The transcript below is from the video “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Bruce Lee!” by The Unknown List.

The Unknown List:

Bruce Lee rose to fame as a martial artist and Hollywood star in the mid-20th century. Accounts of him are heaped with myth and legend. But it’s often forgotten that Lee was a lovable man who, like all people, had his quirks and peculiarities. In this video, we tell you 10 things you probably didn’t know about Bruce Lee. Here we go!

Before we get started, be sure to hit the like button and ring the notification bell for more videos. Also, stick around until the end to learn one of the most interesting things about Bruce Lee you’ve never heard of.

The Unknown List:

Bruce Lee’s Health Issues

Bruce Lee is known to most people as a well-toned prodigy who couldn’t be bothered. There are even people that claim he was the next evolution of man, that he developed superhuman powers. But the circumstances of his death show that Bruce Lee was not immune to health problems. The remarkable personality suffered a seizure while filming Enter the Dragon in the spring of 1973 and had to be hospitalized. The doctors there diagnosed cerebral edema. This is fluid retention that causes the brain to swell. After a quick treatment by the doctors, he was actually fine again.

But on July 20, 1973, while negotiating the shooting of another film in Hong Kong, Lee complained of a headache. The actress Betty Ting is said to have given him a painkiller. This contained an anesthetic and aspirin. A short time later, Lee was found lifeless. Attempts to revive him on the spot failed. He was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong and pronounced dead on arrival. It’s believed that the painkiller triggered an allergic reaction that led to further cerebral edema. Lee was only 32 years old.

The Unknown List:

Bruce Lee’s Famous Private Students

Well, Bruce Lee was not superhuman. He was a legend in his own lifetime, known for his martial arts, willpower and motivational personality. In the 1960s and 70s, several Hollywood stars trained with him to prepare for physically demanding roles in action films or to strengthen themselves mentally. These included actor James Coburn, known from the Western The Magnificent Seven, James Bond actor George Lazenby and film icon Steve McQueen, actress Sharon Tate and her then-husband Roman Polanski also took private lessons from Bruce Lee. Many of these personalities were influenced by Lee so much that they fondly remembered their private time with the martial artist years later. Lee was good enough friends with George Lazenby, James Coburn, Chuck Norris and Steve McQueen that they helped carry his coffin at his funeral.

The Unknown List:

Why Bruce Lee Wasn’t Accepted For Military Service ?

Because Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, he fulfilled the bureaucratic requirements to enlist in the Vietnam war but he did not meet the physical requirements. Why a man with such a rigorous training schedule and such a toned physique would be barred from military service for physical reasons has long been a mystery. Today, we know the reasons; the eyes and a testicle. That’s right! Normally, before birth, a man’s testicles descend from the kidney area into the scrotum. However, one of Bruce Lee’s testicles did not make the journey this disorder, which is not completely harmless, but actually irrelevant for military service and an additionally attested visual impairment were enough for the military doctors to classify Bruce Lee as unsuitable for combat.

To hear that a man like Bruce Lee was dubbed unsuitable for combat is really shocking. After all, I’m sure we all are aware of Bruce Lee’s legendary Dragon Flag training exercises. According to Bruce’s wife, he would spend almost every minute of every day honing his skills and working out. He knew that if he wanted to be the world’s greatest martial artist, he would have to spend countless hours practicing and exercising.

The Unknown List:

Bruce Lee Had His Armpit Sweat Glands Removed

After a successful career as a martial arts fighter and coach of Hollywood stars, Bruce Lee himself became an action hero on the big screen in the early 1970s. Like many well-known actors, Lee was very self-conscious about his image. Therefore at the beginning of 1973, he had the sweat glands under his armpits removed. There were no medical reasons for the treatment. Instead, Lee put a lot of emphasis on the aesthetic representation of his body in his films and he felt sweaty armpits wouldn’t do well there.

American author, Matthew Polly, who wrote a biography of Bruce Lee that was published in 2019, even linked the lack of armpit sweat glands to Lee’s death. Polly suspects that the cerebral edema that led to Lee’s death could also have been caused by heat stroke. The lack of sweat glands would have made it difficult for his body to control heat. However, it can’t be confirmed whether the removal of the sweat glands really contributed to his death.

The Unknown List:

What Does Bruce Lee Have To Do With Seattle?

When you hear the name Bruce Lee, you immediately think of San Francisco, Hollywood and Hong Kong. These places are inextricably linked to the world star. He was born in San Francisco, grew up in Hong Kong and became famous in Hollywood. But it’s often forgotten that Bruce Lee lived in the American city of Seattle for 5 years.

In 1958, when he returned to the United States for the first time since he was a toddler, he was a penniless student living with his father’s friends who employed him in their restaurant. In the basement of the restaurant, Lee opened his first training school. He also studied drama and philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle. Lee spent important formative years in Seattle, without which he would probably not have become such a well-known personality.

The Unknown List:

Bruce Lee The Cha-cha Dancer

Did you know that Bruce Lee could not only fight but also dance? During his martial arts training, young Bruce quickly learned that self-defense is not just about strength and power, equally important is deep balance, the ability to harmonize all parts of the body. That’s exactly what Bruce Lee learned by taking dance lessons when he was young. By learning the Cuban dance cha-cha-cha, Lee practiced moving with more ease while also improving his footwork. Of course, the martial arts expert’s huge ambition meant not only that he wanted to learn to dance but also to master it. In 1958, he won the Hong Kong cha-cha championship tournament. While most people have no idea that he was so deeply involved in the craft, Bruce was also a master of dance.

The Unknown List:

Bruce Lee Didn’t Believe In Multitasking

Anyone who had to describe Bruce Lee in just one word would certainly choose the word “focus”. Focusing on a goal was at the heart of Bruce Lee’s philosophy. If he wanted to achieve something, he took it upon himself and did everything to achieve it. Only when he got there did he turn to a new goal; cha-cha dancer, martial arts teacher, action star. Bruce Lee was all of these things because he wasn’t distracted by the trivial things in life. That’s why he’s arguably the greatest martial artist of all time and to this day, his philosophy inspires people around the world to consistently do their best.

The Unknown List:

Was Bruce Lee Jewish?

No, Bruce Lee was not Jewish but he had Jewish ancestry. Lee’s mother was a Chinese woman named Grace Ho. Grace Ho’s father and Lee’s grandfather was successful Chinese businessman. Ho Kom-tong and the father of Ho Kom-tong and thus, great grandfather Bruce Lee, was the Dutchman Mozes Hartog Bosman. He was born into a Dutch Jewish family of German origin. However, he chose to live in China and became a Dutch ambassador to Hong Kong. So, Bruce Lee was a Chinese-American with Jewish, Dutch and German roots.

The Unknown List:

Bruce Lee On A Fight With Muhammad Ali

What would happen if the greatest martial artist of all time faced the greatest boxer of all time? How would a fight between Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali end? For Robert Klaus, director of Enter the Dragon, it was clear. He wrote in his 1987 autobiography that Bruce Lee once told him that he would certainly not have survived a fight against Muhammad Ali. For Bruce, Ali was the greatest fighter of all time.

One of the accomplishments of Bruce Lee that many people overlook is his sheer strength. It may seem obvious that a martial artist needs to be strong but most people don’t realize just how strong Bruce Lee really was. For the most part, people associate strength with having very large muscles. When you think about someone that’s very strong, you probably picture someone who’s about six feet tall and has more muscles than they could realistically use. However, Bruce Lee had a fairly small body yet he was stronger than most people could ever dream of being. An easy way to prove this is to look at his training bags. Most people practice punches and kicks on training bags. Bruce did this as well. However, he would tear through these bags very quickly.

The Unknown List:

Eventually, it became a hassle for him to use normal punching bags because he would regularly punch through them or cause them to burst. This meant that Bruce needed to find heavier and denser bags that could withstand the force of his incredible strength. Keep in mind, a normal punching bag weighs about 50 kg. However, the bags that Bruce needed to use would often weigh more than 135 kg. To make things even more remarkable, it’s been reported that Bruce was able to kick these bags several feet in the air. If you were to try to kick one of these bags yourself, chances are they’d only move an inch or two when you made contact. Though for Bruce, he could send these bags flying. The fact that Bruce Lee was a humble man who never thought he could become a real threat to a heavyweight boxer is so clear to his descendants and his numerous fans that they remembered a scene in the film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino clearly and many were outraged in the scene.

Bruce Lee, played by Mike Moh, claims he would seriously injure Muhammad Ali in a real fight. Even though Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is a fictional film, putting words in your beloved Lee’s mouth that he never said just went against the grain for many. This shows how many people Bruce Lee still touches years after his death.

The Unknown List:

Jackie Chan Loses Against Bruce Lee

Alongside Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan is one of the most well-known martial artists in film history. What few people know is that the two met briefly while filming Enter the Dragon. The film stars Jackie Chan in a very small role as a villain who tries to attack Bruce Lee from behind. While filming the scene, Bruce accidentally hit Jackie in the head with a wooden beam. It wasn’t a targeted blow but it hit Chan so hard that he couldn’t see for a moment. Lee was terribly sorry about the accident, which is why he took care of Jackie Chan and struck up a conversation with him that The Drunken Master star still remembers to this day.

One side note about Bruce Lee’s film career is that many filmmakers said that he was too fast for normal cameras to capture. When filmmakers worked on Green Hornet, one of Bruce Lee’s most popular TV shows, they were unable to record his moves in real time. These days, we have cameras that can film at 30, 60, 120 or even 240 frames per second. However, back in the 60s and 70s, most cameras were struggling to record film that was merely 24 frames per second. This meant that most of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes did not show up correctly on camera. As the filmmakers would soon learn, Bruce was able to punch up to 9 times in 1 second. He was also able to kick 6 times in 1 second. When you try to record these motions through a camera that can only record 24 frames a second at best, it means that many of Bruce’s fight scenes looked as though he was standing still.

The Unknown List:

According to producers who were on the movie set at the time, the film that they recorded looked as though Bruce were standing there motionless while his enemies were falling around him. However, in reality, his skill was simply too great for the camera to keep up with. To help remedy the situation, the filmmakers had to ask Bruce to slow down so that they could actually follow what he was doing. However, even after doing so, his motions are still very blurry on camera.

These 10 facts about the legendary fighter Bruce Lee show that he wasn’t just an incredible martial artist, he was also a very kind person who loved everyone around him and had his own quirks and traits, just like the rest of us. Feel free to write in the comments and let us know how you liked the video and tell us about other rather unknown facts about Bruce Lee, if you know any. We look forward to your input. Thank you for watching. Click on one of the pictures and watch another exciting video. If you like this video, please give us a thumbs up and to never miss new videos again, click subscribe and we’ll see you again soon.