The ceiling is so low in MMA that…

[CaneloBlue]

Last we spoke about MMA I grilled the trainers and blamed them for MMA's fighters' low caliber skillsets.

This time we're going to talk about boxing history and its relation to MMA.


Does anyone actually believe a sport that is just punches to the upper body predates open rule, no rules, or mixed rules sports? I mean we'd call them mixed today, they just called it boxing when it was happening.

I'm going to focus on America because her history is youngest and easiest to look up. Should any choose to.


We have champions who were more wrestler than striker, in boxing.

We have champions known for their ability to kick, in boxing, with steel cleats.

In America abouts the later 1600 through the mid 1700s it was so common to win a boxing match by castrating your opponent making castrating another citizen of the colonies a felony was actually one of America's first laws.

Sticking with early American boxing, another very common tactic was to pluck out the other man's eyes. When the Brits witnessed what Americans called boxing they were disgusted by the violence and comparisons to Rome were made straight away. This is where the term "Rough-N-Tumble" comes from. Rough, because they might take your willy or your peepers, tumble because plenty of wrestling. It'd be fair to say American boxing was more wrestling than boxing.

"Real" fighting....It's kinda cute, they're in a cage or ring, they have a ref to keep them safe, and a cup to project what in a real fight is most vulnerable. Let an MMA guy take an eye poke and the MMA world cries for weeks. Our champions lost their eyes and their nuts....no hyperbole.

British boxing would be displayed in America abouts the 1820s not terribly long after Tom Molyneaux fought Tom Cribb actually.

British boxing had already formed into the punch-based sport on its own with a very similar path except they were not plucking eyes with thumbs. Brits, before they were punch-only sportsman, were swordsman, clubs, quarterstaff, a sack with rocks in it, you get what I'm driving at....weapons masters. Who came around to just the fist over time as well but like I said at the start America's path is easier to look up so what is important to know is the Brits didn't start out just punches either but by 1820s had refined their sport to a punch-based sport that allowed for some level of wrestling and very little kicking.

Punching started to dominate the arena-less, rule-less, rough-n-tumble scene. All your first American BK champions are rough-n-tumble fighters who got too good at punching to stay in the r-n-t level of things and started to challenge British boxers in British style boxing.

We call bare knuckle London Prize Ring Rules because it is the refined form of bare knuckle not the only form, so it is what you look to for things like lineage in modern boxing and it came from England...if the title didn't let you know some how.

As Americans start to take over BK with punching skills they don't much change the difference in culture from America to England. They adopt the English focus on punching but not English codes for gentleman behavior.

"Lick and son of the ***** in the building" is not exactly becoming of an English gentleman but is regarded as absolute bullbuggery badassery in the United States.

From the 1820-1920 is the era of bar clearing boxing champions. Many men have stories of going to bars and the like and getting into fights with common folk, other fighters, and members of organized crime. This is where the term "Real McCoy" comes from. It's also how John L Sullivan got so popular.


Boxing is the oldest combat sport known to man. Believing it started just punches is ******. Believing we have not opened up boxing to open, mixed, and no rules fighters and situations is also ******. Multiple times, I only covered the American version. It happens about every 500 years in this 3k year old sport.


Boxing is a punch only sports because that is what a no rules sport naturally refines itself to. We've done it, so, so many times. And like Rough-N-Tumble their best options are quickly becoming learning to punch and fighting a champion boxer. Very similarly to how the weapons masters of 14th-18th century England converted to punch masters or got left behind. Very similar to the Greeks holding loose rules pankration to figure out what is best, and, the original reason the original boxers split their hand-to-hand soldier training into two distinct art forms; boxing and wrestling. Everyone knows grabbing folk has its place, second to boxing. The Greeks found this out and let us be clear, MMA has no Theaganese or Klietomachos. Only boxers converted to wrestlers won all three combat sports events in ancient greece. No wrestler not pankrationist ever entered the boxing tournament and won. Boxers entered all three, and won, and are known for the first instance in all of history as the "Heavy Champion"


So yeah, of course their ceiling is so low they need boxing. It's always been that way.....like, always-always. Past three thousand years worth of always been that way.

You are the greatest poster on this website. God Bless you sir.

[KingGilgamesh]

You should turn pro brah, show em how it's done, you know it all and I don't see anyone who can stop you reaching the top.

Is this sour g****s because I laughed at you for having 30000+ posts? I feel bad for saying it but its true. You have to be a special kind of loser to be that dedicated to any kind of online discourse. Awww diddums, this forum must be all you have in your life

[Greg House]

The Greeks found this out and let us be clear, MMA has no Theaganese or Klietomachos. Only boxers converted to wrestlers won all three combat sports events in ancient greece. No wrestler not pankrationist ever entered the boxing tournament and won. Boxers entered all three, and won, and are known for the first instance in all of history as the "Heavy Champion"

Hey, man. Nice read. Do you have a source about that last part where I can read about it? I'm very interested.

I guess I get it because Pankratium (a similar thing to MMA those days) covered an ocean of knowledge on techniques. But mastering that sport would be impossible, so they all became a jack of all trades and master of none. It's like an ocean of 2 inches of depth. And boxers spent the same amount of time as them but training only punching so it's more like a lake instead of an ocean but with the same amount of water (time spent training), so boxing it's an extremely deep lake. It's much harder to reach the end of the lake than of that ocean even though it's the same amount of water. If that makes sense lol.

The beauty of MMA (Or pankratium back then) is that you can beat the experts of every other martial art with it. You can beat an expert in judo by using your footwork and kicks staying away from the clinch (Holly Holm Vs Ronda Rousey) and you can beat a boxer by going for a takedown and choking him out (Randy Couture Vs James Toney). But with the same logic it would be easy for an expert in boxing to train takedown defense, train in recognizing the openings in BJJ that let you get back up to your feet, learn boxing while on the clinch and a way to counter all types of kicks with punches, timing and footwork. And by doing that you can essentially nullify the other areas that the boxer is not an expert in and make the fight a boxing fight in a way. Where he would have the advantage over everyone else in that sport. Francis Ngannou is not technically a boxer, but has successfully applied a similar strategy. But it's extremely hard to see how "the other way around" could possibly work. To conquer "mixed martial arts", you do not need to be the best at every martial art but to conquer boxing you absolutely need to be the best boxer, and MMA fighters have a huge disadvantage against people that have been training boxing non stop since they are kids.

The 500 year cylce you mention is also interesting because I think that we are on an era where boxing became a bit too "refined" and that's what made MMA surface. I think people were already looking for something like this in 70's and 80's with their karate/kickboxing movies and the Ali vs that japanese pro wrestler match. Because boxing's ruleset have evolved so much that it stopped feeling like fighting and started looking like a very limited punching contest. Guys these days, every time they clinch, they open their arms and wait for the ref to separate them. And that "doesn't really feel as a fight" for somebody who doesn't really follows the sport and simply tunes in to watch two guys fight each other which is how this thing started in the first place based on your post. If you watch footage of Sam Langford from 120 years ago, you will see him pushing people, kind of wrestling in a way and shoving people away. Back then you could do all those stuffs in a boxing match and if you were to put a modern boxer of his same weight with him on that rule set, the modern boxer would be much taller with a huge reach advantage but he would get tossed around like a little girl the same way as if he was facing a grecoroman wrestler but with actual boxing skills.

If you watch the compilations of street fights that they upload on CS, you will see that 90% of what happens in street fights are basically: 1-Punching, 2-Grabbing and punching (essentially grabbing their clothes to outposicion them in a way where they can't punch you back or can't use their weight properly to do so) and 3-Trying to muscle someone to the ground and then keep punching them while standing or start kicking them. So, outside of the kicking someone while he is down, it looks very similar to how those old boxing matches sound like. I guess that the complete eradication of wrestling from the boxing ruleset has caused people to turn into MMA to get that "fix" of "be watching an actual fight". Probably the reason why the MMA fans are always so impatient with the fighters. A lot of them (Not all of them. I like MMA as much as boxing and I'm not like that) don't want to be educated in the sport and to understand what's happening. They are not interested in the science of Jiujitsu or the science of Muay Thai and they "boo" even when they are seeing great transitions in the ground or a good battle on a clinch. They just want to see people bleed in what "looks like a fight" to get that "fix".

At least that's how I explain this recent popularity of MMA that seems to be killing the popularity of what is called TMA (traditional martial arts, that gained populartity in the 70's and 80's starting with Bruce Lee). Because TMA used to tell people on movies that "expert fighters" fought like that but now MMA is telling them how expert fighters actually fight and it looks nothing like that.

Ps: Sorry about the long post. I got carried away.

Edit: Found them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleitomachos_(athlete)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theagenes_of_Thasos

Although it says that only Kleitomachos started a s a boxer, the other one was simply to be good at every kind of athletic contest and doesn't say that he won boxing first and then went to win the others. They are the only 2 fighters in over 1100 years that conquered both boxing, wrestling and pankratium. So much for my initial theory lol. Well, I still believe modern day boxers could conquer MMA if they focus on what I mentioned (they don't do it because it doesn't pay well). Maybe it's because MMA is young so the talent pool is very weak right now. Maybe pankratium evolved at one point to a level where they disregarded what didn't work and focused only on the few things that were efficient, making it also a "lake of huge depth" instead of an ocean as I claimed before, and this it became extremely hard for anyone from another discicipline to catch up to them if they started late, just like in boxing. Yeah, I guess that makes sense because MMA is constantly evolving right now, 20 years ago people would use the cage for ground and pound, now they try to avoid it because it's mostly use for the guys on the bottom to get back up to their feet.

[CaneloBlue]

Classic thread. UFC fanboys couldn’t even make an attempt to deny this.