From Wikipedia:
The Way of the Exploding Fist is a 1985 fighting game by Gregg Barnett of Beam Software. Originally developed on the Commodore 64 and published in June 1985 by Melbourne House, ports were made for Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Commodore 16. It was one of the first games to include realistic graphics and movements and borrows heavily from the Data East arcade game Karate Champ which was released the year previously.
The name of the game is probably a play on Bruce Lee's fighting system Jeet Kune Do, which can be translated to "Way of the Intercepting Fist".
Karate champ Jeoffrey Thompson was signed to promote the game but was not sufficiently well known to have the game named after him.
Source: Wikipedia, "Way_of_the_Exploding_Fist," available under the CC-BY-SA License.