Special to Knowing is Not Enough by CFW Enterprises.
Interview Conducted by John Corcoran
(Taken from “Knowing Is Not Enough”, Summer 2000)
The late Academy Award™ winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, besides having been a three-year private student of Bruce’s, was one of his closest friends directly before and during the period when Lee traded obscurity for greatness. Despite the fact that he knew Lee so intimately, past interviews with Silliphant have been alternately shoddy and superficial, for his part of the story, is like his screenplays, a blockbuster. His reason is startling. “Nobody listened.” So I listened – for some four hours – as Silliphant, a master storyteller, recounted his entire martial arts history. The parts which involve Bruce Lee appear here.
Silliphant: Primarily we practiced blocking for what seemed an endless number of hours before we got to any punching techniques. Bruce was a great believer in not being hit. He felt there was no reason ever to be hit unless you failed yourself. Now, you can avoid being hit in two ways; either by blocking the attack or by evading it. Bruce preferred the latter. He didn’t believe in wasting the energy required to block because he considered blocking a form of attack. The ultimate in combat, Bruce maintained, is to hit your opponent without being hit yourself. I always saw the virtue in that approach, one of avoiding unnecessary pain. So I really took to that part of the lessons. And because of my fencing background and acclimation to very closely-timed movements, it was a strategy that to me seemed both natural and desirable.
Were there other types of unusual training?
Silliphant: Sometimes I’d don a face mask and Bruce would put on the gloves and punch at me. What I had to do was, without using my hands, using just head motions – ducking, bobbing and weaving – try to avoid being hit. Bruce really tried to hit me, too – and, when he wanted to, he did. However, I could avoid perhaps three out of four ordinary attacks, and eventually I reached the point where elusiveness was – and always will be – one of my strong assets. I always had the ability to cut down on time and Bruce helped me refine that sensibility. I’m not at all panicked by any sudden, on coming crisis into a jerky response. I suppose my eyes see things in stop-action photography. I don’t make any commitment to an oncoming attack until the last possible second. Bruce taught me to dissect time into infinite degrees. It’s the understanding that you actually have worlds of time within split seconds to do something else unanticipated while your opponent is committed to his already announced action. Almost to the point where, if his fist is right at the tip of your nose, there’s still time to react. What can defeat you is the lack of understanding and appropriate behavior based on this principle.
What do you mean?
Silliphant: If you see someone launch a blow toward your face, and all you can think of is that he’s six-foot-four, weighs 285 pounds and is about to pulverize your nose, he is going to splatter you. Bruce used to say to me: “Whenever some big guy attacks you, instead of reacting to his ego, teach him to react to yours. You must think to yourself – how grateful I am that this wonderful target of opportunity is presenting itself to me at this moment. Think not that your assailant is going to harm you, but take joy in the havoc you’re going to lay on him after he’s been so obliging as to put himself in the position where you can reach him.”
You must do one hell of a lot of work to arrive at this stage of cool thinking. But if, you can attain it, you won’t be defeated just because an opponent is bigger, stronger or meaner, but only if he’s faster and he thinks the way you do. If he’s better and smarter, he’ll whip your ass. You can now see how different Bruce’s approach was from the standard martial arts teaching – where you’re taught just how to stand, the exact proscribed position, your weight displaced in a certain way, your arms up in a certain way, hold this back, push that out. It all becomes very mechanical.
Instead, Bruce said, “Forget all that, we’ll get to that. Right now, I’m trying to teach the spirit of what I’m talking about.” That’s what Bruce taught: the spirit of combat. He made fighting exciting and entertaining to learn. He made it what I always felt it should be, a beautiful game of physical and psychological chess, a constant test of oneself. I often went to his house in Culver City. At this point, we were working out three of four times a week. And no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I exercised or how much I sparred or how much I ran, I never stopped aching. I mean, there were times when I would wake up in the morning and wish I was dead, so overwhelming and total was the pain from every aching muscle. I remember arriving at Bruce’s house and being unable to get out of my car. When I started to move my left leg to get out, pain exploded throughout my whole body. That’s how wracked-up I was from these workouts. Bruce finally came out and asked, “What are you sitting there for?” I said, “I can’t move, I ache too much.” He pulled the car door open and said, “Get out!” Well, when you’re dealing with a master, you get out – fast. Because you know that if you don’t, he’s going to pull you out and that’s going to hurt even more. So, painfully, I pulled myself out of the car. Bruce then said, “You know, in ten minutes, you’re going to feel great. What you’re going to do is like diving into a cold ocean with a wet suit on. There’s that first shock of extreme cold and then it all warms up. The first minute you test all of your muscles they’re going to hurt. After that you’ll feel better.” He was right, of course.
Did other students work out at his home?
Silliphant: Bruce would often invite to his house some of the people from his downtown studio. They were almost all young Chinese. The first time I went to Bruce’s house in Culver City, and these guys were there, the entire practice session was devoted to timing. Bruce wanted to determine how long it would take each of us from a given instant to close the gap to a kicking bag and land what he would consider an effective kick. He didn’t want us just to dash toward it and give it a paddycake kick. He wanted to see what we could have done in a real combat situation. In this exercise, you took position your wherever you wanted: close to the bag, far back, whatever. He’d measure different times for different distances – from the moment he would say, “Go,” until the kick registered. The difference in timing among all of us was amazing. I found to my ego’s delight that of everyone there, even though I was older than those downtown dudes by maybe twenty, thirty years, I had the fastest time.
I recall hearing a story about your having once sparred some Wing Chun exponents at Bruce’s house. Is there any validity to it?
Silliphant: Yes. Bruce and I were working out in his garage one day. This was when he had moved up into the hills. He had a few young Chinese friends there who had just come from Hong Kong and who were exponents of the sticky hand technique. Bruce wanted to see what I could do against these guys, so we put on the gloves – the soft gloves, not boxing gloves – because he wanted us to spar full contact. He disallowed any kicking for this match – only hands. So we went at it. Well, it was really funny. These were suppose to be really good cats. By that time, I had been with Bruce for about two years and I found it embarrassingly easy to hit these guys, to the point where I did so at will. I was hitting each opponent constantly in the face and I wasn’t being hit myself. I kept thinking that maybe they were permitting this because they wanted to show Bruce that his teaching of a Caucasian was very rewarding. I remember wishing that they would fight a little more when, instead, one of them stormed off and cried in rage and indignation because his face had been destroyed not by my gloves but by his losing. Bruce told me later that both had been disgraced. These were really good cats, he said. He was so proud of himself for teaching me. Actually, I had a wonderful time. I really enjoyed the personal contest of facing an opponent, ruining his strategy, and hitting him at will. But the strange thing about it, as I explained earlier, is that I’ve never been aggressive by nature. It’s the reason why I would never have been able to compete. If I had been younger, and Bruce had taught me, I still would never have been worth a damn in any tournament because I simply do not enjoy getting out there and beating the shit out of some guy. I’m not motivated by that and I just don’t dig it. I don’t feel that I have the right to harm another person, and I wish that attitude were true for every human being on earth.
So your victory over the Wing Chun experts was directly attributable to what Bruce taught you?
Silliphant: Absolutely. It was that spontaneous reaction he’d instilled in me. Speed is not necessarily measured by youth or muscularity. I believe it’s something inherited. Some people move fast naturally, some don’t. There are those who seem able to translate an instantaneous order from the brain to the muscles and just do it without letting themselves get in the way. Bruce also used to teach us to rid our minds of extraneous thoughts. For instance, while talking to you he’d unexpectedly throw an orange at you and he expected you – without looking or even being aware of it – just to catch it. If you missed, he’d ride you as being stupid or uncoordinated – and sometimes that was worse than being physically hit by him. Sometimes he would walk ahead of you and objects would suddenly come flying back toward you. We learned to reach out and catch them. No discussion. It had to be an instinctive, spontaneous reaction without conscious thought.
That spontaneous reaction, in combat, is something retired World Heavyweight Kickboxing Champion Joe Lewis calls “explosiveness.”
Silliphant: That’s exactly what it is. I think that word best describes Bruce. And he was very pleased over the fact that I, too, possessed that quality. Bruce then started teaching me kicking. He started with a simple, straight-forward front kick, off both the right and left legs. In Bruce’s case, this kick was totally different from all the others. He had a technique whereby you would land on your left leg, swing your hip around and up, and your whole body moved forcefully into the kick. It wasn’t like straight kicks of the snapping variety. He felt they were an absolute waste of time and they put you in a vulnerable position. To him they were counterproductive. He also felt they exposed you to a lot of danger, like getting your leg broken, not to mention your face or your neck. Bruce liked the side thrust kick using the whole hip and body. He also made me practice the roundhouse, using the instep or ball of the foot as the striking point into a target, like the upper biceps or the shoulder. It was Bruce’s contention that you could break your enemy’s neck by kicking his arm because the force of the kick produced a whiplash effect. Now I’m a guy who believes in feeling things in order to truly comprehend them. I said to him, “Bruce, you’ll have to let me feel that kick so I know what you’re talking about.” He replied, “I don’t want to do that. It’s liable to hurt you.” So he was just kind of nudging me with his instep, when I said, “No, give me a little belt – just something to let me recognize the power. And WHAM, he kicked me. Well, I understood immediately what he’d been talking about. My neck went crunch, my head whipped to the side and I saw stars. I had to go to a chiropractor and was incapacitated for three days. Bruce was very upset. “I hardly hit you,” he said. Believe me, if a guy is poised in a fighting position and you land with the power equal to Bruce’s, you’ll knock him sideways and his head will snap violently to the side. This kick is also very effective to the thigh and an obvious killer into the ribs.
What did he next teach you?
Silliphant: From the roundhouse kick, Bruce moved me into more complex combinations. But he would never let me do combinations until he felt that I’d not only mastered individual kicks, but that I was able to relate them to an opponent as part of an intuitive arsenal. It had nothing to do with mere execution, as with a kata or a rehearsed exercise. It had to do with actual sparring and combat. Everything Bruce taught was related to hard contact. We were always sparring; we never merely did exercises. Bruce believed totally in full-contact fighting – the more impact, the better. So once we had developed the thrust, side and roundhouse kicks, he led us into spinning kicks and all kinds of special attacks with the feet that he was constantly improvising. He was always inventing new attacks and reappraising old ones. For instance, I once asked, “What’s wrong with good old-fashioned sweeping with the heel [crescent or hook kick]?” He replied, “That’s probably the dumbest kick anyone could ever do unless you’re fighting with a drunk or an absolute klutz. Once you get your heel out there and try to spin it around,” he explained, “you’re too vulnerable to counterattack. You can start that kick, but then you must be ready to change it as the counterattack comes and base your change on the nature of the counterattack.” Bruce believed in using the foot as a jabbing weapon. He was developing all sorts of multiple combinations combined within the movement of one attacking or flicking foot.
PART THREE OF THIS HISTORICAL INTERVIEW WITH STIRLING SILLIPHANT WILL BE PUBLISED IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF KNOWING IS NOT ENOUGH. |
