WARRIOR VISION
IN MARCH 1973, two weeks after my doctor said I’d be dead within five years from cystic fibrosis, I saw Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss at a drive-in theater in Vestal, New York. During his opening fight, Lee — dressed in a white T-shirt with buttons from the chest up — took on a lunging thug with a knife. Our hero then executed a pair of the fastest kicks in cinematic history.
Inside me, it was as if a switch had been tripped. No longer was I depressed and waiting to die. Now I desperately wanted to live so I could learn how to do what Lee did so expertly on the silver screen.
After buying every bit of media and memorabilia I could find, I dove into the Bruce Lee universe. I learned that after The Green Hornet was canceled in 1967, he’d penned a script for a TV show. Warner Bros. subsequently turned it down because company execs figured that American audiences wouldn’t accept a Chinese leading man. Later, a few magazines reported that the concept had morphed into the Kung Fu series, which similarly snubbed Lee.
Fast-forward to April 2019: While channel-surfing, I ran across a Cinemax series called In the episode, a bearded hero named Ah Sahm (played by expert Andrew Koji) flashed a trademark Lee pose, then ended a fight with a racist San Francisco immigration officer with a side
