A Pankration Tale

The history of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) goes back a long, long time.

In the 1990s, the UFC seemed like a brand new idea: an actual way to test out which styles of martial arts would be most effective in a “real fight.” Of course, the testing ground itself was limited and arbitrary: there was only one opponent, you knew exactly when the fighting would begin, and the surrounding cage (“the Octagon”) was made of predictable, known materials.

Nevertheless, I had never seen anything like this, outside of martial arts movies like Bloodsport or The Last Dragon. Nobody was calling this “mixed martial arts” back then, either—it was NHB, or “No Holds Barred.” It was brutal, but intriguing.

Naturally, I became curious about the how this new sport had come to be. I found that Mohammad Ali had fought Antonio Inoki in a mixed-rules contest in Japan in the 1970s, and then I found out that the idea of style-vs-style went even further back in the US, to when US when judo champion Gene Lebell took on p…