The MMA Minute – A Brief History of MMA, Part 1

Typically the MMA Minute will focus on a weekend event, either in a preview or review capacity. However, this is one of the slowest months in MMA over the course of the last year or two, and we’ve already had the only notable event, UFC 116. So instead of our usual focus on a singular event, I decided to take a little turn and focus on the world of MMA, and break it down into small portions for anyone that might be interested in learning more about this increasingly popular sport.

Now I’m not by any means some sort of MMA aficionado, but I’ve recently gone back to watch most of the UFC and Pride events (2 of the most notable organizations in the history of MMA), so I feel I am at least on stable ground to talk about the sport.

To start off, MMA is short for Mixed Martial Arts. As usual, Wikipedia (which I used for most of this article, merging various articles and adding my two cents in between), does a great job of summing it up quickly and precisely:

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is a full contact combat sport that allows a wide variety of fighting techniques and skills, from a mixture of martial arts traditions and non-traditions, to be used in competitions. The rules allow the use of both striking as well as grappling techniques, both while standing and on the ground. Such competitions allow martial artists of different backgrounds to compete.

Many detractors will write MMA off as some adrenaline infused showcase of brutality, there really is alot of artistry and strategy behind all the mayhem.

Although the history of MMA can be traced as far back as 648 B.C. when pankration was introduced into the Greek Olympic Games, the first time it was officially brought to US soil was when the UFC held its first competition in Denver, Colorado in 1993. Now this is the second main point that confuses a lot of fringe fans. MMA and the UFC are not synonymous. MMA is the sport, like football is a sport. The UFC is one of the companies that promotes fights, similar to how the NFL is a league that plays football. Most people consider the UFC to be the pinnacle of the sport, like the Super Bowl is the pinnacle of the sport of football. We’ll venture more into the history of the UFC in the coming weeks.

Bartitsu is another example of an early form of mixed martial arts, immortalized by the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories. Founded in London in 1899, bartitsu was the first martial art known to have combined Asian and European fighting styles, and which saw MMA-style contests throughout England between European and Japanese fighters. However, in the 2009 film, the martial art that Holmes used is the Wing-Chun Kung Fu, of which Robert Downey Jr. is a practitioner in real-life.

Bruce Lee popularized the concept of combining the elements of multiple martial arts using his system philosophy of Jeet Kune Do in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Lee believed that “the best fighter is not a Boxer, Karate or Judo man. The best fighter is someone who can adapt to any style, to be formless, to adopt an individual’s own style and not following the system of styles.” In 2004 UFC President Dana White would call Lee the “father of mixed martial arts.”

I could go on for quite awhile, but I did call this a brief history of MMA. I got a lot of my information for this post from the MMA entry on Wikipedia, which does a tremendous job of covering the overall history of the sport, as well as some of what we’ll venture into next week, including  the modern fighters, how the fighting styles have evolved, general rules, the main strategies and ways to win, and also the safety precautions taken to ensure these fighters come out of the cage in as healthy a manner as possible. I recommend you head over there to do some reading if you’d like a more in depth history of mixed martial arts, otherwise, we’ll be back next week with part 2.