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I’m redoing my old MMA History series which has fallen on hard times in the sixteen years since I wrote it. the old links are broken, the videos and gifs are long since deleted, etc. etc. Here’s hoping it’s still of interest.
Desafio: Gracie Jiu-Jitsu vs Luta Livre in Brazil 1991
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s two countries were independently moving towards what we call mixed martial arts or MMA: Brazil and Japan.
In Brazil, the Gracie family had taken the judo they were taught by Mitsuyo Maeda and refined it into a new style they called Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. In the tradition of their master, who had competed in the North and South American professional wrestling circuit (back when the matches were more often “shoots” —actual competitions — than “works” — fixed matches with predetermined outcomes) the Gracies had been participating in professional challenge matches since the 1910’s.
They had developed a rivalry over several decades with a competing grappling style called Luta Livre Esportiva a variant of catch wrestling (an English style of wrestling that includes submission holds) founded by Euclydes Hatem.
After a series of street fights between their champions (most famously Rickson Gracie vs Hugo Duarte), the two camps put on the Desafio – Jiu-Jitsu vs. Luta Livre event in 1991. The card pitted three BJJ fighters (Wallid Ismail, Murilo Bustamante, and Fabio Gurgel) against three Luta Livre fighters (Eugenio Tadeu, Marcelo Mendes, Denilson Maia). The BJJ fighters swept the event.
Here’s a Brazilian TV report on the event from 1991. It’s in Portuguese, but the video is pretty self-explanatory. They go through the event and then show some traditional karate guys point fighting. Gives you a good feel for the media sensationalism and the stark contrast between the proto-MMA styles of BJJ and Luta Livre and traditional martial arts.
Here’s the full fight card:
Japanese professional wrestling evolved from work to shoot in the 1980s
Meanwhile in Japan, pro-wrestling had been taking a turn away from the worked style we’re used to towards real shoot matches throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. Karl Gotch was a huge influence on this. The “God of Wrestling” emigrated to Japan in the early 1970s and spent the next decade as a top star there, serving as a mentor to a whole generation of pro wrestlers, many of whom would take leading roles in the evolution of shoot wrestling.
The first Japanese wrestler to be influenced by Gotch was Antonio Inoki, who faced Gotch in his Japanese debut match in 1972. Inoki went on to book a whole series of style vs style bouts in the 1970s and 80s featuring Olympic Judoka and wrestlers as well as Karate masters and other exponents of famous fighting styles.
Most of these bouts were works, but Inoki’s infamous 1976 bout with Muhammad Ali was an actual shoot. That bout likely took years off Ali’s career as a result of all the leg kicks landed by the crab-walking Inoki.
Meanwhile Gotch mentored a whole generation of Japanese wrestlers like Yoshiaki Fujiwara and Akira Maeda. Fujiwara in particular would pass Gotch’s submission holds on to a whole new generation of Japanese wrestlers like Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki, who would go on to lead Japanese pro wrestling in an increasingly realistic direction that culminated in “shoot-style” promotions like Maeda’s RINGS and Funaki’s Pancrase.
RINGS purported to be actual shoot matches but was largely worked matches with predetermined outcomes. Funaki’s Pancrase on the other hand sometimes resorted to worked bouts but often featured actual shoot matches.
Pancrase wasn’t quite MMA — the rules only allowed open hand strikes and kicks standing and no strikes on the ground — but it gave athletes like Ken Shamrock and Bas Rutten a strong foundation for their future MMA careers. Here’s a representative match from the old Pancrase featuring the organization’s founders Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki.
Two worlds collided at UFC 1
Then at UFC 1, the two worlds collided when Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie met in a classic match-up. Shamrock was a veteran of three Pancrase bouts, including one bout only four days before this match. Gracie had no professional fighting experience before the bout but had participated in many fights in the gym.
Watch how Shamrock’s submission attempts ignore position and Royce takes advantage by constantly working for dominant position. The gi choke Royces uses to win would never happen in modern MMA.
The next installment will backtrack a little bit and talk about the pre-UFC Jiu-Jitsu vs Luta Livre feud in more detail.