MMA evolved out of Pro Wresting. MMA history is usually always told from the Gracie side of the story with Mitsuyo Maeda coming from Japan to Brazil to teach them his version of Judo, which was further adapted through the 20's and 30's by the family into what you see today as Brazilian Ju Jitsu. Even then there's a side to that story connected to pro wrestling as Maeda was doing worked and shoot challenge matches around the world, working with pro wrestlers, even living out of a YMCA in Alabama or something doing wrestling shows to make money. Maeda basically taught the Gracie's his own version of Judo that he changed and adapted with what he picked up around the pro wrestling circuits of the early 1900's. The Gracie's moved to California in the 80's and got really popular, eventually hooking up with some big time producers and putting together the first UFC in November of 1993, the rest is history.
What a lot of MMA fans don't know is that there is a whole other side of the story, the pro wrestling side. It all goes back to Inoki, who brought in Karl Gotch, master catch wrestling shooter that taught Inoki's New Japan guys. Four important pro wrestlers broke off from Inoki and New Japan and created the foundation of MMA. Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Nobuhiko Takada, Akira Maeda, and the original Tiger Mask were influential in the foundation of the UWF. Tiger Mask broke off in the 80's and founded Shooto, the first true MMA promotion and longest lasting promotion around today. The UWF died in the end of 1990 and Takada, Fujiwara, and Maeda started three vanity projects around the same time in 1991. Takada would go on to start UWFI, Maeda would start Fighting Network Rings, and Fujiwara would take Gotch with him to start Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi. Fujiwara and Gotch trained Minoru Suzuki, Masakatsu Funaki, and Ken Shamrock, who broke off and founded Pancrase in 1993 a month before UFC 1. Over in UWFI they had Billy Robinson, another shooter that trained catch wrestling alongside Karl Gotch at the Snake Pit in Wigan. Robinson trained Takada's UWFI wrestlers, Kazushi Sakuraba, Kiyoshi Tamura, Kanehara, Yoji Anjoh, and others. UWFI went out of business in 96 but Takada would get most of the same people together to start Pride.
So after UFC 1 a bidding war breaks out in Japan over Rickson Gracie, the baddest of the Gracie family. Shooto, Rings, Pancrase, and UWFI all offered him HUGE money for a match, but he turned all of them down except for Sayama. Sayama's Shooto hosted a big tournament in 1994 and Rickson came in and won it pretty easily. Later that year as a grandstanding stunt, UWFI sent one of their wrestlers, Yoji Anjoh, to Rickson's dojo in California to challenge him to a fight. Rickson surprised Anjoh by actually accepting the fight and then destroyed him in a bloody shoot fight. The stunt backfired big time and exposed UWFI to the Japanese fans, who were jumping ship over to Shooto, Rings, and Pancrase because they were perceived as more realistic. Rings went full on MMA shoot by 95. In order for Takada and his UWFI backers to rebound from the death of UWFI they put together the first Pride show and finally managed to sign Rickson Gracie. Rickson came in and destroyed Takada in Pride 1 in late 1997 and the rest is history.
After Takada lost to Rickson at Pride 1 there was a headline in Japanese press reading, "Pro Wrestlers are weak", showing Takada losing. A few weeks later one of Takada's dojo mates, former UWFI wrestler trained by Billy Robinson, Kazushi Sakuraba goes into the UFC Japan tournament and taps out a Gracie Ju Jitsu Black Belt that outweighed him by something like 50 pounds. Sakuraba told the press after the fight that in fact, "Pro Wrestling is quite strong". Sakuraba would go to Pride in 1998 and become a HUGE star, by 2000 he was selling out the Tokyo Dome and he would go on to defeat 4 members of the Gracie family including Royce(who was unbeaten in the UFC up to that point, widely considered the best). Sakuraba was trained by Billy Robinson but the deciding factor was a Shooto fighter named Enson Inoue who had a Black Belt in Ju Jitsu and came up through the Shooto system that Sayama designed. Enson found his way over to the Takada Dojo and the rest is history.
MMA fans should learn the history, it adds a whole new layer of context to some of the classic Pride shows because you seen the Japanese Super Bowl of MMA, with fighters coming in from Shooto, Rings, Pancrase, and not to mention all of the Pro Wrestlers that came in through the years, and the amateurs, Olympians like Yoshida and Rulon Gardner. Pride was absolutely the best. As a huge Pride mark I found Bellator's last show to be a breath of fresh air.
