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01/12/2009 Archived Entry: "MMA Coverage By The CBZ - An Editorial"
MMA Coverage By The CBZ - An Editorial
By Jack Dunn
PORTLAND, Ore. -- When I approached Gordoom (Editor-in-Chief, AKA Stephen Gordon or "Bucket") about covering Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) on the CBZ he said that he would rather cover competitive knitting.
I understand the resistance; MMA is a brutal upstart in the world of sport. A fast growing, colorful, an unknown quantity. Boxing, on the other hand is the sweet science. A sport with a near-perfect continuous lineage going back 3000 years. Boxing has been honed and perfected over the centuries. Thousands of generations of boxers have developed and shaped the science to the kind of art we saw in the great ones. I grew up during the middleweight renaissance. Hagler, Hearns, Benitez, Leonard, Duran, and Mugabi showed me what boxing could be, and it was glorious.
Modern MMA is like boxing before the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Everyone in the sport is still learning new things. Conventions are undeveloped, and the rules are so fresh the ink hasn't begun to dry. The thing is, even though MMA in its current form is very new, and it doesn't have the continuous history of the sweet science, it some ways it is just as old.
3,000 years ago the ancient Greeks, like the Egyptians before them, embraced boxing and wrestling. They included the sports in their Olympiad, but they added one more. Pankration, the sport that first combined boxing and wrestling. This was the first mixed martial art. In the early middle ages, Pankration was lost to the ages. But in the East the Japanese were developing Ju-Jutsu, the next combination of striking and wrestling. Ju-Jutsu was more sophisticated then Pankration in that focused on submissions and chokes. When Japanese Ju-Jutsu was adopted and modified in Brazil during the 1970s, Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu was born. It proved dominant in the Vale Tudo, fight contests with virtually no rules.
MMA, at least in its modern incarnation, owes so much to boxing. The sport was originally dominated completely by Brazilian jiu-jutsu, but in the late nineties fighters began employing sophisticated take-down defenses learned from Greco-Roman wrestling, and all of a sudden no fighter could survive without boxing skills. In the last decade boxing has become even more important as a component of MMA. In the early years even the best MMA fighters had boxing skills that could be described as embarrassing. Now they are spending thousands to hire the best boxing coaches in the game. A lot of this evolution has taken place right here in the Northwest. Rather than sports in conflict, I tend view MMA as a child of the sweet science.
We, and by we I mean MMA fans like myself, owe a great deal to the keepers of the CBZ for taking this leap of faith. I hope we will all remember to respect them, and their opinions, even when we disagree.
