Tale of Tim Tackett PART 2
Part 1 of our exclusive Q&A with Tim Tackett ran in the October/November 2018 issue of Black Belt.
In your experience, what is holding back the growth of jeet kune do in the greater martial arts community? Judging from the popularity of Bruce Lee, JKD should be the most popular art in the world.
Bob Bremer and I once did a seminar for about 50 people. I asked Bob privately how many JKD guys were in the room. He said, “Three.” I said, “Maybe four.” And that’s about what it was. We taught the straight lead punch.
The next year, we went to the same place for a seminar and asked, “How many people were here last year?” Most of them raised their hands. We started by covering the straight lead again. The following year, the same thing happened. Somebody said, “Sifu, we already know that.”
I said, “No, you don’t. You recognize it. You have no knockout power with it yet.” That shortcoming affects people in a lot of martial arts. Instead of learning things well enough to be able to use them, they have a lot of techniques that could put them in danger. But people generally don’t train like that.
It’s even more of an issue in JKD. I have all Bruce Lee’s notes from the Bruce Lee Foundation — big, thick volumes with his workouts up to a month before he passed away. He was doing like four things. All he wanted to be able to do well was just those four things. That’s a different
