My first experience of Bruce Lee was in 1977.
I spent entire evenings laboriously carving his likeness into a piece of linoleum with a special chisel. I later applied a thin layer of paint to this haut-relief and printed it onto a T-shirt. Every day I would buy up T-shirts, print them, take them back to the same shops, and sell the lot. I could have grown rich if they hadn’t run out of T-shirts in a 50-kilometre radius. At the Polish Karate Association a couple of years later, I met the journalist Marian Butrym, author of the first Polish book on Bruce Lee. Jealous, I proceeded to write the first Polish basic martial arts manual – Karate. Its print run of 150,000 copies sold out in two days. I personally saw a 300-metre queue for my book on Grzybowska Street, and even joined it. Since they were only selling one copy per person, almost everyone went back and queued again! I rushed to the publishers (Czasopisma Wojskowe), convinced that we would sell a million copies and I, like Croesus, would be able to buy myself a Polonez car, for example. But I ended up buying a tiny Maluch instead, because the publishing house’s annual paper allowance had been exhausted. The socialist economy was a planned economy, and no one had predicted such a surge of success.
We dreamt of master fighters long before Bruce Lee came into fashion. In my childhood, the amazing Abellino – the Bravo of Venice – alongside Zorro and Sir Lancelot would compete with Zbyszek Pietrzykowski, who had defeated the triple Olympic boxing master László Papp. In high school, we liked Toshiro Mifune and, as students, Kurosawa’s Judo Saga, in which a young ju-jitsu student prepares for a deadly match against the insane Higaki brothers – karate masters who could chop down pine trees with their hands and kick fair-sized holes in one-inch boards (on the ceiling!). It was every boy’s dream to learn a few moves and how to count in Japanese, then become… Oof, I shudder to think! During school break-times, we would get into serious discussions about how, sooner or later, karate champions (like us!) would have to register at the police station (after all, each of our hands and feet concealed terrifying weaponry).
Karate swept the country like wildfire. While signing students up for a club in the early 1980s, I diligently filled the list with people from the oddest professions: violinists from Maksymiuk’s orchestra (mind your hands, please!), taxi drivers (to stop attackers), policemen (for work), judges (one should know what one is judging), tailors (more practical than scissors for self-defence), orthopaedists (badly-healed bones must be re-broken), psychiatrists (?), female kindergarten teachers (???), and even hordes of nurses and lady doctors. When I asked the latter why they wished to learn karate, they replied charmingly that they had heard such training was excellent for getting pregnant. Indeed, perhaps the hundreds of exercises for pelvic and abdominal muscles did improve the blood supply to the desired parts of the body. In this way, Japanese karate contributed to the Polish demographic boom.
Of course, there were a few amusing misunderstandings, too. Once I was invited to the Youth Publishing Agency, where the not-so-youthful editor had gathered the staff writers together and, crocheting gracefully, was discussing ideas for a new book. She offered me 20 pages between an article on the tea ceremony (chanoyu) and another on growing miniature trees (bonsai). Annoyed to have wasted my trip from Łódź, I cynically remarked that karate was nothing but hoodlums kicking each other in the head until they bled! The lady dropped her needlework in shock, exclaiming somewhat helplessly: “Oh! I thought it was something like ikebana…”
Such were the times.
Translated by Mark Bence
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