MMA Is Pro Wrestling (Patreon)

So I was recently on Struggle Session's pro wrestling live stream and wanted to expand on some thoughts I had about the interchange between pro wrestling and mixed martial arts.

1.) The tournament format you saw in Japanese MMA and even UFC didn't come from legitimate sports but from pro wrestling. You're never going to leave brackets to chance when you're selling PPVs. So you book it like you would in pro wrestling. This is why Ken Shamrock thought the first UFC was going to be a work—he saw how the sausage was being made behind the scenes. Imagine booking games like that in March Madness? You'd have a congressional hearing. But in MMA, we take this rigging to be normal.

2.) Rankings in MMA are also human doings rather than by an automated value system. It's booked. Consider how easy it would be to automate a system to do rankings in a closed system like the UFC?

3.) Another interesting crossover from pro wrestling to MMA and submission grappling is leg locks. This is an example of life imitating art. In pro wrestling, leg locks were popular because it's a move that didn't cover up the face like armbars, and allowed the person in the lock to face the camera and sell the move. Leg locks are also easier to transition from lock to lock and for your opponent to counter lock. It provides more opportunity to chain wrestle than armbars or chokes. This aesthetic carried over to Japanese MMA where pro wrestlers fought MMA. Since they mostly knew leg locks for reasons I explained, leg locks became a signature. This inspired a lot of American grapplers to take up leg locks. This current craze blurs old shoot-style matches further. You see this in how pro wrestling matches from Japan are often counted on official MMA records.

4.) Before Khabib Nurmagomedov, Volk Han was the Dagestani wrestler, using the Kimura trap decades before it became popularized in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. All of Volk Han's pro wrestling matches are on his official MMA record. The namesake for the move, "Kimura," was touted as a judoka, which he was. But he was also a pro wrestler and that move is something Kimura learned from pro wrestling. Rikidōzan to be exact. As Masahiko Kimura had Korean-Japanese Rikidōzan to learn from, Volk Han had Korean-Japanese Akira Maeda. The Kimura or double wristlock was popular in pro wrestling because it set up other moves, which is useful for pro wrestling's improvisation. Volk Han, real name Magomedkhan Amanulayevich Gamzatkhanov, is considered a legend of MMA. Some think he only fought MMA when in reality, he's only ever competed for a pro wrestling organization and has never competed in what would be considered a legitimate MMA league.

5.) It makes sense Japan went back to pro wrestling while MMA declined because that's where it came from and the lines were always murky. Because it IS murky, they're forever married and have the same origin story—constantly crossing over. There is also an added Dunning-Kruger for American fans who make fun of pro wrestling for its "fakeness" but mistake Japanese pro wrestling, martial arts demonstrations, and fight scenes in Bruce Lee movies as legitimate. In pro wrestling and carny parlance, they'd be known as marks.