The Evolution of the Fight Game... We've Done a 360!

DID WE GO SO FAR THAT WE ENDED UP WHERE WE BEGAN?

The Evolution of the Fight Game

It wasn’t that long ago in the scope of mankind’s history that our greatest minds believed the Earth was flat; nothing heavier than air would ever fly; and the Earth was the centre of the universe around which all planets and stars revolved. To suggest the Earth was round; that mankind would one day manufacture machines that could fly; and that the Earth and all planets actually revolved around the Sun, would have been scoffed at (at the very least) and even had you burned at the stake during certain centuries past.

It also wasn’t that long ago that accepted professional fighting consisted solely of the Marquess of Queensberry rules of boxing and any thought of being allowed to do anything other than punch an opponent was scoffed at.

Even in the 1970s during the birth of modern Western kickboxing, the idea of ever kicking below the waist, wearing short trunks or throwing less kicks than the required kick counter was almost unimaginable. Tell Chuck Norris or Joe Lewis to throw a leg kick? Forget about it!

When leg kicks were finally introduced to professional kickboxing’s rule-set in the 1980s they were considered ‘savage’ and ‘undesirable.’ But you can’t halt progression. Long trunks and above-waist eight-kick counters fell by the wayside as the era of short trunks and leg-kicking took over. The likes of Bill Wallace and Chuck Norris had to keep up or fade away.

In the late 1980s/early 1990s Dutch kickboxers began to travel to Thailand and brought back with them knee strikes, elbows and grappling, thus beginning the spread of Muay Thai across the world. By the mid-1990s the sport of kickboxing experienced the next chapter in its evolution as international rules kickboxing (the stuff that made Stan Longinidis famous) began to die and the inclusion of Muay Thai’s arsenal came to the fore. Once again those who thought leg kicking was the final evolutionary development of the fight game were faced with the choice of either embracing the use of knees or fading away.

In 2008 we’re seeing the next great evolutionary leap in the professional fight game. Excitingly or frighteningly – depending on your perspective – it is the biggest evolutional step fight sports have made since the invention of the boxing glove. It is the advent of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

Most people date the staging of the original Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in 1993 as the official birth of professional MMA. However over the last few years this next and greatest leap in the professional fight game’s evolution has literally taken the world by storm. Just when we were thinking Muay Thai was by far and away the most complete fight sport with it’s use of the body’s eight weapons, we now have MMA – a sport of such enormous arsenal that it makes boxing look like a comparison between a Van Gogh and my nephew’s kindergarten fingerpaintings.

So where does this leave us kickboxing and Muay Thai fans? Do we turn our noses up at MMA just as boxers once (and many still do) turned their noses at those who kicked? Or do we embrace MMA for even though it may not be our cup of tea, it has given a whole new injection of life into the fight game.

You know what the funny thing is about the “new” sport of MMA? This “revolutionary” spectacle where opponents can punch, kick, knee, elbow, stomp, submit, choke and wrestle one another? This latest “trend” that celebrities and the silver screen have so embraced? This pay-per-view “phenomenon” that will, say most pundits, be the death of boxing? The funny thing is that as much as we call MMA a “new” sport and the “sport of the new millennium”, it’s the very same sport that our ancestors competed in more than 2000 years ago! Clay pots have been discovered in Greece with pictures of men engaging in a sport that looks a whole lot like a scene straight from the UFC. And just look at these words from the Mahabharata, one of the major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It describes a scene between two wrestlers, though it could very well be a journalist in modern-times writing gratuitously flowery coverage of an MMA event: "Grasping each other in various ways by means of their arms, and kicking each other with such violence as to affect the innermost nerves, they struck at each other's breasts with clenched fists. With bare arms as their only weapons roaring like clouds they grasped and struck each other like two mad elephants encountering each other with their trunks".

For the record, scholars believe the Mahabharta to predate around 520BC. So the question has to be asked: if in 2008 we’re so feverishly embracing the “new” sport of MMA that in reality is the oldest sport known to mankind, have we really evolved at all?