After ESPN’s Bruce Lee doc, you’ll see Enter the Dragon through a whole new lens ~ USA Latest Games

As you might suspect, Bruce Lee trained hard. [credit: Bruce Lee Family Archive / ESPN ]

ESPN may not be thriving these days due to a severe lack of live sports, but the company's documentary arm is arguably having its biggest moment since the introduction of the 30 for 30 franchise. The Last Dance, the network's 10-part docuseries on Michael Jordan's 1998 Chicago Bulls, became ESPN's most-watched documentary ever in the midst of our still-in-progress, gameless pandemic. So naturally, the company had two more personality-centric projects waiting in the wings to hopefully continue the momentum and establish Sunday Night Sports Docs as a thing.

But last week's endeavor—Lance, a two-part series on the disgraced cyclist—tanked, kinda hard in fact. Audiences may simply be sick of a guy who repeatedly lies to the public no matter how much money for cancer research he's raised. But this week, ESPN debuts Be Water, a feature-length look at the life of martial arts icon Bruce Lee. And if you think Lee kicked ass on-screen (which, duh), you may leave this 95-minute exploration even more impressed

Just as a reminder of who we're talking about here—the final fight of Enter the Dragon.

Kinetic genius

If all you know of Bruce Lee is Enter the Dragon or more recent pop-culture shoutouts in board games and Tarantino flicks, Be Water sets out to show how much of a badass the actor was without even considering his fists. This film may air on a sports network, but it's less interested in Lee's undeniable martial arts abilities and accomplishments and more intrigued by his societal ones. Leveraging Lee's own personal writings, interviews with friends and loved ones, plus loads of family archival footage, viewers will get to see Lee the dogged creator, Lee the vulnerable philosopher, Lee the family man, Lee the Chinese American man at times still working through his own identity.

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