and Bruce himself starred in dozens of films as a child actor. By 1958, at the age of 18, he had been crowned Cha Cha King of Hong Kong and already possessed what most people never develop: flavor. According to Clouse,

In 1958, Bruce left Hong Kong and after a brief stop in San Francisco, moved to Seattle, where he stayed till 1963. During his stay in Seattle, Bruce looked like a "Mormon missionary" who seemed about "as dangerous as Don Knotts" in the words of one of his students. His widow Linda had a better eye:

Bruce, who ironed his own clothes, would continue to kick the fly duds till the day he died (though unfortunately he passed away before he could drive his $60,000 gold Rolls Royce Corniche convertible with built-in bar, fridge and plaque reading: "Specifically Built For Bruce Lee"). He did, however find time to wear zip-up, ankle-length Beatle boots, double-breasted leisure suits with baby elephant collars, see-thru Peter Fonda-shaped shades, a post-mop top, Vitalis Dry look hair do, velour pants, a leather-trimmed, double-buckled cardigan, faded bell bottom jeans with exposed buttons from crotch to navel, silk shirts, courdroy blazers, platform stomps, black turtleneeks and cat burglar suits, tank tops, beaded neeklaces, and even those funny, embroidered barber's shirts that Puerto Ricans like, not to mention his two best get-ups ever: The Green Hornet garb and the yellow motorcycle jumpsuit-with-Asics Tigers-combo (or were those Thom McAnn Jox?) that he sports during the balls out battle with Kareem Abdul Jabbar in his last film, Game Of Death. (By the way, Bruce was the first "Asics Athlete," and always wore the O.G., white leather Tigers with ridged soles and red and blue stripes that Balthazaar Getty once made fun of me for wearing). Bruce's obsession for the best bordered on the absurd. When someone once offered him a gold watch, he said: "Is it absolutely the best? It can't be the best. Bring me a platinum watch. Everyone knows platinum's better than gold."

Of course there are lots of charismatic clotheshorses, but Bruce wasn't just an exceptional screen presence with good taste in threads. He was more than an actor with attitude. He was an artist. A martial artist, but an artist nonetheless.

Unlike David Carradine, who didn't know fuck all about kung fu, Bruce revolutionized martial arts by creating his own Style (that was no Style), which he called Jeet Kune Do, or "way of the intercepting fist." (Rather than block a punch and hit back with two distinct motions, Bruce sought to intercept and hit in one, fluid stroke).

Fluidity was the ideal. "Try and obtain a nicely-tied package of water," Bruce would taunt. "Just like water, we must keep moving on," Inosanto reitterates. "For once water stops, it becomes stagnant."

Bruce dissected rigid classical disciplines and rebuilt them with fluid, po-mo improvements. "It's good but it needs restructuring," he would say. Classical techniques did not take into account the reality of street fighting. Jeet Kune Do did. It was pragmatic, reality-based, empirical- not a bunch of stances, postures and mumbo jumbo handed down from antiquity. Bruce utilized all ways but was bound by none. "Efficiency is anything that scores."

"You see, " Bruce once said, "many people come to instructors and say, 'Like man, like what is the truth? Hand it over to me.' So therefore the guy would say, 'I'll give you my Japanese way of doing it.' And another guy would say 'I'll give you the Chinese way of doing it.' But if you only have two hands and two legs, nationalities don't mean anything. When you go with a particular style, you're expressing that style. You are not expressing yourself "

As it happens, Bruce's outlook was remarkably similar to that of modern day rap artists: "I don't care where it comes from," he would insist. "If it is usable, it belongs to no one; it's yours." The similarities to music don't end there. Dan Inosanto says that Jeet Kune Do is "spontaneous and unpredictable like a free form jazz solo, designed to prepare the student for the uncertainties he was sure to encounter in actual combat."

Bruce backed up his theories with knowledge. He borrowed from all types of martial arts and all western forms of combat as well, including fencing, wrestling, boxing and many others. He went so far as to watch films of Muhamad Ali in a mirror so that he could shadow box along with The Champ. (Bruce, too, thought Ali was The Greatest and that he could never win a fight with him: "Look at my hand. That's a little Chinese hand- he'd kill me").

He was, as Clouse notes, one of the few conceptual martial artists ever. So conceptual that through fighting he hoped to find freedom. He wrote several books replete with detailed drawings of exercises, fighting methods and proposed inventions for new weapons. These drawings are the spookiest of all. The only thing you can compare them to- as Dan Inosanto does- are Leonardo's sketches. OK, OK, so we're gettin' a little carried away. Bruce Lee was no Leonardo. As for his philosophy, his best friends used to say that he only talked about it when girls were around (and one of those ex-girlfriends says that he "spouted a great deal of Oriental wisdom that he did not follow himself"). In fact, one could make the case that he was nothing but a glorified street thug. It's certainly true that the guy was kind of a dick. Or, as his widow puts it, "no plaster saint." Clouse recalls that:

My favorite example of Bruce's colorful rudeness has got be the time he dissed the Greek playboy, Taki, in a Gstaad chalet. "Who's your sensei?" Bruce asked. When Taki, who fashions himself a tough guy, tried to reply, Bruce cut him off: "I know of him. He's no good."

Harsh but hey, most leaders are bullies anyway, and Bruce was certainly a unique, potentially galvanizing leader who meant many things to many races. To his own Chinese, he was a national hero who urged his countrymen to shake off the shackles of a centuries-old inferiority complex. To the inner city Black and Puerto Rican youths who were the first Americans to flock to his films, he provided secret powers that could be used to kick Whitey's ass. And to Whitey himself, Bruce was an updated Charles Atlas for vengeful nerds.

To be sure, this last has resulted in America becoming a nation of time bombs. Not just bouncers break your jaw at the drop of a hat anymore. It could be anyone. President Clinton, for example, knows tae kwon do.

As if that's not scary enough, Bruce can also be blamed for such diverse and deplorable cultural phenomena as The Karate Kid, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Chuck Norris's Right Guard commercial and that bootleg porn film of Jayne Kennedy which is known in some circles as "Fist of Fury." Hopefully, however, the good that Bruce Lee does for Asians and other minorities will someday outweigh the self-justification he's given to a bunch of white geeks who still have a chip on their shoulder because they didn't get picked for the kickball team. (Indeed things are looking up already with the recent collaboration of goofy European mullet-head Jean Claude Van Damme with ultra-dope Hong Kong director John Woo).

But enough of my babbling. There are lots of sidebars and other goodies that aren't as boring and long-winded as my shit so let's get to it. If by the end of all that you still haven't got the point than you might as well just forget it and hurry off to the nearest Soul Asylum concert.

One hint: The point about Bruce is NOT that he died under strange circumstances. The circumstances were no stranger than those surrounding the recent death of basketball star Reggie Lewis, who died of a heart attack in a pickup game only months after he collapsed during the regular season. Similarly, Bruce died of a brain anyeurism after having collapsed from the same thing only two months before. And it's more likely that he got that anyeurism from being kicked in the head his whole life than from, say, the Grand Masters placing The Iron Fist, Vibrating Palm or Big Bozack his shoulder.

True, Bruce was a prophet and his life was touchcd by an inordinate number of coincidences. When his father died at age 64, Bruce had a premonition that he himself would live only half that long. Sure enough, Bruce died at 32, which, in turn, is almost 33 you know, Christ's age when He died (not to mention the number Kareem wore throughout his career). Also, that Brandon Lee died at all, let alone on the eve of his own stardom and on the anniversary of his dad's death, only makes the desire to suspect foul play or divine intervention that much more tempting.

But let's face it: if God, or Jah Jah, or some type of spiritual forces are runnin' shit, there's nothing we can do anyway. And if the Forces of Wack really did bump Bruce off, we do nothing but help their cause by dwelling on it. For all the fate that shrouded Bruce Lee's life, it's the triumph of his will which is most impressive and important. After all, Jeet Kune Do is a way of life, not death. Dan Inosanto reminds us: