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By Cliff Montgomery, ExtremeProSports.com
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Wrestling, kickboxing, holds and locks - in short, those fighting styles
collectively known as unarmed combat - weave a constant thread through
history. These introductory articles will look at the styles coming to us from each
area of the world and set the tone for the kind of fighting made famous by the UFC:
MMA Fighting Styles in the UFC - Where Do They Come From?
1.)The 'Old World' of Europe and Africa;
2.)The amazing styles of China, Japan, and those found around the Pacific
Rim;
3.)The New World.
It's been said that, "You can't know who you are if you don't know where
you've been." These are the building blocks of our modern mixed fighting styles;
therefore knowing them will help us to know ourselves a bit better.
Wrestling has been perhaps the most popular form of unarmed combat
throughout recorded history. Known origins of the sport can be traced back
15,000 years, to drawn cave depictions found in France. Early Egyptian and
Babylonian reliefs clearly show wrestlers using most of the holds known today. Wrestling occupies a prominent place in legend and literature; near the end of the Iliad the poet Homer records Odysseus fighting a titanic wrestling match with fellow Greek Ajax; in Genesis, Jacob wrestles an angel of the Lord Jehovah.
In ancient Greece the four great national festivals were the Isthmian, Pythian,
Nemean, and the most prestigious, the Olympian Games, which were celebrated in
the summer every four years at Olympia. The spectacle lasted for five days, and
was a combination of sacrifices and sporting events. Only men were allowed to
attend, and only nude men could participate. Among the activities, bouts were held
in wrestling, boxing, and the pankration - an extremely intense combination
of wrestling and kickboxing.
In ancient Greco-Roman wrestling one merely had to throw the opponent to
the ground three times, though the sport was rough: wrestlers quite often ended their
careers with broken noses and cauliflower ears.
But ancient Greco-Roman boxing and the pankration were positively
brutal.
The fighters originally wound straps of soft leather over their knuckles as a
means of protecting their hands from the crunch of the blows - as opposed to popular
belief, the straps never protected the one being hit. In later times large straps of hard
leather, sometimes weighted with metal, were used. In ancient Rome this further
developed into the cestus, a metal-studded leather covering with which
fighters maimed and even killed their opponents, sometimes as part of gladiatorial
spectacles.
Occasionally deaths also occurred in the pankration, a contest which had only
two clear rules: 1.)no obvious gouging-out of the opponent's eyes; 2.)the battle would
continue until one participant acknowledged defeat or could no longer fight.
One pankratiast, Sostratos of Sicyon, became well-known for wrestling his
opponent to the ground, holding him there with a lock on one of his arms,
and then breaking every finger on his opponent's hand until he gave up.
To be fair that fell out of favor; still, as the writer Philostratus tells us, the
Olympian pankration judges back then "approve(d) of strangling."
But as the modern historian Tony Perrottet reminds us in his excellent
introductory book The Naked Olympics, "contrary to our perception of a brutal all-out brawl, the pankration had developed among the Greeks into the greatest test of
skill, combining supreme strength with the ballet-like style of Kung Fu."
The ancient Games continued in performance and popularity until they were
suppressed by the Roman emperor Theodosius I around 394 A.D.
During the Middle Ages wrestling remained popular and enjoyed the
patronage of royal houses in France and England; the same was true almost half way around the world in Japan.
Genuine professional wrestling was wildly popular in the United States until
the 1920s. The first professional wrestlers were featured in carnivals, where they often
attracted sizable crowds by offering cash prizes to any 'local boy' who could throw
them.
Professional wrestling in the U.S. reached its zenith during the early 20th
century, then slowly gave way to modern exhibition wrestling, which is intended purely for entertainment.
Two basic styles of Western amateur wrestling - freestyle and Greco-Roman -
are now generally employed around the world. In freestyle wrestling an athlete may
use his entire body in competition, whereas holds below the waist and the use of
the legs are not permitted in the so-called 'Greco-Roman style' .
As for Western boxing, it was revived in 18th Century London in the form of
bare-knuckle prizefights - lengthy engagements in which contestants fought for
money and the spectators placed bets on the outcome.
At the end of the 19th Century however 'The Queensberry Rules', which
emphasize boxing skill and agility over toughness and brute strength, were
adopted as the standard for English prizefighting. The Queensberry rules helped to
undo the popular image of the boxer as a savage brute, and remain in use to this
day as the bedrock of Western professional boxing.
