everything wrote:What was a test like and how do we know?
No one even knows what Bruce Lee's fight with Wong Jack Man was like, and it's been reported on widely.
When Royce beat everyone, it's clear.
With his grand teacher Maeda, or with Wang Xiangzhai (for example), it doesn't seem so clear.
It's not that I don't believe the stories or the underlying point.
There are some stories passed down but those are mainly the remarkable ones. Yang Lu Chan pressing his fist against the famous boxer's as they both sat in chairs and the boxer's chair creaking and groaning and the boxer sweated profusely and his face turned red with exertion. Or Yang Cheng Fu using the cotton thread test to prove his superiority to a challenger he didn't want to embarrass. Or the challenger that jumped out at Yang Pan Hou from behind a bush or something so Pan Hou hit him in a couple of pressure points and killed him dead on the spot. Or the ones that happened behind closed doors that ended in the challenger simply saying "His skill is legit" afterwards. I mean, there's a million of those stories, honestly, but they don't all speak directly to direct fighting skill.
With Cheng Man Ching there is a little more. Robert Smith's account is that, despite his skill as a western boxer (and coach) he couldn't land a blow on Cheng Man Ching, and then CMC returned a flurry of light blows all over his head and body, any of which could have knocked him out if he hadn't been pulling his punches. Or the guy that CMC fought who he knocked down so hard his head swole up like a melon till CMC came over to set him right with his TCM skills.
But perhaps most telling was when Cheng Man Ching was on the mainland and he beat some foreign soldiers. Another unnamed-in-this-story master patted him on the back to congratulate him on his victory and he became deathly ill, bedridden, until a mutual friend asked the master to come over and take the juju off him. The master reportedly told CMC that now that he was famous, he shouldn't be so proud.
Which speaks to why there aren't very many detailed accounts of garden variety challenge matches. It seems to me that bragging about who you beat and how is a bit like kissing and telling. It would cause a loss of face that the defeated master or their students or just some other enforcer type with mad skills might feel compelled to avenge.