By showing Booth and Lee each win a round in their fight, Tarantino elevates Booth in our minds, and makes him look more impressive.At least, if we believe Booth’s recollection of the time he met Bruce Lee.Also, if you’ve enjoyed all this Bruce Lee talk, you should definitely check out our interview with Polly for the “Shoot This Now” podcast, where he talked about the role Roman Polanski thought Lee played in the Manson murders. They are bigger than my head,” said Matthew Polly, author of “Bruce Lee: A Life.”“The story might be apocryphal, as it indicates a self-deprecating sense of humor, which was not Bruce’s forte,” Polly continued. “Muhammad Ali would win, because Bruce Lee was an … Bruce was screening a Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali] documentary. Bruce Lee was an actor and not a fighter. Their failure to respect the great fighter shows just how tough these guys are, I guess.One could safely argue that he’s trying to provoke Booth, not insult Clay/Ali. And it was apparently a conversation that Lee himself had with one of his directors. Many people have said throughout the years that Bruce Lee had a lot of respect for Muhammad Ali. In a 2015 interview with Maxim, former UFC champ Ronda Rousey said that Lee would be no match for Ali. Plus Muhammad Ali was way bigger than Bruce Lee. ‘That’s a little Chinese hand. He couldn’t box for several years in the late 1960s and early ’70s because he was ensnared in a legal fight with the U.S. government over his refusal to be drafted to kill the Northern Vietnamese.“He was not confrontational as a kid. '”And there you have it. One of those people was the director of Lee’s most famous film, “Ali was world heavyweight champion at the time and Bruce saw him as the greatest fighter of them all. Lee thought it might be possible. Even if they were the same size, I’d still go for Muhammad Ali, because he actually had competition experience where Bruce Lee did not.”Rousey certainly makes a valid point. Brad Pitt’s stuntman character, Cliff Booth, argues that there’s no way Lee could take on the greatest boxer of all time.First things first: Everyone on the set should be calling Cassius Clay by the name Muhammad Ali. ‘Everybody says I must fight Ali some day,’ Bruce said, ‘I’m studying every move he makes. He’d kill me. He never fought them, because he had nothing to prove. “The Green Hornet” ran from 1966-67, so the assorted stunt guys should know better than to still call Ali by the name Cassius. And he was in a good position to know, because he was Abdul-Jabbar’s martial arts teacher.“Bruce did spar with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and his comment was, ‘His arms and legs are so long, I couldn’t get inside to strike him.
I don’t see how those punches from Bruce Lee are gonna stop him.”That might seem to end the debate. If for nothing else, the scene was wrong as Muhammad Ali had already changed his name from Cassius Clay before “The Green Hornet” ever started production so Bruce shouldn’t have been using that name anyway.More so, Bruce Lee certainly didn’t ever think that he could beat Muhammad Ali if the two actually ever fought in real life. We asked the biographers for Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, aka Cassius Clay, ... Booth retorts that Lee would end up “a stain on the seat of Cassius Clay’s trunks,” and Booth and Lee fight. “In boxing, at least, if you’re a lighter weight class you can’t beat a heavyweight. )Ali didn’t look for trouble, either. "Ali was world heavyweight champion at the time and Bruce saw him as the greatest fighter of them all. He didn’t get into scraps on the street,” Eig noted.But still. But you can throw it with that caveat.”Polly is a man of honor. No Bruce Lee didn’t and according to his premier disciple Dan Inosanto he never would have! Bruce would use low kicks to try to cripple Ali before Ali could land one of those skull-sized fists on Bruce’s face. See below (and note that Lee is wearing the same outfit Uma Thurman wears in “Kill Bill, Vol. 1):Could Lee have beaten the real Abdul-Jabar? Ali took punches from the biggest, strongest men on the planet — Sonny Liston and George Foreman and Earnie Shavers. The size difference between the two was enormous.