In 2023, Jean-Claude Van Damme sat down with The Telegraph and finally said what the martial arts world had waited three decades to hear. Sony Pictures had offered both men $20 million each to fight live in Las Vegas. The two biggest action stars of the 1990s, settling it once and for all. Van Damme said yes.
Seagal said no. Not the first time either. The third. Van Damme told the reporter this was the third time Seagal had turned down a direct confrontation.
Three separate offers. Three refusals. The story was never really about two men who couldn’t stand each other. It was about two completely different ideas of what it means to be a martial artist.
One turned out to be real. The other turned out to be a very carefully maintained performance. Van Damme was born frail and insecure in Brussels. His father enrolled him in Shotokan karate at age ten, not to make a fighter, but to give the skinny kid something to push against.
What followed was no overnight transformation. It was a kid who showed up every single day for years and did the work. He added kickboxing. He competed across Europe.
He won the European karate championship with the Belgian team in 1979. He took the Mr. Belgium bodybuilding title in 1978. None of that was invented for a press kit.
The competitive record existed before the cameras did, in official records, in front of judges, against opponents trying to beat him. When Seagal later called Van Damme’s credentials a matter of opinion, Van Damme found it almost funny. You do not build a competitive record across an entire continent as a matter of opinion. You build it by showing up and winning.
Van Damme arrived in Los Angeles with a thick accent and an idea of what his life should become. The city was in no hurry to validate it. He drove taxis. He drove limousines.
He delivered pizzas. He cornered producers in restaurants and on sidewalks, told them his name, asked them to remember it. Most did not. He put flyers on windshields.
He did demonstrations on street corners. He spotted Menahem Golan, head of Cannon Films, outside a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, performed a kick so high and so precise that Golan stopped walking and handed over a card that eventually led to Bloodsport. Bloodsport was no prestige picture. It was shot cheaply in Hong Kong and edited under pressure.
The studio nearly shelved it, and Van Damme helped recut the film himself because he believed in it. When it opened, audiences responded to something that had nothing to do with the production budget. They responded to him. The explosive kicks, the splits, the physical reality of a man who had spent fifteen years training to do exactly what the camera captured.
It read as genuine. Van Damme was not performing a martial artist. He was one, and audiences could feel the difference. Steven Seagal was born in Lansing, Michigan.
He moved to Japan in his early twenties to study Aikido, spent years training under legitimate masters, and by his own account became the first non-Japanese person to run an Aikido dojo on Japanese soil. He had real credentials. He also had Michael Ovitz as a friend, which is how he went from dojo owner to Warner Brothers contract through a single choreographed demonstration. Above the Law opened in 1988.
Van Damme’s path from training hall to film set had taken eight years of delivering pizzas and doing splits on street corners. Seagal’s had taken one phone call. Almost immediately, Seagal positioned himself as the only legitimate martial artist in the room. In one of his earliest major interviews, he dismissed Chuck Norris.
He questioned the legitimacy of Frank Dux, whose story had inspired Bloodsport. He said of Van Damme’s competitive record that it was, in his considered view, a matter of opinion. Not a refutation supported by evidence. Not a counterargument with specifics.
Just that slow, smiling dismissal. Van Damme, asked about Seagal on Arsenio Hall, called him a wonderful guy and declined to engage. It was either remarkable restraint or the most efficient method available for making the other man look small. Their on-screen styles gave the rivalry a real intellectual dimension.
Van Damme’s kickboxing produced fights that were high, fast, visually spectacular, built on athletic ability that was obviously real and obviously trained. Seagal’s Aikido was something different. The art itself is genuine, a system built around redirecting an opponent’s momentum through joint locks and throws that require minimal force when applied correctly. In the dojo, against compliant training partners, it is beautiful to watch.
Seagal’s early films captured that beauty effectively. The problem was the word compliant. UFC commentator Joe Rogan has said Aikido would never work against a trained fighter. Never.
Not in a million years. Fight analyst Jack Slack has written that it only functions if your opponent attacks in the straight, predictable manner that any trained fighter learns to avoid in the first week of sparring. Seagal’s film fights worked because the stunt performers were directed to attack in exactly the ways Aikido can handle. The question of what would happen if a real opponent attacked the way real opponents actually do was never answered on screen.
The Gene LeBell story is where the subtext became text. LeBell was a world judo champion, one of the founding figures of American submission grappling. During the production of Out for Justice, Seagal had apparently claimed that no submission hold could render him unconscious. LeBell, working on set as a stuntman, offered to demonstrate the contrary.
He applied a rear naked choke. Seagal went unconscious. The secondary detail, that he lost control of his bodily functions in the process, may have been embellished through repetition, but LeBell confirmed the choke on multiple occasions. Seagal insisted it was a back stretch that was misinterpreted, which is the kind of explanation that answers the question without actually addressing it.
The early 1990s were the peak of both careers. Under Siege was a genuine theatrical hit, over $150 million worldwide. Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice were mainstream commercial successes. At the same moment, Van Damme had Universal Soldier, Timecop, and Hard Target, the last directed by John Woo with such operatic commitment to ballistic choreography that it briefly made him look like the most cinematic martial artist Hollywood had produced.
Box office numbers were comparable. Magazine covers were split. The question of who was better was genuinely open. What closed the question was not the films.
It was the confrontations that happened off-camera, where the rules of movie choreography did not apply. Sylvester Stallone was present at a party in the late 1990s when Van Damme finally had enough of Seagal’s sustained public commentary. He confronted him directly, in person, in front of people. A direct challenge.
Seagal left. Later that same night, Van Damme followed him to a nightclub in Miami and waited outside for two hours. Seagal did not come out. “If he sees me, he runs,” Van Damme said years later, with the flat effect of someone describing a recurring weather pattern.
He was not performing anger. He was reporting what he had observed repeatedly across many years and three separate offers. The man who had implied that Van Damme’s competitive record was a matter of opinion had now declined every opportunity to offer an opinion of his own that came with any physical consequence. The Sean Connery incident sits at the edges of this story and belongs in it.
In the early 1980s, before either man was a movie star, Seagal had been hired as fight choreographer on the James Bond film Never Say Never Again, brought in to teach Connery some Aikido. Connery was not without martial arts background. He held an honorary black belt and had trained seriously for previous Bond films. During a rehearsal, Seagal, apparently demonstrating a technique, broke Connery’s wrist.
Connery described the incident on The Tonight Show in 1996 with the specific restraint of a man who had decided exactly how much he wanted to say. “I got a little cocky,” he said, “because I thought I knew what I was doing. ” He did not say Seagal had acted improperly. He did not need to.
On set, problems were accumulating from a different direction. John Leguizamo, filming Executive Decision, laughed during rehearsals at something Seagal said. Seagal responded by slamming him against a brick wall. “He taekwondo’d my ass,” Leguizamo said, noting with some precision that Seagal had used a technique from a martial art he did not practice on a man who was not attacking him.
The gap between the philosophical, defensive martial artist of the screen image and the man who used surprise force on a smaller coworker for the offense of laughing was not a gap that could be explained away easily. Van Damme’s own mid-90s were unraveling in a completely different way. Publicly. Honestly.
With none of the image management Seagal was deploying. The cocaine addiction was reported. The marriages failed in rapid succession. The box office numbers fell.
He did not dispute that he had fallen. He said he had. He went through treatment. He talked about it in interviews with a frankness that was almost disorienting for the action star persona he had spent fifteen years building.
There was no publicist-approved version. He had fallen, and he said so. He got up and kept working. The fullest expression of that frankness came in 2008 with JCVD, a film in which Van Damme played a fictionalized version of himself, broke, behind on child support, trapped in a Belgian bank robbery, stripped of every resource the action star image normally provides.
Critics who had spent twenty years dismissing him as a B-movie martial artist wrote about the performance as if it were the work of a completely different actor. It was not. It was the same actor finally in a context that allowed what had always been there to be visible. Steven Seagal made no equivalent film.
Gave no equivalent interview. The image remained sealed. The mystical Aikido master. The man with intelligence world connections.
The figure who could not be tested because he operated at a level beyond ordinary testing. It was all maintained with the consistency of someone who understood that the image was the asset, and that any crack in it would be irreversible. What happened to that image over time is what happens to all sealed systems. It contracted.
The films moved to direct-to-video in the late 1990s and never returned to theatrical release. Allegations of misconduct with women, violence on set, fabricated biographical claims multiplied. In 2016, he took Russian citizenship and became an unofficial cultural ambassador for Vladimir Putin, which recontextualized everything before it. The man who had built his persona around a code of honor had become, in the eyes of most of his former audience, something difficult to look at directly.
Today, when fans poll online about who would have won the fight, whose career meant more, who represented what the action genre was actually about, Van Damme wins by ninety percent margins. The people voting are mostly not trained martial artists. They cannot diagram the technical differences between Shotokan and Aikido. What they are responding to is something more fundamental.
The difference between a man who showed up and a man who made sure no one could ever find out. The difference between a career built on ability that was tested in competition before it was tested on camera, and a career built on a choreographed demonstration for a producer who needed to be impressed. Van Damme at sixty-five talks about the physical cost of the career with the same plainness he brings to everything else. The joints that bore forty years of competition and film work.
The mornings that are different now than they were. He talks about the addiction and the rebuilding. He talks about the marriages. He does not perform equanimity about any of it.
He reports it in the same tone of voice he used to report that the Sony fight offer had been declined for the third time. As facts available to anyone who wants to understand what actually happened. The truth he is telling at sixty-five is not primarily about Steven Seagal. Seagal is the contrast element, the mirror that clarifies what Van Damme is not by showing what the alternative looks like across thirty years of time.
What Van Damme is actually telling the truth about is the thing he has been telling the truth about since he was ten years old in a Brussels dojo. Frail and insecure and showing up anyway. That the only version of any of this that matters is the one that can be tested. That the image is not the thing.
That three times is not a matter of opinion. Two philosophies went head-to-head in the 1990s. One was spectacular and real and sometimes fell down. The other was controlled and protected and always found a reason not to show up.
The audience has been voting on which one meant more ever since. Van Damme just finally said out loud what the numbers have been saying all along.
