“Teach Me, Sifu!”

Donnie Yen is probably the world’s biggest martial arts star right now. But the truth is that he isn’t just a “movie” martial artist…he is a genuine bad-ass. There’s a story, well sourced, that he was in a night club with his girlfriend, and a local gang began to hassle them. He took it outside, and depending on the source of the story, between five and seven men rapidly regretted their choice. THAT’S entertainment. I’d give ten thousand dollars to see THAT fight.

How did he become this? Well, part of it is certainly the fact that his mother is a grandmaster, but another aspect is his attitude. I heard another story, told to me by Guro Cliff Stewart (as formidable a human being as I know of, with 15 ADVANCED black belts, a man who at his physical peak could bench press 500 pounds. “Built like a rhino and moves like a cat,” Willie Garvin’s description of Simon Delicata in the Modesty Blaise novel “A Taste For Death”. Brrrrrr.).

Well, it seems that when they were filming BLADE 2 in (Hungary? Bulgaria? Something like that), Donnie Yen was the fight choreographer. Cliff, of course, was Wesley Snipes’ bodyguard.

Well, one night after filming the crew went to a local nightclub (so many fight are connected with nightclubs. There’s an entire essay to be written about “why”, I’m sure) and a huge guy began hassling Wes. They took it outside, or were leaving and the guy kept it up. One thing led to another, and Cliff DROPPED the guy with a single elegant palm-strike to the chest.