10 Aug 2010, 7:35 pm
I remember back when I was in college, I ran across a dvd at the local video store for oddballs called The Ultimate Fighting Championship. I rented it and my roommate and I watched it, instantly hooked.
We watched 5 or 6 of them, actually, but then they became really hard to find.
A few years later, I got back into the UFC, after Dana White was in charge and it had a higher profile.
My wife is as big a fan as I am, so we decided to watch them all, starting at number one. Here are some of our observations:
1. Things progressed a lot faster than I remembered. I thought the sport evolved slowly, but by UFC 5, you weren't going to win if you only knew one style - even Brazilian Jui Jitsu.
Even the rules changed quickly. By UFC13, they already had weight classes, time limits, they stood up fighters who weren't working, and there was no using the fence.
2. My favorite fighters appeared much earlier than I expected. By UFC13, we have already seen Royce Gracie, Ken Shamrock, Tank Abbot, Don Frye, Vitor Belfort, Dan Severn, Mark Coleman, Marco Ruas, Tito Ortiz, and Randy Couture.
And these are the men that made the sport evolve.
In the first couple, Royce reigned supreme. No one could figure out what he was doing or how to defend it - not even the hapless commentators. (When Don "The Dragon" Wilson began calling fights with them, this improved tremendously.)
Royce was finally figured out by Dan Severn, who figured out a good wrestler could neutralize BJJ. The only problem was, he could control Gracie and avoid submissions, but that was it. He had no finish, no submissions, and he was afraid to punch with bare knuckles. (I actually found most Severn fights to be boring, except the one where Shamrock beat him with a guillotine choke right at the beginning.)
This happened a lot at first, and fights turned into 12 minute "lay and pray" cuddle-fests, like the Superfight between Shamrock and Gracie. Yawn.
Enter Tank Abbot. He was really a trailblazer - more than I remembered. He was one of the first to use the 4oz fingerless gloves, one of the first to KO an opponent, and one of the first to use what would later be called "ground and pound," where you don't even really worry about passing guard - you just cram em up against the fence and assault them with fists and elbows.
Tank had a cardio problem, though, and could not be counted on in a long fight. So, the first people to show how reliably devastating a ground and pound attack could be were Don Frye and Mark Coleman.
But now it was time for the age of the striker with a wrestling background. Don Frye hinted at this with his standup power, but the first to show how really effective striking on the feet could be was Vitor Belfort, one of my all time top 5 favorites. The dude had hands as fast and accurate as any pro boxer, and great BJJ and wrestling skills to sprawl and keep the fight on its feet. He was much like today's Middleweight champ, Anderson Silva, minus the Muay Thai.
Right after he arrived, the sport evolved again, with the premiere fights of Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz. Both strong wrestlers, they could ground and pound, but were also well-versed in submissions.
Watching Randy's first two fights was like watching a modern MMA fighter fight one of those old-school guys. Both fights went like this - no matter what their size, Randy immediately took them down, spun around their backs, sunk the hooks in, flattened them out, and performed two picture-perfect rear-naked chokes.
A lot of guys had choked people from that position before, but they were arm chokes, grabbing their wrists and applying as much torque as possible. In a rear-naked choke (or mata leon, lion kill in Portugese), it barely takes any energy at all once it is locked in. You wrap one arm around the throat and grab the other bicep with that hand, then placing the free hand behind the head. The lock is airtight, and you can feel it before they even apply any pressure.
Another thing I noticed was Joe Rogan was a part of the UFC much earlier than I had thought. I think his first appearance was in UFC 11. Even then, he seemed to understand the game much better than the rest.
On a side note, the first time I saw Tito Ortiz in this exercize, he was in Tank Abbot's corner. I knew they were both from Huntington Beach, but I had no idea they trained together. That might explain the absolute hate Tito had for Ken Shamrock - I am sure a lot of it just rubbed off of Tank Abbot, whose disdain for Ken was huge. He called him Ken "Glamrock," which I thought was pretty funny.
I'm still watching, so I'll check in with more observations if it seems anyone cared at all about this post.
12 Aug 2010, 2:46 pm
