Unit 13 · Film and the New League

Akira Kurosawa directed his first feature film, Sanshiro Sugata, in Japan in 1943. It was based on a 1942 novel by Tsuneo Tomita. Tomita’s father had trained at the Kodokan, the judo school that Kanō Jigorō founded in Tokyo in 1882. Kurosawa went on to direct Seven Samurai in 1954.

The film is set in the 1880s, when judo competed with older jujutsu schools for students and police contracts. The hero was loosely modeled on Saigō Shirō, an early Kodokan student. The story shrinks years of real rivalry into a few dramatic contests between invented characters.

Japan was at war when the film opened, and government censors reviewed every movie. Wartime officials favored stories that praised discipline and Japanese tradition. The film is now read as evidence of two eras at once: the 1880s it shows and the 1940s that made it.

Records from Japan’s Sengoku period, the age of warring states from the late 1400s to about 1600, mention shinobi. They were hired scouts, spies and raiders. Many came from the Iga and Kōga areas, in today’s Mie and Shiga prefectures. Warlords of the period hired them to gather news about rival armies.

The black suit most people picture came later. Many historians link it to kabuki theater, where stagehands dressed in black so the audience would treat them as unseen. Novels, comics and films of the twentieth century then turned the ninja into a superhero with a uniform.

The 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice showed a ninja training camp to world audiences. In 1981 Enter the Ninja, starring Japanese-born actor Sho Kosugi, helped start an American ninja boom. The comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984, carried the word to children.

The Karate Kid opened in the United States in June 1984. It was directed by John G. Avildsen. Pat Morita played Mr. Miyagi, a maintenance worker from Okinawa who teaches a teenager from New Jersey living in California. Ralph Macchio played the teenager, Daniel.

The film tied its hero’s karate to Okinawa, which matches the real history of the art in the Ryukyu Islands. Its rival school, Cobra Kai, was invented for the script. The film’s martial arts advisor, Pat E. Johnson, was a real American karate teacher and referee.

Karate schools across the country reported more young students after the film. The movie had sequels, and a series called Cobra Kai began in 2018. A fictional dojo name thus lived on for more than thirty years without ever having a real founder. Its creators had grown up watching the original films.

In 2010 Columbia Pictures released a new The Karate Kid. Jaden Smith played an American boy who moves to Beijing. Jackie Chan played Mr. Han, a maintenance man who teaches him Chinese martial arts. The film was a new version of the 1984 story, set in a different country. Its fights were planned with Chinese martial arts in mind.

Inside the film, characters call the art kung fu, and karate is a Japanese and Okinawan art. The title kept the famous 1984 word anyway. In China the film was released under a Chinese title that means roughly kung fu kid, and several other countries also used a kung fu title.

The case shows a brand at work. A brand is a name a company owns and sells because audiences already know it. Studios kept the name for its market value, while the story inside the film pointed to a different tradition and a different country. Audiences in each country saw the name they were most likely to buy.

Ong-Bak opened in Thailand in 2003. Prachya Pinkaew directed it, and Tony Jaa played a young villager who travels to Bangkok. The plot follows him as he tries to recover the stolen head of his village’s Buddha statue. The village in the story is in Thailand’s northeast, the Isan region.

The film advertised muay boran, the older Thai fighting styles that came before modern ring Muay Thai. Its marketing stressed that stunts were done without wires or computer effects. That claim became part of how the film sold itself abroad. Tony Jaa had trained for years as a stunt performer before the role.

After the film spread overseas, some gyms outside Thailand began to add muay boran to their signs. Thai teaching camps had long passed on older forms within families and regional lines. The film did not create those lines, but it gave their name a new international market.

Welsh director Gareth Evans moved to Indonesia and filmed a documentary about pencak silat, the Indonesian family of martial arts. There he met Iko Uwais, a young silat practitioner from Jakarta. Evans cast him in the film Merantau, released in 2009.

Their next film, The Raid, was released in 2011 and reached international theaters in 2012. Its fights were designed with Uwais and fellow silat practitioner Yayan Ruhian. Reviewers abroad often introduced silat to readers who had never heard the word.

Merantau takes its title from a Minangkabau custom in West Sumatra, where young men leave home to gain experience. Silat’s real history runs through many regions and peoples of Indonesia, Malaysia and nearby lands. One film shows one urban action style, not the whole family.

A fight choreographer designs how a screen fight looks, much as a dance choreographer plans a dance. Yuen Woo-ping built his career in the Hong Kong film industry from the 1970s. He was known for wire work, where performers hang on hidden cables for leaps.

The Wachowskis hired Yuen to design the fights in The Matrix, released in 1999. The actors trained for months before filming. The film’s success made Hong Kong methods a standard part of Hollywood action films. It earned hundreds of millions of dollars around the world, and two sequels followed in 2003.

Yuen also designed the fights for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Many viewers abroad began to use its screen movement as their picture of Chinese martial arts, though it was a designed performance.

American servicemen stationed in Okinawa and Japan after World War II trained in local karate schools. Some came home and opened schools of their own. Robert Trias, a Navy veteran, is widely credited with opening one of the first karate schools in the United States, in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1946.

Black Belt magazine began publishing in 1961. It printed school listings, interviews and tournament results. For many Americans far from Okinawa, the magazine was the first written record of teachers and lines they could check. Its covers and advertisements also shaped what readers expected karate to look like.

Ed Parker, a teacher from Hawaii, held the first Long Beach International Karate Championships in California in 1964. Tournaments like it gave American karate a public stage before Hollywood did. When films later drove new students to schools, a network of teachers, magazines and events was already in place.

Not every new style comes from a film. Kajukenbo began in 1947 at the Palama Settlement in Honolulu, Hawaii. Five teachers from different backgrounds worked together to build it. The Palama Settlement was a community center serving working families of many backgrounds.

The name combines parts of the arts its founders brought: karate, judo and jujutsu, Kenpo, and Chinese boxing. Hawaii’s plantation history had brought together Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean and Native Hawaiian families. The style’s mixed name reflects that mixed neighborhood.

Kajukenbo schools keep records of the founders and their students. That kind of lineage, a documented chain of teachers, is what historians look for. A style can be new and still be real when its founding place, date and people are on record. The Kajukenbo name is still used by schools in Hawaii and on the mainland.

Billy Blanks, an American karate competitor, created Tae Bo in the 1990s. The name blends taekwondo and boxing. It was a workout set to music, not a combat art or a competitive sport. Blanks had competed in karate tournaments in the 1970s and 1980s. He had also worked in films as a performer.

Blanks sold Tae Bo on home videos and through television ads, and it became hugely popular by the late 1990s. Blanks registered Tae Bo as a trademark. A trademark is a name protected by law, so others may not sell products under it without permission.

Gyms soon offered classes with generic names like cardio kickboxing. Those classes borrowed the look of martial arts for fitness. Historians see Tae Bo as a case where a martial arts name became a legal product, owned by one person, rather than a lineage.

Ancient Greek writers record that pankration entered the Olympic Games at Olympia in 648 BCE. The name means all strength or all power. It combined elements of Greek boxing and Greek wrestling in one event. Athletes trained for it in the gymnasium, a Greek building for exercise and education.

Pankration still had rules and officials. Ancient sources say biting and gouging the eyes were banned, and referees carried rods to punish fouls. Athletes competed without weight classes, so heavier men held an advantage. Winners were honored with an olive wreath, as in other Olympic events.

Modern MMA promoters sometimes point to pankration as an ancestor. Historians note a long gap between the two. The ancient games ended in late antiquity, and no living line of pankration teachers connects Olympia to modern cages. The Roman emperor Theodosius I is often linked to the end of the games near 393 CE.

In 1914 the Japanese judo teacher Mitsuyo Maeda arrived in Brazil after years of touring the Americas and Europe. He settled in Belém, in northern Brazil. Carlos Gracie, a son of a local family, studied with him. Maeda had trained at the Kodokan in Tokyo under Kanō Jigorō’s system.

Carlos and his brothers, including Hélio Gracie, opened a school in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s. They developed what became Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The family publicized it through open challenges to fighters from other arts. Later generations of the family spread the art across Brazil and abroad.

Brazilians called contests with very few rules vale tudo, Portuguese for anything goes. These events appeared in circuses and on Brazilian television over the century. They were public shows before any government wrote a rule book for them. Promoters sold tickets to crowds who came to see styles tested against each other.

On June 26, 1976, boxing champion Muhammad Ali met Japanese professional wrestler Antonio Inoki in Tokyo. The two sides fought over rules until days before the bout. It ended in a draw after fifteen rounds and disappointed many viewers. The bout was shown on closed-circuit television in many countries.

Japanese professional wrestling had a strong following, and some performers wanted real contests. Satoru Sayama founded Shooto in the mid-1980s as an organized sport with its own rules and amateur ranks. It is one of the earliest organized mixed martial arts bodies.

Pancrase began in Tokyo in September 1993, two months before the first UFC. Its name borrowed from the Greek pankration. Japan thus had rule-based mixed events before the American league existed. Its founders were professional wrestlers who wanted real, unscripted results.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship held its first event at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado, on November 12, 1993. It was sold on pay-per-view, meaning cable viewers paid to watch one event. Semaphore Entertainment Group produced it with Art Davie and Rorion Gracie.

The event was an eight-man tournament. Its promoters matched fighters from different styles, including boxing, karate, sumo and savate. It was held in an eight-sided fenced ring that the company called the Octagon. Its bouts ended only by a stoppage, a knockout, or a fighter’s corner giving up.

Royce Gracie, Rorion’s younger brother, won the tournament. The event advertised Brazilian jiu-jitsu to American audiences. It had few rules, no weight classes and no time limits for its bouts. Rorion had moved from Brazil to California and taught jiu-jitsu there.

Early UFC events were sold with slogans claiming there were no rules. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a boxing fan, watched a tape and campaigned against the events. He famously compared them to human cockfighting and wrote to state governors urging bans.

Many states refused to allow the events, and several major cable companies dropped them from pay-per-view by the late 1990s. Without cable, the company lost most of its audience. Events moved to smaller venues in places that would permit them. Promoters kept the events alive with smaller home video and live audiences.

Under that pressure, the promotion added rules. It introduced weight classes, rounds, gloves and a longer list of fouls. Historians see this as the point where a spectacle began turning into a sport that a commission could license. The company also began seeking approval from state athletic commissions.

In 2000 the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board met with promoters, referees and doctors to write rules for mixed martial arts. The board adopted the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts in 2001. They set weight classes, round lengths, required gloves and a list of fouls.

In January 2001 a company called Zuffa, owned by casino executives Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta with Dana White as president, bought the UFC. Zuffa worked to win approval from state commissions. Nevada, home of Las Vegas, soon allowed sanctioned MMA events.

The Unified Rules gave every commission one shared text to adopt. A fighter licensed in one state could expect the same fouls, rounds and weight limits in another. That shared rule book is what separates a league from a string of one-night shows. Promoters could also plan a national calendar of events around it.

New York passed the Walker Law in 1920, legalizing professional boxing under state control. It created the New York State Athletic Commission to license boxers, referees and promoters. The law was named for State Senator James J. Walker, later mayor of New York City.

Other states followed with their own commissions. Nevada created its State Athletic Commission in 1941. Las Vegas later became a center of big boxing events, which made Nevada’s commission one of the most watched in the country. Walker’s law replaced an earlier ban on public prize fights in the state.

A commission’s main tools are licenses, medical exams, inspectors and suspensions. It can refuse to license a fighter who fails a medical test. When MMA sought approval, it entered this older system that boxing had built over eighty years. Doctors appointed by the commission examine fighters before and after bouts.

Early UFC tournaments matched fighters of any size. The Unified Rules replaced that with weight classes, groups of fighters within set limits of body weight. Boxing had used weight classes since the late 1800s, and MMA borrowed the idea. Under the Unified Rules, each class has its own upper weight limit in pounds.

Fighters step on a scale at an official weigh-in, usually the day before a bout. A commission inspector records each weight on paper. A fighter who comes in over the limit can be fined or have the bout changed. Commissions set these rules to reduce dangerous weight cutting before fights.

Weight classes changed who could compete. Smaller athletes, including many wrestlers and judo players from lighter divisions, could build careers. The classes also made each division a separate ranking, much like boxing’s championship belts. Women’s divisions were added later with their own limits.

In 2009 the Association of Boxing Commissions, a national group of state and tribal regulators, adopted the Unified Rules. Most states already licensed MMA by then. The shared rule book made the sport look the same from one state to the next. Tribal regulators oversee events held on the lands of Native American nations.

New York held out. A 1997 state law had banned professional MMA events. Lawmakers debated the ban for years, and in 2016 New York passed a law to legalize and regulate the sport. The state had allowed amateur events under rules, but professional bouts stayed banned. Supporters argued for jobs and tax money; opponents argued about safety.

UFC 205 was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in November 2016. The event followed nearly twenty years of the ban. With New York’s vote, professional MMA could be licensed in all fifty states. That event drew a large paying crowd at the Garden.

Many successful MMA fighters came from American high school and college wrestling. That pipeline ran through bodies like the NCAA and state high school associations, which in Illinois means the IHSA. Their first training rooms were school gyms, not MMA gyms.

Other fighters came from boxing gyms, judo clubs, Brazilian jiu-jitsu academies and Muay Thai camps in Thailand. Each of those rooms kept its own ranks, rules and teachers. Many MMA athletes held ranks or records in one of them before they turned pro.

In the 2000s a new kind of MMA gym grew up to combine these sources in one building. Its coaches often held separate credentials from separate arts. Historians describe MMA as a league that borrows rooms, not as a single old art with one founder. Wrestling and Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches often worked beside boxing and Muay Thai coaches there.

Women fought in smaller MMA promotions before the UFC admitted them. Strikeforce, a California promotion, featured women’s bouts in the late 2000s. UFC leaders had said publicly that women would not fight in the company. Female fighters had built records in Japan, the United States and other countries.

That changed in February 2013 at UFC 157 in Anaheim, California. Ronda Rousey defended her bantamweight title against Liz Carmouche, a U.S. Marine veteran. It was the first women’s bout in UFC history. Rousey won the bout in the first round. Carmouche was the first openly gay fighter in the UFC.

Rousey had won a bronze medal in judo at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the first Olympic judo medal for an American woman. Her path ran from a judo club to the Olympics to MMA. Her career shows the league borrowing an older room and its Olympic record.

Zuffa lost money in its first years with the UFC. In 2005 it launched The Ultimate Fighter, a reality series on the cable channel Spike TV. Young fighters lived in one house, trained on teams and competed for a UFC contract. The UFC paid to produce the first season.

The first season’s finale in April 2005 aired free on cable. A close bout between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar drew a large audience. Many business histories of the sport treat that night as the start of its growth. Dana White awarded contracts to both fighters after the bout.

The show made MMA a league with seasons, rankings and stars that viewers followed week to week. In 2016 the Fertittas and White’s group sold the UFC to a group led by the talent agency WME-IMG. The deal was reported at about four billion dollars. By then the UFC held events on several continents.

Coaches in judo, boxing and taekwondo begin every session with a warm-up. Sports science backs them: warm muscles contract faster and stretch further before they strain.

1. Practice where a grown-up knows what you are doing. Clear a space at least two big steps wide all around.

2. Do a dynamic warm-up for five to eight minutes: jog in place, arm circles, leg swings, walking lunges, hip circles.

3. Save long, held stretches for after practice, when the muscles are warm.

4. Watch the move in the Dojo. Learn it step by step, slowly, before adding speed.

5. Never snap an elbow or knee fully straight. Stop just short of locking the joint.

What helps: practice both sides. Short sessions on many days build skill faster than one long session. Sleep helps a new skill settle.

Stay safe: solo and into the air, never at a person. Kicks stay at knee or belly height until your balance is steady. Falls only on a mat or soft grass. Stop if something hurts.

Mixed martial arts borrowed much of its ground game from amateur wrestling. The sprawl is wrestling’s answer to a leg attack: the legs shoot back and the hips drop, so the attacker cannot reach them. Here it is practiced solo, as a fitness drill.

1. On a mat, start in a low stance with hands in front.

2. Place both hands on the mat in front of you.

3. Shoot both legs straight back and drop your hips toward the mat, landing on the balls of your feet and your hips, not your knees.

4. Keep your head up and chest off the floor. Then hop your feet back under you and stand.

What helps: think "hips heavy." Spread your legs a little wider than your hips for a wider base.

Stay safe: on a mat or soft grass. Land on your hands and feet, never your knees. Solo only.

Muay Thai fighters use the teep, a straight push kick with the ball or sole of the foot, to stop an opponent coming forward. Coaches often call it a jab with the leg. MMA fighters borrowed it from Thai camps.

1. Start in a Muay Thai guard: tall, hands high.

2. Lift the front knee up to the chamber, toes pulled back.

3. Push the foot straight forward into the air at belly height, extending the hip forward.

4. Pull the foot back and step down into your guard. Practice with the back leg too.

What helps: think of pushing a heavy door shut with your foot, not snapping. Keep your hands up.

Stay safe: low teeps into the air, never at a person. Hold a wall while learning balance.

Boxers, Muay Thai fighters and MMA athletes all use the pivot to turn without losing their stance. The turn happens on the ball of the foot, which spares the knee from twisting.

1. Start in a guard with your front foot forward.

2. Shift your weight onto the ball of the front foot.

3. Swing your back foot around in a quarter circle, turning your whole body on that front foot.

4. Settle back into your guard, now facing a new direction. Practice both ways.

What helps: the knee turns with the foot. Keep your hands up as you turn.

Stay safe: pivot on a smooth, dry floor. Avoid turning on bare feet on rough carpet, which can grip and twist the knee.