Billy Robinson: “Catching” Momentum in MMA
Posted by Tommy Hackett on 31st January 2010
It’s a shame that Billy Robinson is a name that most MMA fans don’t even know.
In fact, Pro wrestling fans are more likely to have heard of the British-born grappler, probably best known for his great success in Japanese pro wrestling circuits of the 1970’s and his role in creating “shoot-style” and “shoot” organizations in the 1990’s. Those very acomplishments are probably enough to get many of us in MMA and jiu-jitsu to close our minds to this man. It’s our loss. He now resides in Arkansas — toiling in relative obscurity for the last several years as he instructing pupils in Catch-as-Catch-Can wrestling, a wrestling style hundreds of years old, with takedowns and submissions to boot.
Credited with helping train MMA legends Kazushi Sakuraba and Josh Barnett, Robinson is one of the world’s last living links to a long and rich wrestling history. While he became famous in typical scripted pro wrestling matches (some a bit more realistic than others), his Catch-As-Catch-Can wrestling is a legitimate style which developed long before Maeda crossed the Pacific Ocean to teach Carlos Gracie in Brazil, or Jigoro Kano founded the Kodokan Dojo in Tokyo. CACC has a heritage which several of our best fighters in the MMA world are looking to rediscover today.
In fact, earlier this month, Josh Barnett dedicated his win at a grappling tournament (somewhat ironically, a no-gi Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournament) to Robinson. But it was a couple of videos that surfaced recently that got really caught my attention and offer that the movement to incorporate CACC into MMA may be finally getting a little momentum.
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