The Chronological History of MMA |
Welcome to the beginning of what may be a long and winding story, as we begin a quest to (almost) completely document the history of modern MMA. Over the course of many chapters I hope to expose myths, answer questions, raise new inquires, and shine some light on how the way of the fist intersected with the art of the armbar. I intend to go through every mma event (within what is available) in chronological order from the early '90s-00s, and highlight the various highs and lows that have led us to where we are today.
Because modern MMA is such a relatively new phenomenon, such an undertaking, while potentially arduous, is possible. The main thing is really deciding on where to start. I debated starting at UFC 1, but the fact is, that so much of modern MMMA has roots in Japanese pro wrestling, it seemed like I would be doing a disservice by just skipping over all of the shoot style/puroresu leagues that gave us many of the stars and concepts that would wind up becoming important later on down the road. Although the main point of this project is to cover Vale Tudo/NHB/MMA, to not give a solid look at the events that proceeded it is to really leave out giant pieces of its tapestry. Therefore, I have decided to start in 1991, right after the collapse of the UWF, in which several pro wrestling organizations sprouted up in an effort to sell “real fighting,” to a thirsty audience that didn’t know any better. So consider this a prologue of sorts, and thus we will begin in the realm of shoot-style wrestling (which as we will see had their share of actual shoots as well), and we’ll also make some detours into K1/Kickboxing, BJJ, etc, since by this point in time the MMA world was so small and blurred that there is a lot of natural overlap within these separate undertakings.
So, without further ado, let us look back into the depths of a “sport” with a murky past, and no clear future. A culmination of events that has one foot in the Budo spirit of Samurai long dead, and the other in the more recent shenanigans of carnival performers. Yes, let’s take a journey through time and see what led us to where we are today, as we glimpse down the kakutogi road that is simultaneously both one of the noblest of pursuits, and one of the most vainglorious. Ingenuity, creativity, sheer force of will, and sacrifice are rewarded, but at the end of the day… combat is still an endeavor that reduces it’s practitioners to spectacle. Fighting to prove oneself has led to many sorrows, as men vainly chase their identity and self-worth in something that can never provide such a thing.
We find ourselves on 3-4-91 as the very first PWFG (Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi) event is set to take place. Before this took place it’s wise to note (for those reading that might not be familiar with the history), the initial cataclysm that led to Japan’s interest in MMA, the birth of the original UWF, a pro wrestling promotion that started in 1984 as fairly straightforward Pro Wrestling fare. UWF later evolved into something never seen before, once several key members migrated from New Japan Pro Wrestling. Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Nobuhiko Takada, Satoru Sayama (the original Tiger Mask) and Kazuo Yamazaki found a home with this fledging promotion, and this prompted the change in orientation to a more martial arts style. They became the hottest ticket in Japan for a brief period, until infighting over the essence of the product, and a clash of egos between Sayama and Maeda led to its demise. The contention between Sayama and Maeda arose partly due to philosophical disagreements over what the essence of the UWF should be, with Sayama wanting more of a kickboxing flair (he had a background in kickboxing), and Maeda wanting it more rooted in submissions.
They would eventually come to blows, when on 9-2-85 the two began what should have been the usual worked pro wrestling match. Instead, they didn't pull their punches/kicks and were striking each other for real. Eventually they seemed to regain their composure and things went back to normal, when towards the end of the match, Maeda simply gave a super hard kick to Sayama’s balls, and forced a disqualification from the ref. Maeda was fired for this, and Sayama quit pro wrestling in disgust. He would later go on to form Shooto, which was the first true MMA organization, and who’s history we will be exploring in greater detail down the road (The first Shooto event took place in 1989, and while I would love to start this project from there…. I simply have yet to get my hands on any Shooto pre '92. I own most of the Shooto from 94 onward, but if anyone can help provide Shooto materials from 89-93, for the sake of this project, then please do so).
After the initial collapse of the UWF in 85, most of the roster went back to work for New Japan Pro Wrestling, for the next few years. This was until 11/19/87 when Maeda, yet again, couldn’t keep his temper under control and decided to deliver a shoot Muay Thai kick to Riki Choshu’s face, supposedly due to jealously of his position within the company. This left NJPW in an awkward spot, as how do you punish someone for doing something that was “legal,” within the world of pro wrestling? They opted to punish him by insisting that he be banished to tour Mexico for a period of time, but Maeda refused, and opted to restart the UWF, taking a chunk of the roster with him, though reduced revenue from TV-Asahi due to the network demoting NJ from prime time to midnight on Monday Nights resulting in NJ cutting salaries was also a factor in the mass departure. Newborn UWF had initial success until an economic downturn in Japan, coupled with disagreements on inter-promotional booking with more traditional pro wrestling companies, led to yet another demise for this promotion. Only this time, several key players splintered off to start their own promotions/vanity projects, and thus the shoot style boom was born, and as we continue this story, we will see how this led to forming much of what modern MMA is today.
Yoshiaki Fujiwara was a Judoka that transitioned into pro wrestling in the early 70s, and has the distinction of being the first graduate of the New Japan Dojo system. He continued to wrestle for New Japan until the first UWF incarnation, and tried to stay in their good graces after Maeda initially left to restart the promotion in 1988. However, in 1989 he felt the need to continue in the ways of shoot style, only this time he brought young talents Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki with him. Perhaps this decision, more than any other led to MMA being around today as we know it, because if it wasn’t for Funaki taking an interesting in shooting (or at least fake shooting) and in turn training a young Ken Shamrock, the Ufc might not exist today.
The show starts of with the seemingly ancient tradition of having all the performers/combatants enter the ring with much music and fanfare, only this has the legendary German wrestler extraordinaire Karl Gotch as a guest of honor. They give him a microphone and he said a few kind words about wishing success upon this promotion. Karl Gotch was a legend in Japan at this time, and also trained many of the Fujiwara crew, so having his blessing upon the promotion was surely seen as a badge of realism by the audience.
The first man out to the ring is Wellington Wilkins Jr, an American wrestler (not to be confused with the Canadian wrestler who teamed with Chris Benoit and mysteriously died of a heart attack on the same day that Benoit was found dead after committing suicide). Wellington was mainly an opening performer on the Japanese circuit wrestling for various promotions, most notably Michinoku. He hit the skids toward the end of the decade when he was busted with marijuana, thrown in a Japanese jail and eventually deported. He worked a bit in the states after that, but never really took off. Here his opponent is Takaku Fuke, who wound up being a Pancrase mainstay in a few short years, amassing a rather abysmal 16-29-5 record, though to his credit was able to get victories over the great Manabu Yamada, Jason Delucia, and Vernon White.
ML: This is a common mistake, but
The first couple of mins set the overall tone of what was to come with this promotion. An emphasis on having realistic looking matches, but perhaps done at the expense of entertainment value (certainly when compared to its rivals at the time.) These two worked well together and there was a good flow between the two that saw them obtain and reverse positions on the mat several times, but it was a fairly dry affair that wasn’t going to light any fires. It also was a bit odd that they chose the ever so realistic “leg-split,” as a finish.
Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs Johnny Barrett. Fujiwara is up next, and has always had the unenviable ability to look like he was pushing 70, regardless of what decade he happened to be in. He was rather slow and unathletic, but he was someone that you had to have a certain amount of respect for, as he always patterned his style after realism (at least by pro wrestling standards), and could sometimes turn sadistic and become way too stiff in the ring. His opponent here is Jonny Barrett, who I’m assuming only was able to find work here due to his connections to Dean Malenko, because his physique wasn’t doing him any favors. A huge guy that could have been a replacement for a Heel of the Month in the WWF, his size was really the only thing about him that was of any note. Not much to say here… Fujiwara wisely kept most of this on the mat, as Barrett had no discernable skills on his feet, but that isn’t really saying much. After a few uneventful mins of rolling around on the ground Fujiwara put us all out of our misery by ending the bout with an Achilles hold. The match was fairly believable, and thankfully brief, but really wasn’t pushing the needle in any significant way.
Now we get to the first glimpse of magic in this shoot-style world. Ken, “Wayne” Shamrock vs Minoru Suzuki. Fujiwara should get a lot of credit here, as he was willing to put himself in the mid-card and allow some of the younger talent a chance to shine, which was something that eluded a lot of the young Japanese talent in those days. Here we find a very young Suzuki facing an incredible looking specimen in Shamrock, and it’s rather amazing to see that right from the jump, Shamrock was an awesome performer that really shined in this kind of format. One has to wonder how his later career would have turned out if he had jumped back into Japanese pro wrestling instead of the WWF in 1996, as all he really seemed to get out of his tenure there (outside of a fat stack of cash) was a lot of injuries.
This match opened us all up to a whole new world of possibilities that “shooting,” could provide. While this match was not the smoothest, and being a 30min draw it did have it’s fair share of dead spaces, both fighters did an excellent job of parlaying intensity and frustration throughout. They constantly looked for submissions, even in bad positions, and you could really see an example of a grappling mentality before the positional thinking influence of BJJ crept in. The match also had a nice progression to it, as it was mostly submission orientated in the beginning, saving the flashier stuff like a belly to belly suplex, and much nastier striking until later in the match, which gave it natural feel, as if the stakes were getting higher, and it was time to pull out all the stops. A little dry in spots, but a great start to this style, and a great insight into the fact that maybe…just maybe.. there was a future paying audience to be found in real fighting.
Next up, is Masakatsu Funaki vs Bart Vale, and was unfortunately something that was never going to be able to cut it as a main event, let alone trying to surpass the great match that came before it. Vale was someone that was already a bit past his prime when PWFG came around, and while his striking was decent, and his overall work passable, it lacked crispness, and he wasn’t someone that had the stamina to have a long, high-intensity match. Also, his style was best served by placing him with another striker, so they didn’t do anyone any favors by placing him with a grappling wizard such as Funaki. This match would have been fine early in the card, but as headliner, it was anti-climatic.
This promotion had some great talents in the top end such as Funaki, Suzuki, and Shamrock, some passable ones with Fujiwara and Vale, but the mid to bottom tier of the roster looks like they all came from the Acme Jobber unemployment line. It makes perfect sense why they weren’t able to make it once most of their serious shooters left to form Pancrase in '93. Pancrase was probably what this promotion should have tried to be from the get go, but perhaps that wasn’t possible until this group, and others like it, paved the way, and opened a door for real MMA to prove viable.
Mike Lorefice's thoughts:
The first PWFG event was an important one in the development of pre-MMA because Fujiwara was far more of a legimitate martial artist than the top stars of the other new shoot style promotions, Akira Maeda & Nobuhiko Takada, and was willing to promote a more credible, albeit thus invariably dryer style. Granted, the key figure in the development of MMA was Satoru Sayama, who had done the most to push pro wrestling toward shoot style in the original incarnation of the UWF then, most importantly, actually formed the first shoot promotion, Shooto, rather than endlessly hedging by edging closer & closer to reality with his own brand of deception as his peers did. I feel it's important to look at the split of the initial U.W.F before we get into the results of the split of the 2nd U.W.F., and as Michael mentioned earlier, that pretty much came down to what was transpiring between Sayama & Maeda in and out of the ring as 1985 progressed.
While the 7/25/85 Akira Maeda vs. Super Tiger has much more in common with their 1/7/85 match as a conventional worked pro wrestling match, and is actually far less interesting, I feel it pairs more with their 9/2/85 sort of shoot as the battle of wills between Sayama & Maeda was coming to a head outside the ring, even though they still kept it together inside the ring. Maeda exerted his will throughout this contest, making it very submission oriented, and particularly good, leading to Sayama getting his way in the standup oriented rematch. Sayama was largely on the defensive trying to stay on his feet & then get back up, though he obviously didn't try very hard at the latter because with Maeda doing nothing to actually control him on the ground, he could literally stand any time he wanted to.
The problem with this match is Sayama needed to make the match interesting, but by just being the good soldier & telling the story of why he was losing as best he could, he wound up just going along with Maeda grounding him & putzing around with his feeble contortions. Maeda had a number of exciting matches during his career, but was never a particularly good or credible ground fighter even though that was the style that he enjoyed, it was always the guys who actually knew what they were doing like Yamazaki & Han making the match, both pulling a few things out of him as well as putting him in the better role for the audience where he provided some fireworks with his strikes & suplexes rather than grinding things to a halt as he did when just left him to his devices.
The match still started strong as Maeda's efforts to engage in a grappling match with Sayama were so much more fervent here than on 9/2, actually getting Sayama down early with his idea of (a very poorly executed) double leg takedown, after catching a kick, with his captured suplex after catching one of Sayama's clinch knees, etc. Sayama used more footwork in this one, in part because Maeda showed little interest in striking with him, but also didn't deliver on his early promise. Instead of playing the small man vs. big man game, he increasingly served himself up on a platter by fighting on the inside with Maeda so Maeda could get him down off a suplex.
The bout hasn't aged that well because they just keep going for submissions while displaying no real knowledge of how to get them, focusing 99.9% on cranking a limb while just laying across the opponent not doing anything to control any other portion of their body or help them actually isolate their joint of choice. It eventually ended in oh so credible fashion when Sayama missed an enzuigiri & Maeda clumsily secured that most credible of pro wrestling standbyes, the Boston crab! There was very little striking in this match, and consequently, even though these were the two biggest stars in the company, the crowd was pretty much dead throughout, which supports Sayama's tract that the kickboxing base was necessary to the success of the style. This was better than watching Hogan flex his muscles or Flair do another spot for spot performance of his one match, but it's close to the least interesting Sayama match of the 1980's.
Though 7/25/85 isn't particularly memorable, especially in regards to the evolution of real fighting, 9/2/85 was a truly fascinating contest where the clashing alpha personalities of the two dominant forces in the promotion came to a head inside the ring as they probably battled with some vague notion of deciding the future direction of the company, and instead just decided that the company had no future. Though the U.W.F. had grown increasingly shoot oriented in the year and a half it existed, morphing from the humble origins of luchadors & WWF show wrestlers into something more & more hardcore & legitimate, Maeda & Sayama were two huge stars that always wanted to win, both in front of the audience & behind the scenes. It would surely be reductive to say it came down to a matter of tastes, styles, egos, or whatever, and that even kind of comes off in the bout they wound up having. Even though they had something of a shoot, the supposed rift between Sayama's kickboxing & Maeda's submission grappling still actually didn't play out, as they ultimately did a match that was essentially in Maeda's version of Sayama's style. By that I mean, Sayama wasn't using the footwork that elevated his worked shoots toward the realm of believability, nor was Maeda really doing his remedial matwork. It really looked like Maeda's usual style of striking, except that as they pretty much stood in front of each other & bombed away, they were much more violent & aggressive in putting their whole bodies into throwing faster & harder shots that they weren't pulling as usual. Actually, rather than the art of kickboxing that Sayama managed to bring even though the opponents stood around flatfooted, this fight still exemplified that main problem with pro wrestling striking, except they did try to avoid & defend themselves in a basic sort of way, not exiting the pocket, but at least reacting to the blow they saw coming & blocking it or maneuvering their body out of the primary damage range/zone if they could. It's possible Maeda was unhappy that they were doing Sayama's standup match this time instead of his submission match as we saw previously, but the bout definitely didn't devolve into a shoot as someone got prickly, as had been the case in the past with Maeda, they clearly were wailing on each other from the outset.
One could say this was one of the first Pancrase matches, as they were not pulling their strikes, but they not only didn't use closed fists, they were clearly cooperating to some extent at points even though they were putting each other in danger & trying to legitimately damage each other most of the time. I shouldn't make it sound like Sayama wasn't fighting with strategy, he was surely giving up at least 50 pounds and even though he had superior striking technique & more explosion, he couldn't just stand toe to toe with Maeda. He tried to land the middle kick and circle off to maintain some space, but he was going backwards too much & clearly didn't have the stamina to fight what Lyoto Machida would later establish as a karate style MMA fight, so instead of capitalizing on his speed and movement advantages, Sayama spent way too much time covering in the pocket while he withstood Maeda's onslaught & poised for his next offensive. The striking portions were legit, but neither had any kind of a wrestling base, so getting the fight to the ground was rather awkward, and that's really why fights could play out much easier & better in Sayama's style than in Maeda's, which normally required him to hit a suplex to get started. Sayama wasn't taking bumps for Maeda, but still conceeded to ground portions, which basically occured when the person in the disadvantageous position surrendered further rather than finally try/work to disengage.
The mat wasn't really a threatening position for either though, as when you add no BJJ background to no wrestling background, they weren't doing much beyond playing footsies, and when you combine a sweltering building with the stress & overexertion of actually trying to make things work without the usual cooperation, I think Sayama was mostly just happy to get a break while Maeda muddled around, daring him to actually come up with something to make him regret that decision. Unlike the standup where there was a very obvious difference in how aggressive they were landing blows, they didn't appear to be be applying any more pressure than usual when they actually had something of a submission, and the audience was dead silent as they were throughout the 7/25 match.
As they spent more and more time delivering comatose inducing matwork, you almost forgot that a few minutes ago they seemingly wanted to kill each other on their feet. One would actually have thought that they were getting along again until Maeda grabbed the rope to get the bout returned to their feet, and proceeded to knee Sayama low for no apparent reason, leading to the DQ. It's almost certain that Maeda was supposed to lose given he defeated Tiger in their previous match, so one can deduce that Maeda may just have been looking for an out, as he should have been growing calmer, if anything, given they'd gotten away from actually shooting on one another and there was nothing new to give him a reason to pull a stunt. However, one can't be certain from the camera angle if the knee clipped the groin or not, so it's perhaps as likely that someone finally did enough damage with a legitimate blow to make whatever the planned finish was irrelevant. Maeda has always been a shady character, but from what I can see, I'm leaning toward Sayama just claiming it was a low blow. Maeda was subsequently reprimanded & never worked for the promotion again. The workers, who were already resentful of Sayama for being the booker & primary creative force in the promotion didn't side with him though, and while he did step in a U.W.F. ring six more times as this was playing out, he quit the promotion and then pro wrestling entirely. U.W.F. never ran another show after Sayama's final appearance on 9/11/85, with Maeda & co. returning to New Japan for the next 2 1/2 years before taking the next step toward blending the barrier between fake and real fighting. A very good match, but it would have been nice not to have had to wait 3 more years for Maeda and co., and really forever for Sayama, as he was so far past his athletic prime by the time he returned 11 years later that he resembles his old self far less than his many Tiger Mask predescessors.
Jumping forward to 1991, PWFG was the most oddly positioned of the new promotions that formed in the wake of the second U.W.F. split. If there was ever a ship on Fujiwara's ability to be a top star, it had sailed long ago. His booking style was very interesting though, as he simultaneously did far more to position PWFG's actual fighters in more legitimate in ring situations while also doing the least when it came to ever having any sort of real contest under his auspices. Maeda was never going to do a shoot, and god knows the world would have been a much better place if Takada never displayed his inability to grasp even the most basic concepts of the sport he was the mythical flagbearer of, but RINGS & UWF-I were also willing to promote real kickboxing matches, and RINGS increasingly blurred the vagueries by putting their younger natives and certain foreigners into shoots & less scripted affairs amidst their more flashy and fantasy oriented lineups.
Though most of younger natives in PWFG were very respectful of Fujiwara as a mentor, particularly the promotions most important combatants Masakatsu Funaki & Minoru Suzuki, unlike pro wrestling, shooting was a young mans game & they were in their athletic prime, while Fujiwara, a month shy of his 42nd birthday, was already to the age of retirement. Fujiwara did his best to leverage his name value with the necessity of promoting young stars to create a promotion that would have some legs & had the potential to actually move forward, but he still wasn't really willing to take the important step of actually losing to them, which led to an incongrous dynamic where Funaki or Suzuki often headlined the show, but Fujiwara was always going to be the man to beat. Those two were more tollerant of this than Shamrock, who wasn't directly a senpai of Fujiwara and didn't seem to think he owed him even though Fujiwara would give this young pro wrestler his first opportunities at stardom in the upcoming months, and by positioning him and Bart Vale as the top foreigners, was actually eventually forced to do the jobs to them that would more rightfully have gone to Funaki & Suzuki if Fujiwara had really been willing to make them the faces of the promotion. Again though, Fujiwara was much more generous with giving the venue to the natives than Maeda, who not only wasn't losing to a native for half a decade, but was neither giving them a sniff at the top of the bill nor any foreseeable road toward being his successor.
Suzuki vs. Shamrock is the reason to watch the first Fujiwara Gumi show, an ambitious all out 30 minute draw where their ability to show all the sport is capable of may fall slightly short of their desire to do so, but that desire is so high it's hard to fault them. Obviously, a lot of progress has been made since that Sayama/Maeda matches that differentiates this contest from those greasiest roots of shooting as well as current pro wrestling, and these were subtly on display right from the opening sequence where both were hesitant & used small feints to try to set up their strikes, which were really distraction to open up a single leg takedown. I would have liked to see them explore these possibilities more rather than revert to the old more Greco style high clinches leading to throws to get the match to the ground, positionally the bout still left a lot to be desired once they hit the canvas as well due to the lack of BJJ, but the grappling was a lot more realistic than Maeda's because the fighter on the defensive was active, twisting, turning, and rolling to either escape, take the top and/or use their own counter submission. Though the endless rope escapes aren't ideal, they did allow for an entertaining ground oriented contest where they were able to keep working hard & threatening one another for half an hour. I'm not suggesting these guys invented the wheel, but rather giving an idea of what was going on at the high end of sport without pinpointing the genesis of the various evolutions that occured in newborn U.W.F. Structurally, this was still a pro wrestling bout, quite a well built one, at least working up to and in the suplexes and dropkicks that "shouldn't have been there". There wasn't much striking in the 1st half, which is probably a good thing because Shamrock was often too fake with his hands. However, tensions really escalated in the 2nd half when Shamrock went from a series of mount palms to illegal soccer ball kicks to Suzuki's head, prompting Suzuki - after a break to recover - to come back at Shamrock with a series of short range standing headbutts, which thankfully bore no resemblance to Fujiwara's big windup comedy spot. Suzuki was pretty great here, and Shamrock could complement him well enough that the match worked exactly as they hoped, stealing the show with a semifinal draw that propelled them to the main event on 8/23/91.
In other news:
Don Wilson lost a breathtaking 12 round split-decision loss to Marek Piotrowski at Odem Arena before a sellout crowd of more than 5,000 people. Wilson’s World Kickboxing Association crown was unaffected, however only the Professional Karate Council’s and the Fight Factory Karate Association’s 180-pound vacant titles were at stake. Piotrowski, who also recently defeated Rick Roufus, won by a half-point margin on the judges’ cards after a thrilling seesaw bout. Wilson, who normally fights in the 175 pound class, extended an invitation to Piotrowski to fight him for his WKA title.
In Modesto California, two kickboxers and a passing pedestrian met in a dangerous way recently. The two martial artists, sparring at the North Bay Martial Arts Club got into a clinch, then rolled each other out of a third floor window, landing directly on an unfortunate passerby. The pedestrian was treated at a local hospital and released, while the two kickboxers were hospitalized with more serious injuries.
Former Kickboxing champion Louis Neglia recently hosted the first of several pro-am kickboxing competitions, featuring three professional and seven amateur bouts. In the professional matches, Dennis Schuette knocked out Robert Shandrick in a cruiserweight fight, Roger Heidlebaugh, and Brad Morris fought to a draw in a middleweight bout, and Anthony Salerno scored a technical knockout of Peter Olanich in a super-welterweight battle.