Description:

Lee Bruce


Bruce Lee Jeet Kune Do Business Card with Outstanding Provenance

 

Business card belonging to martial artist and film actor Bruce Lee (1940-1973), ca. 1968. The card has a cream background printed front and back in English and Chinese. The top reverse, emblazoned with a red and gold logo of Lee's martial arts style, Jeet Kune Do, folds down along a perforation to discreetly cover Lee's pay scale displayed beneath. In near fine condition, 3.5" x 3.375". Provenance: Bruce Lee gifted this to close friend Herb Jackson, who in turn gave it to his son, Mark Ashton-Jackson. Accompanied by a photocopy of the original Letter of Authenticity signed by Mark Ashton-Jackson dated May 25, 2018.

 

Bruce Lee offered "Consultation & Instruction" for $275 per hour, a 10-Session Course for $1,000, and the option to train overseas for $1,000 a week plus expenses. These fees were monumental in 1968, and astronomical even today. Lee charged the equivalent of $2,000 per hour in 2018 currency, which is about 20x the average hourly salary of anesthesiologists, one of the highest paid professions in the United States today.

 

Lee opened his Lee Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute in Seattle, and then in Oakland, in the early 1960s. In the latter branch, Lee developed a close personal friendship with one of his pupils, Herb Jackson. Jackson became one of Lee's workout partners and even made safety modifications to some of Lee's training equipment.

 

The copy of the Letter of Authenticity reads in part: "I, Mark Ashton-Jackson, state that this item was owned and used by Bruce Lee, the legendary martial arts and action film star. This item was given to my father Herb Jackson as a gift from Bruce Lee in and around 1968. My father Herb Jackson was a very close friend and confidant of Bruce Lee and was also one of his private backyard students in Los Angeles in the mid to late 1960s…"

 

In July 1967, Bruce Lee founded his own martial arts style and philosophy called Jeet Kune Do. The modified taijitu symbol appearing on Lee's business card, inspired by the ancient yin-yang representing perpetuity and continuance, served as a logo for his new martial arts style and is a registered trademark held by the Bruce Lee Estate.

 

Lee had felt restricted by traditional martial arts rules; Jeet Kune Do eliminated them. As an instructor, Lee not only allowed but encouraged his students to fight with the spontaneity, ingenuity, and abandon that you would encounter in real street fighting. Jeet Kune Do has been alternately described as "the style of no style," "the art of fighting without fighting," and "minimal movement with maximum effect." Jeet Kune Do combined elements of martial arts, boxing, fencing, and other athletic forms. Around this time, Lee's wholistic attitude towards health and wellness coalesced and informed his later training.

 

Bruce Lee trained celebrities like Steve McQueen, James Coburn, James Garner, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Joe Lewis. He also worked with people like pupil and friend Ted Wong (1937-2010). In an interview originally published in the May 2008 issue of Black Belt Magazine, Wong said that Lee's private lessons differed radically from the more traditional curriculum offered at his schools. On being asked to describe Lee's one-on-one teaching, Wong said: "Often, the private lessons were about working on what he wanted or what he was working on at that time. He might use me as a sounding board… Sometimes he would work with me on something I was lacking…Sometimes we would work on fun things like movie choreography: timing, selling the shot, reaction and camera angles. We didn't do a lot of physical training together, but he did set up a program for me to work on my strength…sometimes after the sessions he would take me running."

 

Bruce Lee's training schools, innovative martial arts philosophy, and feature-length films did much to popularize martial arts in the mid-century United States. Born Lee Jun-fan in San Francisco but raised in Hong Kong, the teenager had relocated to the United States to avoid growing gang violence in the British colony. Lee, who had studied martial arts primarily as self-defense, started teaching kung fu in the United States in 1959. This was somewhat controversial as martial arts traditionalists maintained that non-Chinese should not be trained.

 

Lee died prematurely at age 32. His feature-length films, some of which were acted in, written, and directed by him, include: The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), Way of the Dragon (1972), Enter the Dragon (1973), and The Game of Death (1978, posthumous.)

 


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