Hella Nation - Evan Wright [95]
At eight every night Team Punishment assembled in the wrestling gym at a local high school for four hours of peak training. With the 310-pound Tongan kicking and whirling through the air like an elephant ballerina, Brazilian jujitsu fighters bouncing off the walls, guys boxing, guys throwing one another through the air, a skinny blond kid from Georgia who did warm-ups by spinning across the mats in high-speed cartwheels, the mildewy basement gym looked like the setting for a low-rent remake of a grand fight scene in a Bruce Lee movie.
The climax of the training occurred when each fighter took his turn doing his best to beat Tito. They piled on him in a sort of pugilistic tag team. A fresh fighter confronted Tito every ten minutes. If Tito was on the ground with a guy, and it was going slowly, his boxing coach would circle with a punch stick—a boxing glove stuck on the end of a six-foot-long PVC pipe—and repeatedly whack Tito in the head or stomach. Sometimes two guys at once would simultaneously pin and punch Tito. Most nights they fought like this until midnight, finishing with sweat soaking their clothes, blood trickling from noses and mouths, drool foaming from their chins as they spit out mouth guards. They resembled a pack of wild dogs after a fight. “We might look barbaric,” said Kyle Johnson, a fighter from Georgia with a thick southern accent and a pale, blood-smeared chest at the conclusion of the night’s training. “But we’re not barbarians. We’re a restorationary movement, bringing back the greatest sport of ancient times.”
THE ANCIENT GREEKS WERE FANS of their own Ultimate Fighting sport called pankration. It combined boxing, kickboxing and wrestling, and it became one of the most popular Olympic sports after it was introduced in 648 B.C. A similar sport became wildly popular in America after the Civil War. Called “catch-as-catch-can,” it was a fighting style that came out of the prairie states and combined punching, kicking, takedowns, choke holds and submissions—joint locks that force an opponent to surrender or suffer broken bones. In short, it wasn’t much different from the UFC’s no-holds-barred style of fighting.
At its peak, catch-as-catch-can vied with baseball as America’s number-one spectator sport. In 1911, thirty-five thousand spectators filled Chicago’s Comiskey Park to watch an American named Frank Gotch take on a European wrestling champion, George Hackenschmidt. It pitted Gotch’s freewheeling American style of fighting against the European’s more formal techniques. Gotch trounced the European early in the second round. Teddy Roosevelt signed an order making catch-as-catch-can part of the curriculum at West Point, and universities across America instituted wrestling programs based on a watered-down version of the sport. But the triumph of catch-as-catch-can as a spectator event was short-lived. Crooked promoters discredited the sport by “working,” or fixing, fights, and by the time of the Depression it had evolved into the phony professional wrestling now presented by the WWF.
Pure no-holds-barred fighting was reintroduced to America in the late 1980s by two immigrant brothers from Brazil, Royce and Horian Gracie. For several decades, ever since their grandfather had learned jujitsu in the 1930s, members of the Gracie family had been fighting in “Gracie Challenge” tournaments, in which they took on and usually beat all comers in any style of fighting. Royce and Horian opened a gym in Los Angeles to promote their family’s jujitsu technique, good against any form of hand-to-hand combat.