Born in Brooklyn and having an impeccable record after serving in the U.S. Marines, Ron Van Clief begins his martial arts career. He competes in both full-contact and non-contact karate tournaments in New York then internationally, going on to win several national tournaments and world championships. Ron is known as a real fighter because he often competes in street tournaments with Chinese martial artists and holds his own. His reputation grows because of this and being nicknamed "The Black Dragon" by Bruce Lee. Van Clief is a student of Goju-Ryu, WingTsun and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (Joe Moreira ). In 1971, Van Clief creates his own style of martial arts, called "Chinese Goju," attempting to unify Japanese style goju-ryu with its roots in Chinese martial arts. He like many black martial artists such as Carl Scott appears in Kung Fu films. At that time, the industry is not interested in hiring anyone from the west because they feel that western martial artists are too slow and not respectful to the art form and the genre of film making. However this starts to change when they hear about the Black Martial artists from America and it doesn't hurt that they have endorsements from the martial artists of the Chinese community either.