A strange article I found on a Wing Chun forum, perhaps Kung Fu Online, way back in the early 2000s.
Needless to say (hopefully), I did not write the article, and have some issues with its veracity, to put it mildly. Pretty funny, though.
According to the Hong Kong newspapers, Yip Man broke a stack of 1000-pound ice blocks and could jump up and kick five oak boards in half. They said he also he killed a Russian horse with a single slap to the animals back. Each week the stories written by Wang Kiu got wilder and wilder. Let’s go back in history a bit before these stories started.
It has been rumoured by the Tongs that maybe Leung Sheung supplied drugs to Yip Man and then Yip Man sold him a $100,000 franchise to teach Wing Chun. They say that Yip Man never touched Leung Sheung or every discussed Wing Chun with him. All they did was chat in restaurants. But one day Leung Sheung secretly saw Yip Man doing a form when he was spying on him through the hole he drilled through the wall of his apartment. Yip Man in fact saw Leung Sheung teach through a hole in the wall of Leung Sheung’s studio and then went home to study Leung Sheung’s form.
For amusement while he was high on drugs, he did everything backwards. This is when Leung Sheung saw his stuff. It so happened that Yip Man discovered the hole in his wall and realizing that Leung Sheung was spying on him, concocted a brilliant plan to get even with him.
Yip Man handled Leung Sheung quite well by deceiving him into thinking that he knew some martial art. In fact Yip Man played a joke on Leung Sheung by merely using Leung Sheung’s movements but doing the opposite.
So where Leung Sheung did a wide stance, Yip Man did a narrow stance. When Leung Sheung used a flat fist, Yip Man used a vertical fist. When Leung Sheung’s Wu sau came out forward, Yip Man made his go backwards. While Leung Sheung used hard strong motions, Yip Man used soft ones.
Leung Sheung thought that was a brilliant innovation and so he fell for Yip Man’s joke. In a period of 5 months, Leung Sheung had mastered Yip Man’s backward form. Leung Sheung decided to test this Wing Chun in competition and to his surprise won the all Hong Kong nationals competition by breaking his competitor’s jaw with a Phoenix Eye punch. Unfortunately he was disqualified, so he entered the forms competitions where he showed off his new form. The judges didn’t know what to make of it but after some bribery by Leung Ting, decided to award him the coveted Gold medallion for his efforts. His winning made front-page news.
Leung Sheung being very ****y decided to challenge the great Yip Man. So he summoned Yip Man to the teahouse and challenged him to a match. Yip Man being high on Opium was very calm in the face of Leung Sheung’s challenge. Leung Sheung threw a Pheonix eye fist at Yip Man but just then Yip Man turned to look at the new waitress and fell off his chair. Leung Sheung missed and hit his head on the low hanging light above the table and knocked himself unconscious. When he came to he couldn’t remember what happened.
But Leung Ting, a student of Leung Sheung’s Dragon style, happened to be there and being a friend also of Yip Man offered to help Yip Man by publishing a story in all the Hong Kong newspapers of how Yip Man beat up Leung Sheung. From this story Yip Man suddenly got hundreds of students wanting to learn his secret style. Yip Man, knowing that Leung Sheuing was a good fighter, decided to have Leung Sheung teach all these people in exchange for a percentage of the fees. Leung Sheung thought it was a great honour to be the head instructor for Yip Man. Leung Ting realizing the commercial potential of this new deceptive art, never refuted the story.