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Lee Jun-fan was born on 27 November 1940, in San Francisco, and died known to the world as Bruce Lee, on 20 July 1973 in Hong Kong. When he started martial arts, it was a collection of countless strictly organized and controlled contradictory sets of beliefs and practices, each of which believed itself to be clearly superior to the others. It was a field in which everyone was certain they were better than average.

Lee left a legacy that truth in unarmed combat lay outside of fixed systems. He showed the world a contest with fighters in fingered gloves, using strikes, kicks, takedowns, and tapping out to submissions on the ground. That was in 1973; didn’t happen in the UFC until 1997.

In short, Bruce Lee left a world where mixed martial arts made sense.

When MMA came along, it was a new process for the refining of technique, one as simple as wheels on luggage. If you want to figure out what works in a fight, then fight. If a technique doesn’t work for you, you’ll know, because you will get hit in the face. The name Bruce Lee gave to his approach – Jeet Kune Do, or The Way of the Intercepting Fist – captures that reality.

And if there was no Bruce Lee, you wouldn’t be reading this. I was 13 years old, the youngest kid in class, about 110 pounds, and spending the summer with pops in the mountainous Kingdom of Lesotho, Africa. I watched Enter the Dragon at the Holiday Inn Maseru, and since that moment, I have not wanted to do anything else for a living.

Pops got me into training with two South Korean 6th-degree black belts, Mogg Yoon and Tae Hyun Park, who were teaching the nation’s Police Mounted Unit, on the grounds of the national prison. Then I went back to ma in Cambridge, USA, and walked into the Suk Chung Institute of Tae Kwon Do in Harvard Square. The first thing I saw was a pic of Mr. Chung and Bruce Lee arm in arm. I did TKD and wrestled in high school. My college dropped wrestling the year I started so I did martial arts only, and bought into a studio when I graduated in 1982. I did that full-time for a little over a decade. Then one night, we all got together at a condo to watch UFC 1 on PPV for $14.95.

I started learning everything I could about the new sport with a guy at the gym named Dave Roy. We put everything we figured out in a notebook. In 1996 Dave set up an AOL site called The Art of NHB Fighting, with a Technique of the Week in it, drawn from the notebook. Eventually, hundreds of people every week were checking out the AOL site, so we decided to turn our fighter’s notebook into The Fighter’s Notebook, and self-publish it.

We decided to set up a website to market the book, so I grabbed a few urls. I was upset that Disney beat me to NHB.com by a few weeks, and passed on MMA.com for $200. We partnered with FightingTalk.com, a news page, and the owner suggested we call our site The Underground. Sounded OK to me, so we self-published the Notebook and went live at mixedmartialarts.com in August of 1998.

I am sad that Bruce Lee never got to see his vision become a sport. He would have loved it, as his brother Robert explained: “Spirit-wise, he would support it 1,000 percent. It’s what he came up with.” Brothers can of course be biased. But UFC president Dana White called Lee, “The Father of Mixed Martial Arts.”

Rest in Peace Bruce Lee, and thank you, for everything.