This is the only story I’m going to tell you tonight that my father didn’t see with his own eyes. He heard it. Three times. From three different men. Over the next 20 years. And every time the story was a little different. This is the version that stayed with him. Take it the way he gave it to me as a story. Late October 1971.
Seattle. The week of Linda Lee’s stepfather’s funeral. Bruce was in town for 4 days. He stayed at a hotel near the airport one night and at his mother-in-law’s house the next three. He ate dinner at Tai Tung at least twice that week. My father knows this because Taky Kimura was there one of the nights and Taky told him about it years later.
If you don’t know Tai Tung, it’s a Chinese restaurant on the corner of South King and Maynard in the part of Seattle that used to be called Chinatown and is now called the Chinatown International District and is mostly the same buildings either way. It opened in 1935. Bruce ate there as a kid in the early ’60s when he lived in the basement of the building two blocks over.
He had a chair. Wooden. By the window. Second one in from the door. He sat there enough times that the owners left it for him without saying anything. That chair is still there. I sat in it last week. The waitress didn’t know who Bruce Lee was. She was maybe 22. She brought me tea and told me the wonton soup was good.
Bruce was 31 years old that October. He had finished filming The Big Boss in Thailand two months before. The movie hadn’t come out yet. In Hong Kong, almost nobody knew his name. In Hollywood, the people who’d known him from The Green Hornet thought he was finished. He was, by most measurements anyone in America was using, a man on a down slope.
He didn’t look like a man on a down slope. My father, who saw him on the street that week, and I’ll get to that, said he looked like a man who already knew something the rest of us hadn’t figured out yet. My father was 16 years old in October of 1971. He’d been training with Taky Kimura for about 8 months at that point, not seriously, not the way the older guys trained, but seriously enough that Taky knew his name and asked about his mother.
He worked weekends at a gas station on Rainier Avenue. He had a 1966 Chevy that didn’t run half the time. He was, by every measurement that mattered to him then, a kid. He saw Bruce twice that week. Once on Maynard, walking out of Tai Tung with a paper bag leftovers, my father said, which he thought was funny because at that age he didn’t think movie stars took leftovers home.
The second time was in the parking lot of the funeral home on Boren Avenue, two days later. My father was driving past. Bruce was standing outside smoking. My father said he wasn’t sure it was him until he was already past, and by the time he turned around, Bruce was gone. Neither of those was the night I’m telling you about.
The night I’m telling you about, my father was at home doing homework, or pretending to. He didn’t see anything. He heard about it the next morning at the gas station from a man named Frank, who’d been at the bar two doors down from Tai Tung, on the corner of South King and 6th. The bar doesn’t exist anymore. It was demolished in 1994 to make room for a parking structure.
I don’t even know what it was called. My father called it the King Street Place. Frank called it Eddie’s, which might have been the bartender’s name and not the bar’s name. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand, even the easy things about this story are not easy. Even the name of the bar is gone.
What everyone agreed on is this. There was a bouncer at the door. He was a big man. Not tall, 6’1, 6’2, somewhere in there, but heavy. 380 lb, my father said Frank said. Takey later said 350. The third version, which came from a guy named Donnie who told my father about it in 1986 in a parking lot in Tukwila, Donnie said 400 even.
I’ll give you the average. 376. Call it 380. He was a big man. That’s what matters. His name, in two of the three versions, was Walt. In the third version, he didn’t have a name. He worked the door at that bar four or five nights a week. He’d been a wrestler in high school, somewhere in Eastern Washington. He’d done some boxing in the army.
He was, by all three accounts, the kind of man people did not test. The kind of bouncer where guys would walk three blocks out of their way to drink at a different bar. Around 8:30 at night, Frank said 8:40, Takey said 8:15, Donnie didn’t know, Bruce walked out of Tai Tung. He was alone. He was carrying that paper bag.
He was wearing a brown leather jacket and dark slacks. He turned left on King Street, walking toward 6th, where his car was parked. To get to his car, he had to walk past the bar. Past Walt. I want to slow down here. Because the next 4 seconds are the entire reason I’m telling you this story. Walt was outside the bar.
Standing on the sidewalk. He was, depending on which version you trust, either smoking or just standing. There was a small group of men near him. Two or three. Drunk. Not customers. Friends. Or guys who hung around. The kind of crowd a bouncer keeps at arm’s length. One of them said something about Bruce. As Bruce walked past.
Frank said it was a slur. Taki said it was just a comment about his height. Something like look at the little guy. Donny said it was something obscene about Linda. Which Donny might have made up. Because Donny tended to. Bruce kept walking. Walt, and this is where all three versions converge.
Walt stepped off the sidewalk and put his hand on Bruce’s shoulder. Not a punch. Not a grab around the neck. A hand. On the shoulder. The kind of move a bouncer uses a hundred times a night to turn a drunk around and send him home. Four seconds. Frank said it like this. He touched him. Then he was on the ground. I didn’t see what happened in between.
Taki said it like this. And Taki was not in the bar. Taki heard it from a man who was, Taki said, Bruce didn’t move his feet. He just turned. His shoulder went one way and his hand went another way and the bouncer’s wrist went a third way and that was it. Donny, 15 years later in a parking lot in Tukwila, said it like this.
I saw a man hit the sidewalk who I had personally watched throw a guy through a window the week before. And the man who put him on the sidewalk was already two steps past him. Walking to his car. Like nothing happened. I keep coming back to that detail. Like nothing happened. Bruce did not stop. Bruce did not turn around.
Bruce did not say anything to the men who were still standing there. Bruce walked to his car. He put the paper bag on the passenger seat. He drove to his mother-in-law’s house on Beacon Hill. He did not, as far as anyone has ever found out, mention what had happened that night to Linda or to anyone in the family.
Walt sat on the sidewalk for what Frank said was a long time. His wrist was broken or sprained badly enough that he couldn’t lift his arm. He didn’t go to the hospital that night. He went the next day. The doctor at Harborview, depending on which version you trust, told him it was the cleanest small bone fracture he’d ever seen, like someone had set it up to break in exactly that one place and nowhere else.
Walt didn’t work the door at that bar after that night. He didn’t quit. He just didn’t come back. The story Frank told is that Walt drove home that night, sat in his kitchen until 4:00 in the morning, and told his wife he was going to do something else for a living. Two months later, he was working at a hardware store in Renton.
He stayed there until he retired. He never, as far as anyone in the neighborhood knew, told the story himself. Takey said Bruce mentioned it once. Months later, in Hong Kong, they were on the phone. Takey said Bruce called him every few weeks just to talk, and Bruce said, near the end of one of those calls, “There was a man in Seattle who put his hand on me.
I should have just kept walking.” Takey said, “You did keep walking.” Bruce said, “I should have kept walking sooner.” That’s the line that stays with me. Not the broken wrist. Not the 4 seconds. The thing that stays with me is that Bruce, who had spent 10 years training his body to do exactly what it did that night, regretted that it had done it.
He didn’t want to have hurt Walt. He wanted to have walked past. I asked my father once if he thought Bruce was sorry for what happened. He took a long time to answer. We were sitting in his garage. He was sanding something. I don’t remember what. He said, “I don’t think sorry is the right word.” I think he was tired.
I think he’d done that move 10,000 times, and that was the first time he’d done it on a person who wasn’t trying to hurt him. Walt wasn’t trying to hurt him. Walt was just being a stupid bouncer with a hand on his shoulder. And Bruce broke his wrist because his body did what his body does. I think that bothered him.
For a long time. My father went back to sanding. I sat there for another minute. Then I asked him, “How do you know all this? You weren’t even there.” He didn’t look up. He said, “I wasn’t there. But I worked at a gas station for 2 years, and three different men who were there told me about it on three different mornings.
Frank told me first. Then Takey, when I started training serious. Then Donny in ’86, who didn’t even know I knew the other versions. When three men tell you the same story 15 years apart, and the only thing that changes is the bouncer’s weight, you start to think the story is real. I drove past the corner this morning, where the bar used to be.
There’s a parking structure there now. Concrete. Five stories. I parked on the street and walked across to Tai Tung. The chair is still by the window. I ordered tea and wonton soup. The waitress asked if I’d been there before. I said, “Yes. Many times.” She said the soup is good. I said, “I know.” I sat in the chair for a long time.
I thought about Walt. I thought about Bruce walking past with a paper bag full of leftovers. I thought about my father at 16, hearing about this for the first time at a gas station from a man named Frank, and not knowing yet that he would hear it twice more in his lifetime, each time a little different. My father is 70 this year.
He still goes to Tai Tung sometimes. Not for the chair. For the wonton soup. He tells me it’s the best in the city. I don’t know if that’s true. I think he just likes that the place is still there. He said something else about that night. The last time we talked about it. He said, “Bruce won that fight.” And he wasn’t happy.
That’s the part nobody understands. I think about that. About what it costs to win something you didn’t want to fight for in the first place. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for sitting with me. I make these as carefully as I can. If you want to know when the next one is here, you can subscribe. If something I said was wrong, tell me.
I’d rather know. My father is still here. I’ll keep asking him things. Take care.
