[TAG] Work In Progress

[Jimmy O'Regan]

Mike Orr wrote:

> On 11/9/05, Jimmy O'Regan <jimregan at o2.ie> wrote:
> 
>>Mike Orr wrote:
>>
>>>But still, I hope UFC wipes WWE off the screen.
>>
>>I doubt it, from what little I've seen of UFC. WWE is... a soap opera
>>with fighting (uh... better fights :), UFC just looks like a bar brawl.
> 
> 
> It can look like a brawl if you don't understand what they guys are
> doing, but it's quite organized.  It (pankration) is a combination of
> wrestling and kickboxing.  One guy puts the other guy in standard
> submission holds until he taps out (symbolically gives up).  The

Well, any time I saw it the rounds ended after one put another in a
submission hold and punched 'til the referee sent him back to his corner.

Aside from that, it's not going to replace WWE any time soon. WWE may be
fake, but it's more interesting to watch, if only for the acrobatics.

> In the early 1900s, the Gracie family in Brazil learned jiu-jitsu from
> a Japanese master.  They combined it with streetfighting techniques
> and created the sport of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.  In the 1990s they set
> up schools in the US, knowing it would be a big hit because there was
> nothing like it here.  UFC was started around the same time although
> I'm not sure exactly how.  Early UFC was all about "Which style is
> best?", matching opponents from different martial arts backgrounds

IIRC, there are two Gracie school ATM (family fued).

"Real" Jiu jitsu practitioners tend to look down on Gracie Jiu jitsu,
because it has all the vicious stuff removed.

> 
> Pankration was the main sport in the ancient Olympics.    There's a
> modified version in the modern Olympics (no stand-up hitting?), but

I should hope so. Pankration was originally a fight to the death, no?

> Wrestling is disappearing in American colleges due to Title IX, a law
> that under some interpretations requires an equal number of slots for
> men and women in sports.    So the colleges drop wrestling to avoid
> getting sued.  (There are few women wrestlers, though there are more
> women pankrationists than you might expect.)  Wrestling remains big in
> the midwest colleges and Oklahoma because there are so many
> multigenerational wrestling families and it's a moneymaking sport, but
> it never caught on much in the northwest where football subsidizes all
> the other sports.  But as it disappears from the colleges it's been
> popping up in the martial arts schools, as people want to cross train.
>  So that could be its dominant place in twenty years.

Wrestling is pretty big in Poland, as I found out one night. Long story 
short, growing up with brothers close to your own age beats 
(rules-abiding) wrestling.

> 
>>As for visualisation, well... you've seen kata and shadow boxing, right?
> 
> 
> Not with visualization, no.

OK, fair enough -- kata has become "tradition"[1], so the point is
probably lost on most teachers, but with both kata and shadow boxing,
you're fighting an imaginary opponent: visualisation.

[1] A British karate practitioner, who has also studied several other
martial arts, wrote a book explaining how many of the "decorative" moves
from the Shotokan kata are actually throws and grapples. The excerpt I
read made a lot of sense, but the traditionalists are deeply in denial.