Jerry said:
How about:
1. furnish documentary proof satisfactory to a Board of having completed at least one year of experience as the holder of a Journeyman license and having been actively engaged in, or working at the business of, teaching and studying martial arts.
2. furnish documentary proof satisfactory to a Board of having successfully completed a Board-approved 150-hour Master's Course conducted by a college/university, public vocational school, private occupational school licensed by the Department of Education or an organization for its employees or members within ten years of the date of application for a Class A (Master Martial Artist) license; and
3. obtain a passing score of at least 70% on the Board's written licensure examination.
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Of course, Journeyman is the hard one, requiring 8000 hours over a period of no less than four years within the previous 10; and 600 hours of classtime.
Respectfully, this is utter bullcrap. These organizations exist only to leech money off people and have absolutely nothing at all to do with martial skill of any kind.
I don't see how Bruce Lee isn't considered a master. Look up Takeda and read about all his behavior - he is often considered one of the greatest masters of the martial arts.
Most of the modern American conception of masters as wise, serene old men seem to be taken from the movies and have little relationship if any to the historical behavior of the men we have regarded as masters.
I don't think anyone should question Bruce's skill either. At 33, he came further faster than perhaps any other unarmed fighter in history. He was always at the very cutting edge of sport training, for instance using pylometrics before the US Olympic track team did (he was probably one of the first dozen people outside the Soviet Union to do pylometrics). He was inhumanly fast, very, very technically skilled, extremely intellegent and analytical and clearly could fight very well.
The reputation he held among the other greats of his era should vindicate him of any slurs about his ability. Chuck Norris has called Lee a better fighter repeatedly. Gene LeBell said something to the effect that he was the best student of the martial arts he had seen. His mutual exchange of knowledge with Ed Parker deeply impressed Parker and led him to change a substantial amount of the Kenpo curriculum - Inosanto I believe said that everytime Parker and Lee met Parker would change a bunch of stuff. Long before Lee was famous, or for that matter at his fastest, Jhoon Rhee had sparred with him and said that Lee was so fast that he couldn't even touch Lee even after Lee purposely slowed down a bit - the only contact with Lee's feet lightly kicking him while he tried to go full contact.
When Lee went back to Hong Kong to film his movies, he met up with Yip Man, who clearly did not think of Lee as unskilled. Someone should dig up some of Yip Man's quotes about Lee; I don't remember their content but they were quite flattering. Wong Shun Leung (who was definately among the top 2 or 3 of Yip Man's personal students and was the defacto challenge match represtative for challenges made to Yip Man's person) felt that Bruce Lee had impressive Wing Chung even when he came back to Hong Kong although he did not agree with any of Bruce's other innovations, believing Wing Chung to be a perfect system.
As a point of technical skill, Lee clearly was at the top of his game.
Though he never completed Wing Chung (only getting down about one third of the syllabus), every Wing Chung leader I have heard commenting on him said that he was among the very best at the parts he knew.
As for the challenge match, it was against a man named Wong Jack-mon who was a Tai Chi expert recognized in San Francisco as a grandmaster at 32 (his age when he fought Lee). He engaged Lee head to head for less than ten seconds before he took off running - and it took Lee almost two minutes to catch him. When he did, Lee brought him to the ground with a western wrestling take down and proceeded to chain punch him for a few seconds, then stopped and asked if Wong wanted to give up, which he did. Lee said later that he should have been able to knock out Wong within the 10 seconds they were fighting head to head and shouldn't have had to chase him - this convinced him that rather than supplementing his Wing Chung with other stuff, it would be better to start a whole new system, seeking out good stuff wherever he could find it.
Lee was in tons of street fights. The reason he left Hong Kong in the first place is that he had beaten a triad leader into the hospital and the police told him to leave before the traid tried to take revenge on him. He was in numerous fights, both in the street, because he had rubbed a number of gangs the wrong way, and in official challenge matches against various martial arts styles. When he got to Seattle, he fought with people from the Edison technical college, several of whom later became his students. In Oakland, he had a "open door to challenges" and fought more than a few against various kung fu people who thought Wong's fight was not good enough. He also had some number of non-chinese people who decided to test their ability. He didn't lose any of them. There also is a story somewhere from a girl he was walking home in Oakland when he beat the living daylights out of three guys that tried to jump them with lead pipes.
Back in Hong Kong, he fought several fights against people who wanted to fight the big TV star (Green Hornet). On the set, he fought at least four different times against extras and stunt men who thought he was fake; these are well documented because there were many witnesses. At least once on the set he had a fight with a gang leader who was trying to extort protection money from the film crews. On the way back from lunch during filming he got in a fight with several members of a construction crew who were mocking him as he walked past.
There are surely many more fights and more detailed accounts of each of them out there if you look hard enough.