There’s no doubt that the rise of the Ultimate Fighting Championship changed the martial arts forever. While today’s MMA is mostly a sport built around individuals, the modern cage fighting movement was created with a very different purpose in mind.
The Gracie family, proponents of a ground-fighting system built from the bones of Judo, were out to expose the traditional Eastern martial arts as a collection of flimflam men and grifters, phonies teaching worthless junk to kids at strip malls around the world. What separated the Gracie family from others claiming martial superiority was an absolute willingness to but their concepts to the test. Proof was provided on request, whether inside the dojo, on the beach or trapped within the unforgiving Octagon.
The Gracies weren’t just out to prove what would work when two people agreed to a very specific form of combat. They wanted to know what would work for real. Like for real. And, over the decades, they believed they had come up with a pretty workable formula.
The UFC was created as a proof of concept for the Gracie system and elevated ground fighting as a key component in real unarmed combat. The original “mixed martial arts” involved taking distinct arts and tossing them into the cage together to see which style emerged supreme after mixing it up. But, very quickly, something amazing happened. Instead of distinct arts battling for the honor of their progenitors, savvy fighters began taking techniques that proved effective from other forms of martial combat. Eventually, over time, fighters added striking back into the mix and the modern style of MMA was born, an amalgam of amateur wrestling, Brazilian jiu jitsu and kickboxing that you can watch on any random Saturday on ESPN+.
For most of us, it was revelatory. But was it really new?
Many of the ideas purported to be discoveries of the Octagon were actually well known in antiquity. Recently I came across an old book from 1956 on a dusty shelf that made it very clear that the lessons learned in the mid-1990s about how real fighting worked, were truisms thousands of years before. The same process of refining martial prowess, eliminating the ineffective and inefficient in favor of the deadly and dangerous, had played out in Ancient Greece, on the sand floor of the palaestra if only because the steel cage hadn’t yet been created.
Civilization and our ever-increasing talent and skill for finding new ways of killing each other had allowed us to forget. The UFC brought that knowledge back to the surface—but the idea that it was creating something new and unique is patently false.
The concept that gloves functioned best as a way of protecting a fighters hands and not his opponent’s head? Known.
That submission locks and chokes were effective fight enders? Known.
And the heart of the Gracie concept, that a grappler who could take an untrained foe to the ground would be at a distinct advantage, no matter how proficient the other fighter was in the fistic arts? Known and known.
This post isn’t intended to take away from what the Gracies created. The UFC served a valuable purpose, exposing charlatans and providing people looking to test themselves a canvas for testing their martial concepts against others who were serious about hand-to-hand combat.
If not exactly innovators, the Gracies were throwbacks, part of a long-line of serious men devoted to honing the martial craft, bone-breakers who had more in common with Deoxenos than they do the average man on the street.
Want to know more about wrestling in the Olympic Games? Here’s the chapter on the sport from Grombach’s book if you’re interested.