UFC's GSP - Georges St Pierre (UFC)
Today, Dana White’s Ultimate Fighting Championship presents UFC 132, in what will almost certainly be another pay-per-view revenue monster for the premier mixed martial arts organisation in the world.
The rise of UFC is a fascinating one; from an organisation close to being banned in the 1990s, to a respected fight promotion that has left boxing and professional wrestling behind in popularity and pay-per-view numbers.
However, I wonder if Dana White has ever heard of Akira Maeda? While it may seem a long bow, an incident in a Japanese pro wrestling ring in 1987 precipitated by Maeda went a long way to ushering in an era of shoot-fighting and consequently mixed martial arts in Japan, and then the USA.
At the time, Akira Maeda worked for Antonio Inoki’s New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW), the biggest and most-watched wrestling group in the country. Maeda had a curious cult following. He was something of a maverick, who believed that the increasingly bizarre and gimmicky pro wrestling style of NJPW was belittling the business and the wrestlers who worked in it.
Japanese pro wrestling, while every bit as fixed and worked as its American counterpart, always presented itself as serious competition and its workers were almost all from real combat backgrounds, such as amateur wrestling, sumo and martial arts. They relied less on glitz, glamour and outrageous soap opera storylines and more on realistic bouts and rivalries.
Maeda was disgusted by the prostituting of his ideals and garnered a reputation for being uncooperative in the ring. His kicks and strikes carried more weight and sting behind them than was the norm. His argument was that in order to put across the physical combat aspect of his bouts, it had to look as real as possible. His popularity with fans grew while his reputation with his fellow workers and NJPW boss Inoki fell.
On the 19th of November 1987, during a six-man tag team match, Maeda’s opponent Riki Choshu had one of Maeda’s partners in a submission hold. As per the script, Maeda was supposed to enter the ring and break up the hold. He did so by launching a full, unprotected roundhouse kick to Choshu’s head, breaking Choshu’s orbital bone and putting him out of action for a month.
In a pro wrestling sense, this was an act of cowardice and Maeda was suspended and eventually fired from NJPW. However, Maeda’s fans were outraged and his popularity exploded. He immediately formed his own promotion called Newborn Universal Wrestling Federation or UWF. The UWF had existed in 1984-85 but was simply awing of NJPW.
This time, Maeda took charge along with another ex New Japan star Nobuhiko Takada and presented bouts that to all intents and purposes were real fights between combat athletes from different disciplines. It drew huge crowds and UWF was the first fight promotion to sell out the Tokyo Dome, for a card headlined by Maeda against Willy Wilheim. More than 60,000 attended the event and suddenly UWF was the hottest ticket in the country.
It was not widely known at the time, but the bouts were still worked (i.e., the winners were predetermined) as Maeda still believed the audience needed to be educated in realistic shoot-style matches, and so there was subtle cooperation between opponents. However, there were no wrestling “high spots”, no flashy moves or running the ropes, and every match had a definitive finish, be it submission or knockout.
It was a phenom destined to crash and burn. Maeda absolutely wanted nothing to do with aspects of pro wrestling and stubbornly refused to let the smallest aspects of showmanship infiltrate the promotion, despite it being a work. This led to the dissolution of Newborn UWF in 1990.
Takada formed Union of Wrestling Force International (UWFI) which continued the theme of shoot-style wrestling. Maeda formed Fighting Network RINGS in 1991 and began the transition from a worked to a shoot promotion. Some of the fighters who competed in RINGS are familiar names to current UFC fans, such as Renzo Gracie, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Fedor Emalianenko and Randy Couture.
UFC began in the United States in 1993 and fighters from the States travelled to Japan to broaden their fighting skills and increase their bank accounts. By the mid 90s, the term Mixed Martial Arts or MMA was used to describe a variety of promotions that had sprung from Maeda’s RINGS, including PRIDE and Pancrase.
Maeda’s former co-founder of UWF, Takada, went back to pro wrestling but eventually decided to test himself in the MMA world by joining PRIDE. He had a huge following as a pro-wrestler but tapped out to a Rickson Gracie armbar in his MMA debut.
Meanwhile, Maeda had his last match against legendary Russian Olympic wrestler Alexander Karelin in 1999. He lost via submission and the RINGS promotion tapped out not long after, unable to compete with the booming popularity of PRIDE, which was attracting UFC names such as the Gracies, Mark Coleman and Wanderlai Silva to Japan for big cards.
PRIDE itself was eventually bought by White’s UFC in 2007. Today, UFC sits atop the MMA mountain with weekly TV shows, monthly PPVs and a burgeoning popularity.
It’s amazing to think that much of it can be traced back to a pro-wrestler who wanted to be real.
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