We’re talking here about the summer of ’75, shortly after I had put an end to the Kung Fu series by just walking away, while it was still high in the ratings: very high. People thought I was crazy to leave. I had a few reasons for ending the show. One: I had always said the third year would be the last. Two: it was starting to become repetitive, and the writing was falling down, the stories were getting kind of lame, all of which I had known would happen if it went on too long. I didn’t want it to become just another TV show. I’d done everything I could with it. It was time to get on with the rest of my life, make some movies. The biggest thing, though, was my own emotional state. I’d broken up with my long-time sweetheart. I was heartbroken, almost suicidal. I simply could not continue with the charade any longer.

The last day I had worked, February 5^th, 1975, she had come to visit with our son in tow. In between takes, I joined them on the grass. She sat there, with our boy on her lap (he was asleep) and we looked sadly at each other, unable to speak. She’d never seemed more beautiful to me. When they called me back to the set, I managed to say, “Goodbye,” my heart breaking, and that was it. She and the kid walked out of my life. We had to cancel my final shot as Kwai Chang Caine as I couldn’t stop crying.

So, now, a few months later, I’m in New York, with Sifu. We had seats at ringside. Kam was there to demonstrate the Double-Sword Form, and I was to make an appearance and give a little speech. There were performers from all over the world and the place was packed. Demonstrations of almost every style were on the bill, and some bizarre competitions between different disciplines were on hand to round it out. A wrestler versus a Judo man, a lightweight boxer against a woman. That was a very unequal contest. I had dinner with the girl the night before, a charming young lady from Oklahoma, and she was really scared. Rightly so. Her opponent, a tough little Latino with a barrel chest, gave her no quarter. As I remember, the fight lasted almost one round. At first the girl held her own pretty well, but then she got mad, and lost control. He decked her. Knocked her out. In the Judo/wrestler fight, the wrestler pinned the Judo man, but I thought the match was not set up right. They had the Judo guy in a gee, and the wrestler in trunks. Well, in Judo, you grab at your opponent’s clothes. A wrestler just grapples. They had it backwards. The result was the Judo man had nothing to get hold of, just skin, slick with sweat, and the wrestler had handles to grab.

Kam was awesome with the sword form, leaping higher than I thought a human could, and seeming to hover in the air, in defiance of natural law.

Ed Spielman, the writer of the original Kung Fu script, was there, I think the only time I was ever face to face with him.

One of the highlights for me was meeting Ed Parker for the first time. He showed me some techniques for taking out an attacker with a ring of keys. I was not impressed. That’s just not my kind of kung fu. And I had always thought Ed Parker was just a fat friend of Elvis. How could a guy that wide be a master of an athletic discipline? At the end of the event, though, Ed changed my mind for me. When the final bell rang, we looked up from ringside toward the only exits at the rear of the stadium, the aisles packed with people, and realized that we were going to have to walk a gamut of five thousand or so over-stimulated martial arts fans, looking for action.

I would have just gone for it, but Ed suddenly became protective of me. “You can’t go through that,” he said. He saw that though the aisles were full, the seats were now empty. “Come on.” he said. And the two of us jumped onto the nearest seatbacks and we ran across them, all the way up probably fifty or more rows to the back of the house, Ed right there beside me, running interference, like a linebacker. This was easy for me, at a hundred-seventy pounds, but Ed, at three hundred or more, should have broken the back of every seat. He didn’t. His feet touched down as lightly as a deer, and he ran like one. How he did that, I don’t know. The only answer I can come up with is he defied gravity. I had to start rethinking my opinion of him.

Perseverance seems to be the main tool for success in any endeavor. If you look at love and friendship though, probably the two most important things there are in life, you need understanding, self-control, and a host of other qualities. care, compassion, delicacy. In martial arts as well, it seems. In Agni Yoga, a form of meditation which I was studying at the time, the sacral chakra is defined as ‘Love’, which, they add, is what gravity is. It’s love, these Hindus say, that holds the solar system together and keeps us from falling off the planet. The color of the chakra is pink.

While we were in New York, Sifu and I took a run every day, through the streets, not on a track. I could never get into going around in circles. All I could think about on these runs was my broken heart. On this one morning, we ran all the way uptown along Broadway, past the theater district, past the Trump Tower at Columbus Circle to Needle Park at 72^nd Street, where all the retired folks sat around on benches, next to the coke heads. We stopped for a minute at a souvenir shop, to catch our breaths a little.

“What am I gonna do,” I said to Sifu. All he said was, “Patience, strength, fortitude.”

Okay. You fall down, or you get knocked down, and you get up again, and do whatever it takes to feel good about yourself, and go on. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘If Ed Parker, at three hundred pounds, could defy gravity, and Kam Yuen can fly, and if gravity is love, then I could cheer up and make it out of this funk alive.’

There’s been a lot of water since then, under the bridge and over the dam, and I should be in my rocking chair by this time. But right now, I’m in my prime and on my game, with a lot left to do, and I’ve got at shot at happiness. And that’s the essence of kung fu. If you ain’t got that, you ain’t got fu, I don’t care what color your belt is.

Another thing about Ed Parker: he loved The Art. And, Hey, Love is where it’s at! That’s what Ali would say, and he’s The Greatest.

My manager warned me that there was a series contract attached to the deal, and though I had said many times that I didn’t want to do another series, he was sure that I needed to look this one over. I was astounded. Not only was it a great script, and the kind of thing one rarely (one might say “never”) sees on TV, it also stuck a special resonance for me.

Back in 1967, the “Summer of Love”, I was appearing in a TV Special for CBS, called Johnnie Belinda, with Mia Farrow. One day I was standing by the coffee machine chatting with a man named Murray Susskind. He asked me, if I were to do another series, what would I like it to be about. I said, “I don’t want to do a series.” He said, “Yeah, but if you did, what would it be?” I said, “It would be about Cain, the first murderer, walking in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden, with the mark of God on him, trying to atone for the sin of killing his brother. And I’d set it in the Old West.” He said, “I’m talking about a commercial TV series.” I said, “So am I.” He just walked away, shaking his head.

And now, here it was just exactly what I’d ordered up, maybe mine for the taking. It also had this stuff in it I’d never heard of, called “kung fu.” I knew about Karate, of course. Though I was living on top of a mountain and didn’t even own a TV set, I wasn’t that far out of it. And Judo: I’d heard of that. And way back during the World War II, I’d known about something the Army Commandos used called Jui Jitsu, mostly from comic books, but this “kung fu” was relatively unknown to me. Actually, I’d heard the words twice before, once from a choreographer in New York, and once from a fellow actor. Well, I’d have to see what that was about.

As far as the series commitment went, I reasoned that there was no chance whatsoever of this great story becoming a network series. It was just to radical a departure. I was sure I could do the movie and then get on with my life.

I had, at that moment, for completely unrelated reasons (though, it might be said here that there may be no such thing as a coincidence) shaved my head. When I walked into Jerry Thorpe’s office at Warner Brothers, with my shiny pate, plus barefoot and with my dog in tow, I definitely turned some hairy heads. There wasn’t a lot of question about me playing the part. It was pretty much handed to me. I do remember Jerry asking me what I’d do about the martial arts. I replied that my background as a dancer and what I knew about gymnastics and boxing would see me through. Then, as I was leaving, I jumped up and planted my “Gene Kelly” version of a flying sidekick on the wall above the doorjamb. My bare footprint stayed up there for the whole length of the series.

They put me together with David Chow, and he taught me as much as he could in the short time we had before we would start the film.

We started shooting in October, at Vasquez Rocks, an otherworldly landscape in the mountains about two-hours from Los Angeles by car. I had a little Italian racecar, that I used for the trip every day. It was a super-cold trip. The car had no heater and no top, and the windshield was so tiny that the frigid wind hit me in the face, but the engine kept me warm up to the waist at least. Vasquez Rocks was even colder, and I was in shirtsleeves most of the time.

I got to know Kam Yuen on the shoot, and some other martial artists, and somehow managed to gain and keep the respect of these great fighters. I fell in love with Key Luke, and became kind of a big brother to Radames Pera, who played me as a boy.

I still had my doubts about wanting to do a series. One day, just before Christmas, I was standing next to Jerry Thorpe, the wind whistling around our heads. I said to him, “You know what I want to do? I want us to do our job so well, that it’s just too good for television.” Jerry smiled, and said, “Why don’t we do both?” And I guess that’s what we did.

By the time the network got around to giving the series a green light, I’d decided I could not in any conscience turn down the opportunity to put this great statement before a TV audience.

It worked out pretty well, didn’t it?