The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (28 page)

At least in boxing you are allowed to properly avoid and block a strike. Boxing is a true thinking man’s sporting contest. Not content with the no-holds-barred brawls dominating the streets of Scotland at the time, John Douglas, 9
^th
Marquess of Queensberry, endorsed a new set of rules governing fights. “Fair play,” as it was termed, dominated the landscape. No longer were men concerned with winning at all costs. Suddenly, winning as a gentleman was thought the highest honor. The rules encouraged gloves, a “fair” chance to get back up if you fell down from exhaustion, and short rounds to allow the men adequate rest for their weary bodies. Fast-forward a hundred years, and the gloves are now little more than decoration for punches so hard they can break through cement, standing eight counts give a concussed opponent a chance to wake up and take another beating, and the short rounds encourage all-out action for short time periods, subsidizing the knockout punch. Boxing, designed to be noble and sophisticated, became the surest way to develop traumatic brain injury. If you’ve ever had aspirations of dying in the ring, you need to do only two things. Take up boxing, and wait.

Perhaps the most logical thing to do then is create a martial art with the sole intent of hurting your opponent as little as possible. It seems that the Brazilians, in their infinite wisdom, have managed to do this with the creation of capoeira. Capoeira was a martial art developed by African slaves in Brazil during the 1700s. With fighting expressly prohibited, the slaves needed some way to resolve conflicts (that didn’t necessitate an online grudge match via Battlefield III and an Xbox LIVE account). To keep their fights under the radar of the slave drivers, the slaves invented a time machine that would allow them to look three hundred years into the future at awful twenty-first-century teen movies. Drawing inspiration from great works of art like
Bring It On
,
Bring It On Again
, and
Bring It On: Fight to the Finish
, they developed their own dance-focused style of fighting to both beat one another to a pulp and annoy/confuse their masters. They expanded upon their dance-fight system until it became the well-rounded, intricately choreographed dance of death that exists today. No other fighting style (except for possibly every other fighting style) encompasses the depth of technique, the efficiency of motion, and the range of possible fight-ending attacks as capoiera’s ritual of spinning continuously in the same direction while extending an arm or leg in a vain attempt to slap your opponent in the thigh.

If it’s now obvious to you that striking is a ridiculous, futile endeavor (and it should be, because I’m laying it on pretty thick), then maybe you’re thinking, “Uncle Chael, what about the other grappling arts? Are they awful too?”

The answer is yes. Judo is among the first attempts in history (but certainly not the last) for liberal-arts majors to develop a fighting style soft enough for their delicate hands but tough enough to earn them some street cred from their hipster friends down at the coffee shop. A Japanese hypochondriac by the name of Jigoro Kano watched some videos of the NCAA finals (wrestling, not basketball), and thought to himself, “How can I make this worse?” Kano succeeded in his mission by putting gi’s on otherwise straight athletes, convincing them to go “easier,” and babbling on about mutual welfare and benefit. He called this new art judo, and when the world rightly recognized that it was just a passive style of Greco-Roman wrestling with a jacket, he quickly and haphazardly allowed two types of submissions, as if that made any difference at all. This new art of judo even found support among the international community, gaining acceptance as an Olympic sport in 1964. This sport revolves around sloppily throwing your opponent while grabbing his shirtsleeves and, as far as I can tell, not much else. Some Olympic sport.

Not wanting to be left out in the cold in terms of embezzling Japanese martial arts (all the cool kids were doing it), Russia decided to get in on the act as well. In the 1950s the USSR traded the Japanese government one year’s supply of food for 5,000 Judo gi’s. The Soviet geniuses then dropped the gi’s out of helicopters over St. Peter’s Square and watched with glee as mass hysteria ensued. Those who garnered a gi, and didn’t die of starvation, became the first crop of Russian judoka. These autodidacts tried to master the intricacies of the Japanese art through osmosis. Unfortunately, because all the literate Russians were sent to Siberian work camps, the Russian practitioners had no clue what the actual judo rules were. Taking their best guess, they emphasized leg locks and disallowed strangleholds. Unfortunately, they guessed totally wrong. However, to save face, the Russians pretended that was their plan all along, and called their new leg-lock focused art form sambo. This small lineage of original sambo practitioners has spawned literally hundreds of thousands of sambokas who have gone on to accomplish absolutely nothing in the modern MMA scene.

But at least the Russians changed something. They paid homage to their foundational roots, acknowledging judo as their art’s ideological forefather, switched some trivial points around, and tried to create something new and better. That’s more than I can say for Brazilian jiu jitsu. The long, boring history involves a few members of the original Gracie clan learning judo from a legitimate Japanese judo teacher and, in the span of time it took him to go number two in the bathroom, renaming it Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Without changing a single technique, creating a single new rule, or inventing any new premise, the art was born magically out of thin air. A quick press release, a new marketing plan, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu was off to the races to dominate the martial arts world. To do this, the Gracie family (the original thieves of judo) developed a no-holds-barred fighting challenge to prove the superiority of “their” art. Royce Gracie’s father (or cousin or something) created UFC 1 and filled up the tournament brackets with a bunch of washed-up, broken-down, stand-up fighters. Royce was then given the easiest route to the title as he tied up, choked, and tickled his way to UFC gold. The rest, as they say, is history.

The history of the decline of humanity, that is. Do these fools honestly believe they invented a new martial art? A new system of mutually beneficial, holistic combat? Bollocks. Mud-eating cave dwellers in the mountains of Kazakhstan were doing keylocks and lapel chokes a billion years ago. In short, wrestlers were doing it first, and they’re still doing it better.

And it shows. In the character of the men who wrestle. In the hardwork and determination they put into everything they do. In their reverence for their teachers and in their refusal to take credit for what they had no hand in creating. Mostly, it shows in the men that wrestling creates. Everyone from Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf to Gen. George Patton to Maynard James Keenan. And almost every US president worth a hoot has had a strong wrestling pedigree. (Aside from Richard Nixon, of course, thanks to a misdiagnosis of tuberculosis and subsequent family boycott of all sporting activities. Had he not been affected by this unfortunate circumstance, he almost certainly would have won four Greco-Roman world championships and still become leader of the free world in his spare time.)

Here is a list of some great men:

What do all these presidents have in common? Aside from their universal refusal to join that other political party full of crybabies and weaklings? That’s right, all of these outstanding specimens of manhood were wrestlers. Maybe not world champions, but the hard work, full-bore training, and mental strengthening paid off by instilling in them the courage and tenacity needed to take on the highest political office, and win.

You can even take a look at the ranks of the UFC today and find that wrestling dominates the top of every single weight class. Nearly every UFC champion has a foundation in wrestling.

It doesn’t matter if you want to become the champion of the UFC [
fill-in-the-blank]
weight division or champion and ruler of the free world, history has made one thing abundantly clear. You’d better know some wrestlin’ if you wanna do it well.