CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Davis Miller
Praise for The Tao of Muhammad Ali
Author’s Note
Dedication
Title Page
Part One: Enter the Foetus
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two: A New Life
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three: A Little History
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Four: The Secret Death of an American Dragon
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Five: Riding the Ghost Train
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgements
Copyright
The Tao of Muhammad Ali
In this companion volume to his critically acclaimed bestseller, The Tao of Muhammad Ali, Davis Miller turns his attention to a second iconic figure of the twentieth century – and another of Miller’s own seminal influences – film star and martial arts legend Bruce Lee.
Just weeks after completing Enter the Dragon, his first vehicle for a worldwide audience, Bruce Lee – the self-proclaimed world’s fittest man – died mysteriously at the age of thirty-two. The film has since grossed over $500 million, making it one of the most profitable in the history of cinema, and Lee has acquired almost mythical status.
Lee’s was a flawed, complex, yet singular talent. He revolutionized the martial arts and forever changed action movie-making. As in The Tao of Muhammad Ali, Davis Miller brilliantly combines biography – the fullest, most unflinching and revelatory to date – with his own coming-of-age autobiography. The result is a unique and compelling book.
Davis Miller is the author of The Tao of Muhammad Ali. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Esquire, Sport magazine, Sports Illustrated, and numerous other periodicals. His first published story, ‘My Dinner with Ali’, was voted by the Sunday Magazine Editors Association to be the best essay published in a newspaper magazine in the US in 1989. It was a finalist for the 1990 National Magazine Award and in 1999 was judged by David Halberstam to be one of the fifty best pieces of sports writing of the twentieth century. His story ‘The Zen of Muhammad Ali’ was nominated for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize; that piece was later included in the 1994 edition of The Best American Sports Writing. Davis Miller has two children, Johanna and Isaac, and lives near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was born. He is at work on several more books.
Thanks first and foremost to Will Sulkin, without whom I’d still be a lowly sports writer
To Doug Pepper, the man with the US plan
To Gail S. Marion for being the Doctor Baby and for considerable patience through tough times
To Mel Berger for not giving up this ghost
To Armand S. Deutsch for being the greatest adopted grandfather of all time
To George Tan who has lived this story more than I
To Peter Nelson for the right Curse of the Dragon contracts
And to
Dennis Kennedy
Frank Lloyd Wright, Krishnamurti
Siddhartha Gautama, Bodhidharma, Alan Watts
Tom Simons
A ring centre bow to Professor Joe Lewis
For my martial mentors: Tony Lopez, Kathy Long, Li Siu Loong, Eric
Nolan, John Chung
To Jesse Glover, and in memory of Ed Hart
To Dr Donald Langford
To Muhammad Ali and ‘Sugar’ Ray Leonard
To Laura Shepherd, Jan Wenner, Greg Williams, Bob Love, Kerry Shale,
Glenn Stout, John Rasmus, Tobias Perse
To Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Russ Barenberg for organic and uncategorizable musical inspiration
To Harry Crews, Joan Didion, Nick Hornby, Tom Robbins and Tom Wolfe for being pointing fingers
To Holly Haverty-Woolson, for being my friend and for giving me one of the best lines I’ve ever stolen
And to everyone who has let me know how much my Ali stories have meant in their lives
I’VE BEEN RIGOROUS in what I’ve written about Bruce Lee’s life. I have not, however, allowed day-to-day details to get in the way of the larger truth of my own story.
A story must take on its own reality, a kind of story-reality. No story is accurate; many tell the truth.
Parts of this tale don’t fit with other stories. Look at the edges of even the ‘hardest’, most immutable ‘facts’. Look long enough, look honestly – the edges will shimmer.
Music’s real. The rest is seeming.
Fats Waller
Dance as though no one is watching.
passed on by David Hebler
‘Nobody has ever written so purely about Ali before. Maybe no one has ever written so purely about anyone . . . An intimate, rambling, fascinating book . . . that is a low-key revelation, like a letter from an apostle.’
Los Angeles Times
‘What Miller puts into perspective is the effect Ali has had on his, and so many other people’s lives. Poignant details are punctuated with metaphysical musings on existence. In essence, Miller is Ali’s spiritual Boswell. A compelling, strange and beautiful book.’
Daily Telegraph
‘Davis Miller has written a fine, rare book, one of only a very few that recognizes that sport can be a pathway to and for the spirit . . . The Tao of Muhammad Ali resonates with wisdom . . . A classic, part of the standard against which I’ll measure all other sports writing.’
Glenn Stout, editor, The Best American Sports Writing
‘Absorbing, generally unsentimental and filled with the clarity of ordinary human experience.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Miller’s work is more than sporting hagiography. His portrait of Ali is inextricably linked to his own struggle to become a writer . . . ranks among the best of contemporary American writing.’
Independent
‘Miller’s astounding book, more in the tradition of contemporary writers such as Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford than that of mere boxing biographies, is a seminal interpretation of fame, how it affects both those who have it and those who live in its shadow.’
Esquire
‘What brilliant stories these are! Davis Miller writes profoundly and beautifully.’
Joyce Carol Oates
ON MONDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER 1973 I was a drowsy-eyed, twenty-one-year-old freshman at Lees-McRae Junior College in Banner Elk, North Carolina. It was a miserable time in my life. I had few friends, inside or outside class. I lived vicariously through Superman comic books and the outsized deeds of Muhammad Ali.
I was five-foot-seven and weighed ninety pounds. Guys in my high school had nicknamed me ‘Foetus’. I was punched in the stomach, pushed into girls’ restrooms, had my skinny bones stuffed into lockers, or was plain ignored. Although most of my contemporaries were preparing to graduate from university and proceed into the real world, I was maturing slowly (if, and there was real doubt about this, I was growing up at all).
That September marked the first time I’d been away from my father’s house for longer than a weekend. I was homesick. To relieve my misery, I spent time in Banner Elk’s only cinema, drawn to the mystery and the power that lit-up screens and hidden speakers have when placed at the front of large, dark rooms.
Though Banner Elk’s cinema was named the Center Theater, Lees-McRae kids called it the Bijou. Had it not been for them, the village of fewer than three hundred residents could not have supported a cinema. Directly behind my dorm and at the end of the car park, the Bijou was about the size of, and maybe half as clean as, a greasy old two-car garage. Tickets cost twenty-five cents each. A different feature opened every three days. Since the beginning of term, I’d seen almost every film that was shown at the Bijou.
The picture that night was Enter the Dragon. The house lights dimmed, flickered, went out. The red Warner Brothers logo flashed.
And there he stood.
There was a silence around him. The air crackled as the camera moved towards him and he grew in the centre of the screen, luminous.
This man. My man. The Dragon.
One minute into the movie, Bruce Lee threw his first punch. With it, a power came roiling up from Lee’s belly, affecting itself in blistering waves not only upon his onscreen opponent, but on the cinema audience.
A wind blew through me. My hands shook; I quivered electrically from head to toe. And then Bruce Lee launched the first real kick I had ever seen. My jaw fell open like the business end of a refuse lorry. This man could fly. Not like Superman – better – his hands and his feet flew whistling through sky. Yes, better: this wasn’t simply a movie, a shadow-box fantasy; there was a seed of reality in Lee’s every movement. Yet the experience of watching him felt just like a dream.
Bruce Lee was unlike anyone I (or any of us) had seen.
‘It is not the vulgarity of James Arness pistol-whipping a drunken, stubbled stage robber,’ legendary folksinger Phil Ochs wrote of the first time he saw Bruce Lee:
It is not the ingenious devices of James Bond coming to the rescue, nor the ham-fisted John Wayne slugging it out in the saloon over crumbling tables and paper-thin imitation glass. It is the science of the body taken to its highest form, and the violence, no matter how outrageous, is always strangely purifying.
In Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee moved fluidly, almost Alisweetblack, but with a rhythm distinctly his own. And, oh!, was he fast. Even faster than Ali. So explosively quick that the paths of his hand strikes were invisible. You could see techniques begin and end – nothing in the middle. It hardly seemed possible. Yet here he was, right in front of me, right here on this shimmering twenty-foot-tall screen.
Fists flying, feet soaring, punching and kicking bad guys from all angles. Punches and kicks – and much, much more. Lee’s limbs moved in such a marvellously precise fashion that, when he was facing the camera, his blows seemed to slice the screen into sections. In addition he was the only genuinely lithe man I had ever seen, other than Ali. (Women are sometimes lithe, I believed; men almost never.) Lee used hands and feet, knees and elbows, shoulders and head, good great God, his entire body! And he did so with just about perfect grace and balance.
Even more amazing: when he was standing still, something inside him vibrated; something continued to move.
Another big part of his appeal for me was that Lee was only about my size. Though he seemed invulnerable, he was short and thin and there was a fragility, an eggshell mortality, about him. If this little guy could be this righteous, whuppin’ huge bad guys with such unthinkable speed, power, accuracy and ratifying beauty, I could, too.
I was off to the moon.
Oh, hell, no! Not the moon. Neil Armstrong had already made that voyage. I was up, up and away, on the first manned mission to Alpha Centauri.
Bruce Lee was a master of effortless effort, an artist whose brush strokes sliced the air, and opponents’ bodies, as naturally and unerringly as ancient Buddhist monks had spent only seconds stroking watercolours into bamboo patterns on rice paper, patterns signifying Five Virtues of the Superior Man – simplicity, harmony, wisdom, contentment, a life beyond ambition.
Ali had seemed so singular, so freaky, such a mutant. And he was so damned huge. Bruce Lee’s frame, the length of his arms and legs, the ratio of upper body to lower, looked almost exactly the same as my own, though I didn’t consciously think about any of that.
What I knew in every molecule in my body was this: Bruce Lee was who I’d always wanted to be, what I’d always believed I could become (or, more precisely, felt I was already in some unseen way), although, before meeting Lee, I wasn’t certain such a person could exist.
THE END OF summer of my eleventh year. As usual, I walk through the living room to the den. Though the sun hasn’t cleared the tops of oaks and sycamores behind the house, aunts and uncles and grown-up cousins are sitting on our new sofa and chairs and are standing on the back porch smoking cigarettes.
My Aunt Anna and my father’s Aunt Johnnie guide Carol and me to the kitchen table and bring us each a plate with a powdery white doughnut on it and a glass of watery orange juice which makes my stomach hurt. When we’ve eaten, Carol and I are led to our parents’ room, where Daddy is seated on the bed. He pats the mattress on either side of him, asking us to sit. Someone closes the door.
Daddy draws a deep breath. ‘God must’ve needed a blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel,’ he says, calm and level.
Carol leans forward, looking at me across Daddy’s lap. ‘What does that mean?’ she asks, her eyes sleepy, her mouth open, her voice soft and trusting.
‘It means . . .’ I hesitate; I’m not sure what it means. Then: ‘It means Mommy’s dead,’ I say.
As the words leave my mouth, I know that they are true. A swarm of hornets rises in my chest and flies through me. My face stings, my hands do, too; so do my eyes.
I run from the room, down the hall, into the kitchen. I stare out of the alcove windows at cars passing on the street. How can everything look the same when all of it has changed for ever?
‘I’ll kill them, I’ll kill them all,’ I say, not knowing who I’m talking about, then knowing that, too. ‘I’ll kill every doctor I ever see,’ I say.
And Aunt Anna comes and pulls me to her breasts and rocks me slow and gentle. ‘I’ll kill every doctor in the world,’ I say through clenched teeth, not feeling my Aunt Anna at all.
And Daddy closes and locks the door to the room he’s shared with my mother. And he begins to wail and howl from somewhere so deep inside I could not have guessed such a place existed.
My mother, Sara Burns Miller, had died, aged thirty-two, of a kidney disease we did not know she’d had, although she’d been sick all my life. I’ve always believed that my mother’s death is the most significant thing anyone could learn about me. And I also believe that it helps explain a great deal about how Ali and then Bruce Lee came to be so important in my life.
My mother. Much of what I know about her can be found in the hundreds of photographs she took of me. These pictures share many qualities. I’m always dressed in doll-like perfect clothing. I’m almost always alone, standing glowing and perfectly formed in near-perfect light. I’m wearing a perfect camera-gobbling smile and have JFK perfect hair: visible manifestations of my mother’s compulsive ache for everything to be understood, in control and, well, perfect (her health never was), an anxiety she passed on to me.
Within days of her death, I quit blaming doctors and placed the fault where it really belonged – on me. Mommy’s doctor had advised her not to have children. But she had had me and then my sister. I thought Carol and I had made her die.
With this recognition, I shut myself away from everyone around me. When Daddy tried to talk with me, to pull me from my impermeable funk by asking questions, I answered not in words, but with grunts. By late November, when John Kennedy was killed, my catatonic forcefield was fully charged. By the spring of 1964 I’d not only quit talking, I’d just about stopped eating (during meals my stomach cramped so bad I’d fall to the floor, roll up in a ball, and rock back and forth in moaning pain), I’d quit playing with Carol and with other kids, and I came out of my shell only to watch Ali on Daddy’s tiny black-and-white TV, to play by myself in the woods and down at the creek behind Daddy’s house, to go to and from school (where I’d stopped doing work and sat staring at initials carved in my desktop, wondering when I’d wake from this awful dream), to buy comics and Tom Swift books, and to go to the movies.
The Carolina Theater was the last of Winston-Salem’s stately old movie palaces. Inside it was adorned with ornate silver sconces; marble statues of gods, goddesses and heroes; a wide, winding, red-carpeted staircase designed to make each of us, one and all, feel born of royalty; and a must-laden, stiff, faded and stained once-red velvet curtain that looked as if it weighed about a hundred tons.
On Saturday mornings at nine o’clock the dust-heavy curtain rose and, after paying ten cents admission, children twelve and under were shown a cartoon and a weekly episode of a Radar Man, Batman or Superman serial; we played bingo for movie passes, popcorn, sodas and candy; and we watched a full-length cowboy or monster picture.
On Friday and Saturday nights Daddy would take Carol and me to a Western or to a Disney. I remember a summer evening in 1964 when Carol was spending the night with a friend. I recall riding in the car with Daddy and that the windows were down. Crickets and cicadas were throbbing; it was one of those nights so steamy and still that it seemed to float up against your skin. I remember stopping for a cone of soft-serve vanilla ice cream on the way to a double-feature at the Winston-Salem Drive-In. And, as the sticky ice cream dripped across my fingers, Daddy said, ‘Need to tell you ’bout these movies, son.’ His words, his tone and the look on his face were obviously intended to carry weight.
‘You’ll see some things with women you never seen,’ he continued. I didn’t understand what he meant, only that he sounded nervous, protective and maybe a little guilty. ‘Nothin’ to get worked up about, Dave,’ he assured me.
The movies that night were Doctor No and Goldfinger. Hours later, entirely worked up, I lay wide awake in bed, hearing the movie voices inside me, recalling not women on the screen, but how James Bond had been so screw-everybody-cool, and how he’d disposed of all bad guys, effortlessly and systematically, the power magically vested in him by late-twentieth-century technology and by a strange, mystical Japanese science called ‘karate’.
A few weeks later, Daddy told me about a new TV show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We watched the first episode together. And here they were again, these secret agent types, these coolest of the cool. To me, the hero, Napoleon Solo, was badder than Bond, cooler than zero, as he hiply and virtuously battled, and almost effortlessly destroyed, each and every foe. He was seldom, if ever, hurt in return, having been rendered indestructible (and nonchalantly cocky!) by near-magical gadgetry, and by knowledge of that same exotic and miraculous ‘karate’.
Over the next four years I ached to become Agent Solo. On weekday afternoons, until it was time for Daddy to get home from work, I crept from room to room in the house, shooting evil counter-agents (who fell bloodlessly dead before my eyes) and delivering lethal karate chops a hair’s breadth away from lamps, bedposts, the hat rack beside the front door and (my favourite place of all) the back of the neck of the skinny, long-legged, trembling, six-pound female terrier my mother had bought and named Black Jet.
As five o’clock approached, I began to pace back and forth from Daddy’s bedroom window to the kitchen alcove, watching for his car to come around the bend in the road. ‘Dear God,’ I’d plead to the walls and windows, ‘please let Daddy come home NOW.’
In winter months it would be dark before I’d see the left-turn indicator winking on Daddy’s Impala. As the sun set, I’d get big anxious and large agitated. I’d race from bedroom to kitchen, kitchen to bedroom. As I ran from one end of the house to the other, when Carol got in the way, Jet wasn’t the only one who suffered showers of karate chops.
On weekends I asked Daddy to drive me from pharmacy to toy store to department store, where I collected The Man from U.N.C.L.E. accoutrements – trading cards, magazines, books, guns, badges, walkie-talkies, stereo LP records.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was last shown on NBC on 15 January 1968, my sixteenth birthday. To me, its passing was a major event. The year before, for refusing to be inducted into the army, Ali had been stripped of his licence to box; surely he was on his way to jail. I had no friends by then, only Napoleon Solo books, some pulpy boxing magazines and the now darkened television.
All through my teenage years, each weekday morning, after Daddy’d fixed a hot breakfast for Carol and me and placed it on the table, he’d playfully march from the kitchen, down the hall and into my room to wake me. All the way down the hall, he’d optimistically, rousingly, cheerfully sing. ‘Daaveee, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier,’ he’d serenade, cartoonishly exaggerating every syllable.
And ‘I can’t get ’em up, I can’t get ’em up, can’t get ’em up in the morning. I can’t get ’em up, I can’t get ’em up, can’t get ’em up at all.’ It may have been the only military song he knew. Daddy came of recruiting age after World War Two. By the time American soldiers were fighting in Korea, he and my mother were married, I’d been born, and he was exempt from service. Thank goodness.
Daddy was such a wondrously gentle man, I believe that military training would’ve ruined him, put him in a state where he would’ve had greater difficulty honouring/allowing his compassionate and tender nature. (Growing up stoically during the Depression and World War Two in the industrial South, the son of alcoholic parents, and losing his only childhood sweetheart when they were both so very young, I still marvel at his uncommon tenderness.)
On weekday mornings, when Daddy tried to wake me, I couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t force them open, not after ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, sometimes even half an hour. ‘Son, come on now,’ he’d say, trying to sound only a little irritated, ‘I’m gonna be late to work. Get on up and go to the bathroom and splash some cold water on your face.’
Many mornings, he’d take me by the hands, tug me from bed, lead me to the bathroom, turn on the water, splash it on to my face. No matter how hard I tried (and I did), I still couldn’t open my eyes.
For Terry Davis
who has suffered through almost a quarter of a century with this story and my writing
MONDAY EVENING, 27 SEPTEMBER 1973. I watched – and heard and felt – Bruce Lee smack hundreds of people so hard and fast that they froze where they stood, their neuro-circuitry scrambled. They bowed, they fell, they lay. And they didn’t get up.
To me, this was high art and science; each moment, every movement, was rivetingly righteous, sanctifying, purifying – a steaming hot bath on a frozen night.
At the end of the last luxurious battle in Enter the Dragon, I looked at the world around me for the first time since Lee had appeared onscreen. Compared to the song his body had sung, my existence was cold, mechanical, tedious. A moan, a Holden Caulfield whine.
I had no illusions about Enter the Dragon being a great film, or even a good one. It was more of the same Bondish junk I’d seen a thousand times and outgrown years before. Enter itself hadn’t so affected me; it was Bruce Lee, who’d leapt, shining, from the screen.
As I left the cinema, I didn’t walk; I glided about a yard off the ground. As soon as I’d seen Lee, in that single incandescent moment, I knew: I had not even known what martial art was. Now an extraordinary new reality had been revealed. And that reality purred, for me, in a way nothing else had. What I had believed, abstractly, about who a martial artist could be had been defined, precisely, by Bruce Lee, this man who single-fistedly manifested so many of my ideals.
When I’d stumbled upon Lee in Enter the Dragon, I was a prospective monk finding an ancient Taoist scroll in the bargain bin at a small-town five and dime.
Enter left town on Thursday. But I needed more time with Lee. Friday, instead of driving to Daddy’s house, which I’d done every weekend since I’d started college, I tooled over to Johnson City, Tennessee, where the movie’d been showing for a month and a half. At the door, a beautiful, dark-featured girl gave me a smile and a copy of a magazine called Fighting Stars, which featured Lee on the cover. It was one of only a couple times in my whole life that a good-looking girl had smiled at me.
What did it matter that she handed copies to people in front of me and behind? Those people were spectators, who floated from one sideshow to the next, seldom understanding – or curious to understand – what performance(s) they were seeing; wanting a performer, any performer, every performer (whether Lassie, Elvis, Sinatra or Jesus), to deliver them, for a time, from boredom. I believed I was different. This was the reason the beautiful girl had shared her smile with me.
Bruce Lee was a participant, a mover; I wanted to become one, too. And Fighting Stars would be the second chapter of my mystagogy; it would help introduce me to knowledge that might prove to be the peer of my well-worked martial pretensions.
I DIDN’T KNOW until I got to my dorm room, opened the magazine and read the hurriedly written obituary on page one – Bruce Lee was dead at the age of thirty-two.
I almost had to sit down on the floor. I couldn’t see how or why someone so obviously alive could ever really die, at least at the age Lee had.
Thirty-two, the same age Ali would be on his next birthday. And one year younger than Jesus had been when he went out and got himself offed. Most important to me, though, it was the same age my mother was when she’d died ten years before.
Christ, I wouldn’t even have thought Lee was thirty-two. He looked mid-twenties, tops. A man so youthful, how could he be dead? Especially when he was the guy I’d hoped to find for so many years – and had only just met.
At sixteen I was four-foot-ten, weighed sixty-three pounds, and felt powerless and forlorn almost all the time. It’s an understatement to say that I had no interest in school. I flunked nearly every class on my schedule, I had failed the tenth grade (and would eventually fail the eleventh) and when Daddy tried to talk with me about doing something with my life, pleaded with me to get interested in anything, I told him that I already knew what I wanted and what I was qualified for – and I didn’t need good grades to make it to the welfare rolls.
For my birthday present, hoping to capture The Power that Ali and Bond and Superman tapped into, I asked Daddy for karate lessons. The instructor we chose didn’t look like Bond, Ali or Superman; he was short, Italian, overweight, and by day worked as a hairdresser.