Archive for the 'Wrestling' Category

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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Wrestling is fucked. Excuse the language, but it is true. Also excuse me making a post on this, a blog about MMA and everything legitimate in the fighting world, but this goes unsaid. Mitsuharu Misawa, one of Japan’s living legends in the pro wrestling world is dead and it raises a lot of questions. A lot of legitimate questions. What it also provides for combat sports fans, is a clear line between safety and dangerous when it comes to competing.

What Misawa did for a living was fake fight, essentially. He went out and put on a show that was based loosely on the world of combat. Part showman, part athlete, part fighter and part idiot is how you can explain most people who choose to do what Misawa did for a living. Misawa helped pioneer, along with his peers in All Japan and later Pro Wrestling NOAH a dangerous, high-risk, blurred-reality version of pro wrestling. While still staged, the name of the game was one-up-man-ship and “fighting spirit.” This wasn’t new to Japan, but the way that they went about it was different. Instead of using legitimate strikes and submission holds like wrestlers like Inoki, Maeda and Takada, they opted to toss each other on their head and necks repeatedly to get the crowd excited. Instead of the occasional high risk move where one of the wrestlers lands on their head, matches broke down to what at times felt like an endless cycle of being planted directly on their heads.

It came about during a time when this “real fighting” stuff (the stuff this site is about) was starting to gain steam across the world and leave wrestling behind like the fad that it was. To keep the fans’ fickle interest, wrestlers had to prove how tough they are. What needs to be said and why this is important is that Mitsuharu Misawa was not only the posterboy for this style, but one of the innovators of this style, and this style essentially murdered him while performing. Think about that. Thousands of wrestlers have been inspired by Misawa and his style and adopted it as their own, fighting through the pain and injuries because that was what the fans wanted. The rude awakening is this; it is incredibly dangerous.

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If you’re an American without a very select internet provider, your choices are slim for combat sports.  Women’s saber showed up over the weekend, thanks to a dominating performance by the American team, and of course CNBC has all the boxing a reasonable person could ask for.  If you are a fan of judo, though, you can only thank your lucky stars for fine individuals like Kendall Shields, the folks at youtube, and whatever torrent service with access to foreign tv you can find.  If you stay up til the wee hours, or have a DVR (or, like the rest of us in the Dark Ages, a VCR), you can get small snippets of the King of Sports.  I refer, of course, to wrestling, which started on Monday. Read the rest of this entry »