If we were to raise Bruce Lee from the grave and put him in the prime of his life, would he win? No, I don’t think he would, but that’s not fair, seeing as Bruce Lee was raised in an era where Jiu Jitsu didn’t really exist, and collegiate wrestling was not considered a major part of martial arts. However, let’s say he was born in 1990, and was raised in this era of MMA, I think, by the time 2013 hit, he’d be a legitimate contender. He's got a peerless work ethic, fantastic conditioning, and an open mind to picking up new techniques.
The skills of somebody from half a century ago would be out of date in today's world of mixed martial arts, but MMA wouldn't be what it is today without people like Bruce Lee as a part of it's history. Today it’s hard to go a city block without stumbling past an MMA school. Bruce Lee is an icon to many top mixed martial artists today, including 8 year undefeated middleweight champion Anderson Silva.
You don’t have to look too far back in history to know that the MMA fight game has evolved tremendously. Forget about people who were born in 1940, how about we focus on the early days of UFC and how much better the fighters have gotten in just the last decade. Bruce Lee practiced a hybrid martial art, and was one of the first hybrid martial art athletes ever. However, his primary martial art was called Wing Chun, a martial art that was proven very early on in the UFC to be tremendously ineffective in the cage. Many Wing Chun fighters tried to fight in the UFC and all were destroyed. Wrestlers would take them down, Muay Thai artists would strike effortlessly through their blocking scheme, which consisted of having their hands far away from their face, and jiu jitsu practitioners would simply submit them. All this being said, if MMA was popular in the 1950’s (the decade that Bruce Lee was a teenager) I believe that Bruce Lee would have focused on the martial arts that were proven to be the most effective, and studied them tirelessly.
Dana White was once quoted on the subject and said, “Actually, the father of mixed martial arts, if you will, was Bruce Lee. If you look at the way Bruce Lee trained, the way he fought, and many of the things he wrote, he said the perfect style was no style. You take a little something from everything. You take the good things from every different discipline, use what works, and you throw the rest away.”
Just as it is perhaps naive to think he can battle against everyone decades after his passing, it is disrespectful to go "he'll lose because he was born 70 years ago". Well, yeah, just don't be a jerk about it. I think he would have realized rather young, which sports worked in the UFC, and which ones didn’t, and would devote his life to the martial craft, and by the time he reached fighting age, would be a strong competitor.
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If I were a man who has recently skirted by a jury after murdering a child, I would probably lay low, stay out of the limelight. This is not the case for George Zimmerman, who has allegedly accepted a pay-per-view boxing match against former average rapper DMX. 