Michael Jackson had a black belt in karate and was a secret martial arts expert. Photo / Getty Images
Michael Jackson had a black belt in karate and was a secret martial arts expert who was obsessed with Bruce Lee films.
The King of Pop learned the fighting art form as a child with his brothers in the Jackson 5 – Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Jackie – at the insistence of their late father Joe Jackson, who wanted all his sons to be able to protect themselves.
Michael Jackson’s secret fighting skills have been revealed by his former bodyguard Matt Fiddes, who was 18 when he met the Billie Jean singer in 1998 after being introduced to him by spoon bender Uri Geller.
Taekwondo expert Fiddes, who is from Barnstaple, Devon, and runs his own global franchise of martial arts schools, was surprised to discover Jackson was such a proficient martial artist, and the pop superstar asked him to train him to get his second dan black belt.
Speaking on the Stripping Off podcast, Fiddes said: “Uri introduced me to Michael Jackson as we became friends and he got to trust me. Michael was already a black belt.
“Joseph Jackson made all the Jackson 5 study martial arts. He wanted to proceed with his training to second dan.
“He was damn good. Not just him, though. Tito, Jermain, all of them did it, all the Jacksons. Joseph [their dad] wanted to make sure they could take care of themselves. Joseph was a boxer.
“Look back at Michael Jackson’s dancing, he puts all the kicks and punches and blocks in his dancing, it’s all in there.”
Jackson’s martial arts obsession led him to study Lee’s fighting style, known as Jeet Kune Do, and he would rewatch the action hero’s films repeatedly to learn the Hong Kong actor’s moves himself.
Fiddes said: “He was a Bruce Lee fanatic. You sit down with Michael and watch a movie, he would annoy you because he would know every single word to Enter The Dragon, The Way of the Dragon, The Big Boss. No matter how many times he just watched the movies over and over again. He wanted to meet his only surviving child, his daughter Shannon Lee, and Linda Lee, Bruce Lee’s ex-wife. I had connections to Shannon Lee and Linda Lee.
“That’s what Michael did. He studied the greats and wanted to know how they stay relevant.
“So he was obsessed about what made Bruce Lee so relevant all these years on. He studied James Brown, Charlie Chaplin and Fred Astaire and he would take bits from them and put them into his own dance and his thinking. He would read four or five non-fiction books a week.”
Elsewhere on the podcast, Fiddes claimed Jackson allowed himself to be destroyed by allowing damaging people into his life and trusting them.
Fiddes recalled how the pop superstar, who died at the age of 50 in June 2009, frequently put his faith in the wrong individuals as “people would get in his ear”.
He said: “He was the creator of his own destiny but he was very bad at trusting the wrong people.
“In the 10 years I knew him he must have gone through about 12 different managers, some of them very good and some very bad.
“People would get in his ear, the latest friend, the latest family member. People would get in his ear and people would get pushed out, even myself. I found myself pushed out at some points.”
Jackson died from an overdose of surgical anaesthetic propofol and other prescription drugs prescribed by Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2011. Fiddes recalled the singer became reliant on doctors who were frequently seeking to take advantage of his global stardom.
Fiddes said the Thriller hitmaker became dependent on painkillers after he was left with second-degree burns to his scalp while filming a Pepsi commercial in front of a group of fans at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in January 1984.
He said: “The biggest issue he had was the doctors. There was always a doctor. I remember one time I went into a bathroom of a hotel, downstairs, Michael’s hotel, and I could overhear a doctor talking to a Michael Jackson fan, and the doctor was basically doing a US$10,000 deal to introduce the fan to Michael in the hotel suite. I couldn’t believe my ears.
“If you go back to Michael with that, you better hope he believes you, because otherwise he’ll shut you out and he’ll be stuck with some doctor. This is the issue he had.
“The doctors had a way of hooking Michael in with the medication, making him depend on it.”