The article's headline is incorrect. It was Kareem Abdul -Jabbar who trained with Bruce Lee. After all, Bruce was the sensei and Kareem the student.

I disagree. Bruce Lee treated it as a learning experience as well.

> At first, Bruce told Mito that Big Lew was slow, his arms were weak, and he wasn’t good at chi sao. A reporter who witnessed one of their workouts was more impressed with Bruce than Big Lew. He wrote that Bruce could “leap and kick over Alcindor’s head, and says he can defeat him by taking advantage of his shin and thigh with a kick.”

> But Bruce soon realized all that was irrelevant. Even if he could get inside Big Lew’s reach, it wasn’t easy. And with his front kick, Big Lew could rattle the rim of the basket. Bruce’s Wing Chun skills were all but useless. He joked with Doug Palmer, “Try doing chi sao with someone when you’re staring at his belly button.” Bruce called Taky and told him not to focus on chi sao in the school anymore.

> “Bruce and I sparred regularly,” Kareem remembered. “But we didn’t compete; I was like a drawing board on which he could work out his theories and he was instructing me how to deal with people and attack him.”

If you're going to use a foreign word for teacher, shifu would likely be more appropriate than sensei. Lee's martial arts were rooted in Chinese tradition, not Japanese.