Requiem for a Fighter: Meet the only man to officially fight Bruce Lee

Photo by Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty Images

Gary Elms faced off against the ‘Little Dragon’ for high school boxing title.

Time has allowed the world to piece together much of the puzzle that was Bruce Lee’s life but still there are degrees of both myth and of mystery that surround the man.

Included among those is the tale of a fellow Hongkonger named Gary Elms and his own brush with Lee and his fame, before that fame even really had a name.

On March 29, 1958 inside the gymnasium at Hong Kong’s St George’s School, Elms faced off against Lee as he tried to defend his Inter-School Individual Boxing Championship crown. The 18-year-old Lee took the bout on points – decisively – against his 17-year-old opponent and it would prove to be the only official fight Hong Kong’s “Little Dragon” ever had.

That alone is a remarkable fact given Lee’s rise to fame and fortune was built on his reputation as a fighter, and for decades afterwards there was even dispute about whether the bout even took place.

But slowly, over the years, more facts have been unearthed and now a full picture can be painted not only of the fight itself but of the mysterious young man who stood across the ring from Lee long before he became a legend.

“I think anyone who met Gary will tell you he was a unique individual,” recalls his sister Lorraine Barclay.

Elms passed away on January 1, 2018 and he took all memories of the fight with Lee with him. Members of the Elms clan say Gary Elms was never really known to have shared the experience or even reflected on how he might have watched Lee’s rise from Hong Kong to Hollywood.

“Gary wasn’t much for going over the past,” explains Barclay.

Instead it seems Elms was simply focused on forging his own path in life, one that now shows him to be quite the unique individual in his own right.

But first, let’s get to the fight.

Western-style boxing was the only combat sport not frowned upon by Hong Kong authorities in the 1950s, following a colonial-era crackdown on martial arts that the city’s British overlords basically used to help keep the locals under control.

Looking back, it now seems to have been simply a matter of time before Lee would enter the fray. Even as a young student, Lee had built up a reputation as a hot head on the streets of Kowloon – and beyond. He was running with local gangs and getting into scraps both in and outside the grounds of St Francis Xavier’s College, while trying to hide his misadventures from the martial arts masters who were attempting to fine-tune Lee’s natural skills and curb his natural enthusiasm for a contest.

Related: Bruce Lee, and Hong Kong’s infamous rooftop fight clubs

Lee had by that stage found trouble with the law, too, and it would later be on the pointed advice of local police that his family shipped him off to Seattle, for his own safety more than anything else.

The bright lights of Hollywood would soon be turning Lee’s head, but back in 1950’s Hong Kong, his glory days as a child star had faded and he was then just another young man trying to find his way in the world.

Boxing no doubt offered him a challenge. As it did to Gary Elms.

Elms was much like Lee in that he was a middle-class kid who seemed always ready to rumble and would take on any comers. He had carved out his own reputation in school boxing circles, representing the British expatriate boys of King George V School, the sworn enemies of Lee and the predominantly local lads from St Francis Xavier’s.

Author and martial artist Matthew Polly tracked down some of Elms’ schoolmates when (exhaustively) researching his Bruce Lee: A Life, including one Rolf Clausnitzer who recalls his friend as being “one tough nut.”

Though rumors that followed the bout would claim a knockout victory to Lee, the reality is that he seems to have bullied Elms around the ring – knocking his opponent to the canvas three times across three rounds – but Elms kept coming back, and he kept attacking. Reports from witnesses make it sound like an odd contest, with Lee throwing hybrid wing chun kung fu and boxing combinations, and struggling with the gloves, and Elms trying to stick to what he knew best – the established rules of the ring.

“Gary was amazingly resilient,” recalls Clausnitzer in Bruce Lee: A Life. “He was knocked down several times, but rebounded each time and did not seem to be any worse for wear.”

In the end, it was a unanimous points victory to Lee, and no pride lost for Elms.

By all reports, Lee took no great pride in the victory, frustrated at not being able to knock Elms out and vowing never again to be constrained by rules and regulations he found stifling. Such an attitude later drove Lee to create his own brand of kung fu – jeet kune do – and to encompass many forms of combat in the way he trained, and taught. This attitude, and style, eventually shook up the world of cinema through global hits such as Way of the Dragon (1973) and Enter the Dragon (1973) which helped turn Lee into an icon before his tragic death via cerebral edema in 1973, aged 32.

To all public intents and purposes Elms over the same period simply faded from view. But he continued to loom larger than life in the eyes of his extended family.

“I’m sure you could not meet anyone quite like him,” recalls Lorraine Barclay. “He had his own way about everything he did and was always determined to follow his own path, no matter what.”

After high school, Elms fought a few times mainly for fun and to maintain fitness – as exclusive images dug up by his family for this article have revealed – but he never really took boxing seriously again. However, his pugnacity and fearlessness never seemed to have deserted him. He first joined HSBC looking at a career in banking before becoming bored with office life and heading to the United Kingdom, from where his family had originated, to try his hand as a quantity surveyor.

But Elms was always looking to expand his horizons, so over the years he would turn his talents to everything from sheep farming in Majorca to opal mining in the dusty outback surrounds of Australia’s Coober Pedy.

According to family members, Elms also kept questioning the world around him. Elms’ time Down Under from the 1970s helped expand his interest in and knowledge of native plants and their medicinal uses and he would often disappear into the bush on solo expeditions, testing himself against that nation’s fierce extremes of weather and of landscape.

Family members gathered at Elm’s funeral recalled gazing up at the sky at night in wonder as their uncle, an amateur astronomer, would chart a course through the various stars and solar systems.

As Gary’s nephew James Barclay recounted, there was also a solo trip to the troubled Central American nation of Belize in the 1970s — just as the nation was preparing for a war that never happened against neighboring Guatemala, with years of tension and border skirmishes between the two countries.

As was his want, Elms was one day traipsing alone through mangrove swamps looking for native flora when he stumbled upon a covert American military listening post. Bailed up and asked for identification, Elms rose to challenge, pointing out that the country was still then under British jurisdiction and rather forcibly informing his would-be American captors that they could “Bugger off to your embassy!”

That fighting spirit also revealed itself on the roads, according to niece Adeline Clark, who recounted being advised at an early age by Gary that when it came to cars one should “drive it like you stole it.”

“Money never meant anything to Gary, and laws were meant to be broken,” recalled Lorraine Barclay. “Gary lived the way he wanted and answered to no one. He did it his way.”

A series of strokes towards the end of his life curtailed Gary Elms’ wanderings. He passed away aged 77 in Poole, on the south coast of England, after contracting pneumonia, taking with him a unique slice of history thanks to that fight with Bruce Lee.