They All Go Into the Dark: The Necessity of Evolution in MMA

While MMA has gained legions of fans over the past few years, some of us are able to recall the earliest days of the sport; the days when less than stellar fighters attempted to display their skills in martial arts as diverse as ninjitsu, pit fighting (thank you, Tank Abbot), and, of course, everyone’s favorite—sumo wrestling.

These fighters, many of whom gave up their MMA careers after only a few losses, helped future generations to understand that certain fighting styles simply aren’t viable in the world of MMA.

One would think (at least we did in the earlier days of MMA) that a gigantic sumo wrestler would manhandle his smaller opponent, or that a self-professed ninja (Scott Morris, you clown) would dismantle whoever was foolish enough to cross his path. Alas, was anyone ever so young?

It quickly became apparent to fighters that if you wanted to succeed in MMA you had to have a ground game. Early UFC combatant Ken Shamrock definitely had submission skills, but when confronted with the devastating submission prowess of Royce Gracie, Shamrock looked like a rank amateur.

Suddenly, every fighter in America who wasn’t adamant about being a wrestler became obsessed with learning the secrets of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Within no time, Brazilian jiu-jitsu became the first line of defense and offense for fighters looking to improve their skills on the ground. Ground fighting, and by extension submission based grappling, became the means by which the majority of early MMA fights were won.

For you doubters, the truth of the previous statement is clearly witnessed by the fact that the main events for UFC’s I-VI were won by fighters using BJJ based submissions. It wasn’t until UFC VII, and the introduction of lethal striker Marco Ruas, that the merits of striking came to be more fully appreciated.

Yet, after his meteoric rise to greatness, Ruas disappeared back into the shadows, leaving MMA to be dominated by a series of fighters whose background was in wrestling, among them Mark Coleman, Kevin Randleman, Randy Couture, and Tito Ortiz.

In the ensuing years, a silent war would be waged in MMA; a war in which grapplers battled strikers for supremacy of a sport that was experiencing exponential growth. In the UFC, high caliber strikers like Chuck Liddell showed the MMA world that a fighter didn’t have to have submissions, or even a ground game, to be successful. Similarly, Liddell’s pro-striking template would be mirrored by Wanderlei Silva and Quinton Jackson, both of whom scored monstrous knockouts against their opponents in Japan’s PRIDE organization.

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