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Fedor Emelianenko could very well lose tonight and if he does it could be in utterly humiliating and devastating fashion. That is a very unlikely outcome of tonight's fight, but it is a very real possibility. Brett Rogers has demonstrated many times that he hits with sufficient power to knock out any man if he can connect square.

But regardless of what happens tonight, Fedor Emelianenko will remain the greatest heavyweight fighter in the history of MMA for the foreseeable future. Only one athlete has a comparable resume -- Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira -- and Fedor has beaten Nogueira convincingly twice.

But for those of you who were not watching Fedor through out his career I wanted to lay out a couple of things that will hopefully put his accomplishments in contest. And lay to rest any thoughts that Fedor's resume is reliant on having beaten a number of former UFC champs and freakshow opponents.

1. Fedor rose to the top of, and thoroughly dominated the PRIDE heavyweight division from his entry in 2002 to the collapse of the organization in 2007. The PRIDE heavyweight division was by far the best ever assembled in MMA up to that time. Remember this was in an era when the UFC had enormous financial difficulties and had multiple champions walk away from the belt due to financial disputes. The PRIDE division was built off the back of the 2000 PRIDE open-weight Grand Prix which brought together many of the most highly regarded fighters of the day and did much to establish a clear pecking order in the division. Fedor didn't participate in the tournament, but he did beat the winner, Mark Coleman in 2004.
   
   
2. Fedor emerged from Akira Maeda's RINGS organization, one of the key transitional organizations in the evolution of Japanese pro-wrestling into MMA. While RINGS was late to abandon "worked" matches (pre-determined outcomes), they practiced a very "stiff" form of pro-wrestling that incorporated many actual kickboxing and submission techniques. By the time Fedor began in RINGS they had gone to almost 100% "shoots" (actual sporting matches with no pre-determined outcome). RINGS is most important in MMA history for two reasons: 1) Maeda's recruitment of Volk Han, a Sambo master who brought a flood of Russian fighters along with him, including Fedor but also Mikhail Illioukhine and others; and, 2) the two mega King of Kings tournaments Maeda mounted in 1999 and 2000. Those tournaments brought together with the PRIDE Grand Prix of 2000 established a very firm pecking order for the heavyweight division by assembling most of the best fighters from Japan, America, Brazil, Holland and Russia and using the tournament format. Fedor would go on to beat the winner of the 2000 King of Kings tourny, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira.
   
   
3. During his run at the top, Fedor has beaten exponents of all the major styles to so far dominate in MMA. He has beaten Olympic caliber wrestlers. He has beaten top K-1 kickboxers. He has beaten Olympic medal winning Judokas. He has beaten the best Brazilian Jiu Jitsu MMA fighter in the history of the game. He has beaten numerous former UFC champions. While he hasn't always fought the best and there will always be challenges remaining to be met, Fedor's run at the top has no equal in the history of the game.

There are flaws in Fedor's game. He has been rightfully criticized for sometimes fighting less than the most worthy opponents. He will not remain at the top indefinitely. But the buzz around him is for real. It's something he earned the hard way, by facing and beating a who's who of the best MMA fighters in the game at the time he fought them. We'll see if he can impress an American mass audience tonight.

A couple of other Fedor stories worth reviewing if you missed them:

• Luke Thomas: Fedor Emelianenko Leaves the Ring and Enters the Cage
• Brent Brookhouse: Analyzing Fedor Emelianenko's Striking

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Heavy.com reports:

Sources close to Brock Lesnar's camp informed Heavy.com tonight that Lesnar will not be able to participate in the postponed main event of UFC 108 against Shane Carwin.

Lesnar has battled an undisclosed illness for the past month that forced him to withdraw from a scheduled title defense against Carwin at UFC 106. The bout was rescheduled for UFC 108, but Heavy.com learned earlier this week that Lesnar has not recovered from the illness and cannot train at even a moderate page without quickly becoming exhausted.

A source close to the UFC confirmed the story while pointing out that Lesnar was never officially part of the UFC 108 card.

Word is, Lesnar has mononucleosis, not H1N1.

The question in my mind is whether or not the just-announced Cain Velasquez vs Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira fight will be for an interim title.

The other thought is, what a drag for Shane Carwin.

Randy Couture gets the takedown on Valentijn Overeem at RINGS King of Kings 2000.

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Josh Gross reminds us of the historic RINGS King of Kings 2000 tournament where Randy and Big Nog nearly met in the final round:

...the pair will meet for the first time at UFC 102 knowing they could have as easily done the same eight years ago in their primes during a historic tournament that helped shape the sport.

Four months removed from recapturing the UFC heavyweight championship in 2000 against Kevin Randleman, Couture advanced into the semifinals of Japan's RINGS 32-man "King of Kings 2000" tournament, considered at the time the best heavyweight field ever assembled, before being upset by the talented but heady Valentijn Overeem.

Defeating Nogueira in the finals would have given Couture ownership of the title as MMA's best heavyweight just when Zuffa assumed control of the UFC. Instead, when Couture tapped to a guillotine and Nogueira secured an arm-triangle against Alistair Overeem's older brother, it was the jiu-jitsu pioneering Brazilian who walked away as the sport's top heavyweight -- thus signaling years of debate about the caliber of competition between U.S. and Japanese fight organizations.

No one could have known it then, but that loss, which gnaws at Couture's competitive soul, played a major role in the growth of Japanese MMA and its reputation from 2000 through 2006 for showcasing MMA's best heavyweights.

This great piece by Shu Hirata gives more background on that tournament, and its 1999 predecessor, why it had the funky no striking to the head on the ground rules. Here's an excerpt:

K.O.K. (King of Kings) was Akira Maeda's answer to the world in regards to the rapid invasion of "The Black Ship" named Gracie Jiu-jitsu and Vale Tudo in the Japanese fight sports community. The public was definitely shifting towards "real fight." The fans were hungry, anxious to see, who truly is the strongest. And no striking to the head on the ground was Maeda's answer. The fans, especially those hardcore well-informed types, were thrilled with Maeda's invention.

This was back in 1999 when everyone was still debating, regarding both the sports and entertainment aspects, and which would be the most suitable rules for MMA. PRIDE was experimenting with different rules such as 60 minutes (Renzo vs. Kikuta) and 30 minutes (Kimo vs. Severn) matches so Maeda believers in Japan thought, hey, these K.O.K. rules could turn out to be the more interesting to see as a spectator sport!

This, also, was a historical conversion for RINGS because it meant that they had finally decided to just concentrate on the competition. The era was thirsty for real fighting, and this was no longer just indispensable. In order for them to stay competitive in the Japanese professional sports market, this decision was unavoidable.

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RINGS started to experiment with K.O.K. rules in the "World Mega-Battle Tournament" which opened on October 28th 1999. Maeda began implementing his invention with a 5-minutes-per-round-for-2-round system in this 32-man tournament.

No striking to the head and no stalling. These two points were the backbone of K.O.K. rules. Maeda and RINGS wanted to create a sports-like MMA show without any smell of street fighting. So Maeda first got rid of elbow shots and in the next, he took out kicking to a grounded opponent. Then finally, and most importantly, Maeda took out all strikes to the head on the ground. Then he came up with something very revolutionary and that is the concept of "no stalling" which was applied to refereeing under K.O.K. rules.

In the end, RINGS lost its promotional war with PRIDE and the rules set of the K.O.K. tournies is now seen as an odd aberration in MMA history, a wrong turn if you will. But at the time it was a valid experiment in conducting sporting fights.

The 1999 and 2000 RINGS K.O.K. tournies were part of a consolidation of world-wide MMA into one top tier talent pool After half a decade of the top fighters mostly beating cans in smaller events, RINGS and PRIDE brought the best fighters in the world together in three open weight tournaments: the 1999 and 2000 RINGS K.O.K. tournies and the PRIDE 2000 GP.

The 1999 K.O.K. line-up was stellar and the 2000 was even more so. In addition to Couture, Nogueira, and Overeem (the brother of Alistair) it included Brazilian aces Renato "Babalu" Sobral, Carlao Barreto, and Roberto Traven, RINGS stars Tsuyoshi Kohsaka and Kiyoshi Tamura, Russian stars Volk Han and Mikhail Illoukhin (plus a fairly unheralded new comer named Fedor Emelianenko), American independent circuit aces Bobby Hoffman, Jeremy Horn and Dave Menne.

When Nogueira won the K.O.K. 2000, after losing in the finals of the 1999 tourny to Dan Henderson by split decision, it established him as indisputably one of the top fighters in the world. When he moved over to PRIDE and beat Mark Coleman and Heath Herring in fairly short order, he became the undisputed top heavyweight in the sport.

I'll be writing more about the K.O.K. tournaments in my MMA History series soon, but this was a timely occasion for a little preview.

Videos from the event in the full entry.

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Mark Hewitt's Catch Wrestling: A Wild and Wooly Look at the Early Days of Pro Wrestling in America is a fun and informative read for any MMA fan who's interested in learning more about the roots of the sport. The best part is its on sale for only $5 at Paladin Press.

From the Wikipedia entry on Catch wrestling:

Catch wrestling is a style of submission wrestling. Catch wrestling is arguably the ancestor of modern grappling, professional wrestling, mixed martial arts and no-holds-barred competition. Catch wrestling's origins lie in a variety of styles, most notably the regional wrestling styles of Europe, particularly the England (e.g. Collar-and-elbow, Lancashire catch-as-catch-can wrestling etc.), Indian Sub-continent (e.g.pehlwani) and Iran (e.g. Varzesh-e Pahlavani). 'Collar-and-elbow' refers to the initial hold of the wrestlers. The term is sometimes used in a restricted sense to refer only to the style of professional wrestling as practiced in United States carnivals just before and after 1900.

Hewitt  focuses on that last category, telling the stories of the top wrestlers of the 1890 to 1940 era in the Unite States. Those of you who keep a close eye on our MMA History section will remember old school catch wrestlers like Ad Santel and Frank Gotch, both of whom are featured in Hewitt's book. 

In addition to Gotch and Santel, Hewitt devotes a great deal of time to Farmer Burns, Fred Beell, George Bothner, the shifty and deadly Charles Olson, Ed "Strangler" Lewis, John Pesak, Joe Stecher and Clarence Eklund. There are two chapters devoted to bouts between catch wrestlers and jiu jitsu grapplers featuring such Japanese notables as Katsukama Higashi, "Hako", Akitaro Ono, Nobushiro Satake, Tokugoro Ito and Mitsuyo Maeda (who would later travel to Brazil and teach jiu jitsu to the Gracie family).

The book also includes a chapter on bouts between boxers and wrestlers and a discussion of the feared "combination men" -- toughs who had mastered both boxing and wrestling and applied their knowledge in traveling carnivals where they would take on all comers.

The book is well sourced from newspapers and periodicals of the time and Hewitt does yeoman's work trying to untangle the layers of hype and kayfabe that predominated a sport that was becoming less and less legit throughout the period covered by the book.

But there was never a golden age of sporting competition, from the earliest chapters of the book, even top grapplers like Frank Gotch would travel under assumed names and take blue collar jobs from which to engage in challenge matches against local toughs. They worked much like a pool shark does today, playing down their professional caliber skills to skin locals who overestimated their abilities and were willing to lay down money.

The fearsome Charles Olson gets several interesting chapters detailing his habit of fighting under assumed names, including two tragic occasions where he broke the necks of other wrestlers in prize bouts. Things were definitely wild and wooly in the old days.

Its hard to get more than a feel for the techniques of the old catch wrestlers, since Hewitt focuses on the drama of the bouts and telling the stories of the contestants rather than breaking down their techniques. Its clear from some of the photographs that a kimura-like hold was often used but called a "double wrist-lock".

The most intriguing part of the book to me was the discussion of the old "leg wrestlers" like Joe Stecher and Clarence Eklund. This isn't about leg locks or knee bars. What these guys did was use their legs "like a second pair of arms" to control their opponent's head and arms. They also emphasized the use of leg scissors as a pain hold and sometimes even to get submissions.

Ultimately I enjoyed this book and if you're interested in the pre-history of MMA, it's easily worth $5 and the time it takes to read it.

A couple of installments back, I talked about the epic Frank Shamrock vs Enson Inoue fight from Vale Tudo Japan 1997. Before that bout, the UFC had told both fighters that the winner would get to face UFC 14 mini-tournament winner Kevin Jackson for the first ever UFC middleweight (199lbs) title.

Kevin Jackson wasn't your average 3-0 mma fighter. He was the 1992 Olympic gold medalist in Freestyle wrestling. He brought a level of athleticism and explosiveness to MMA that just hadn't been seen before. His MMA debut against John Lober at Extreme Fighting 4 was a frightening display of dominance. Jackson unleashed a rapid fire brand of ground and pound on the very tough Lober that left everyone watching in awe.

His run through a four-man tourny at UFC 14 was no less impressive. Going into the fight Jackson was a prohibitive favorite. Not only was he a dominating physical force with unmatched wrestling technique, but he had absolutely mauled John Lober -- a man who had soundly beaten Shamrock via a lop-sided decision less than a year earlier.

Shamrock had surprised many by surviving over ten minutes in Enson Inoue's mount, but no one expected him to be able to defend against Jackson's vicious top game assault. And it was a given that Jackson would be getting the takedown.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that a quick armbar would be the way to beat Jackson, but at the time it was an absolute stunner. The whole 0:16 is well worth a look.

Frank Shamrock gets a lot of praise for being the "first mixed martial artist", meaning that he was one of the first fighters to be a good submission as well as a good striker and had decent takedowns as well. As a reader noted in the comments, the UFC had already seen some fighters combine good wrestling or submissions with effective striking -- particularly Don Frye and Marco Ruas.

In my mind, Frank Shamrock's real triumph was introducing real game-planning to the sport. Starting with his epic win over Enson Inoue and continuing with this win over Kevin Jackson, he beat the toughest men in his weight class at the time by applying clever game plans more than anything else.

A key part of Shamrock's game-planning was his move away from big brother Ken's Lion's Den and to the new "Alliance" camp that he formed with Maurice Smith and Tsuyoshi Kohsaka. Here's a bit from Total MMA about how that camp was formed:

Maurice Smith fought future MMA legends Ken Shamrock and Bas Rutten in Pancrase, losing to both by submission in a combined 6:32. If Smith wanted a future in this sport, he knew he would need to revamp his game. Since his biggest problem was avoiding submissions on the ground, he struck up a friendship with Ken Shamrock and traveled to California to train with the Lion's Den. The UFC made Smith an offer to fight when he was preparing Shamrock for his first fight with Dan Severn. Smith knew he wasn't ready yet. "We did more talking than training, and when he went into the WWF, I got pawned off on Frank," Smith said. ...

"Maurice and I got together because Ken made a deal with Maurice. Maurice would train Ken in striking, and, in turn, Ken would train Maurice in submission wrestling," Frank Shamrock said. "So after Maurice had trained Ken in striking, when it came time for Ken to train Maurice he said, ‘Frank, go train Maurice.' Like he had me train everybody. So I trained Maurice, and during that time we realized that Maurice and I were way more alike and had the same ideas about fighting and the art of fighting. We developed a real close friendship that exists to this day."

Another fighter who would go on to great things made his UFC debut that night: Kazushi Sakuraba. We'll get into that in the full entry, plus some videos of fights from back in the day.

Photo via www.fcfighter.com

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We're blowing out some writer's block here and pressing forward with the MMA History series. I haven't done an installment since January, so new readers can be forgiven for not knowing the darn thing even exists. I've got links to all the earlier installments in the full entry so you can catch up.

The Top 50 MMA Matches series that I did with Sergio Non and Beau Dure got me focused on this again so my plan is just to power through.

One thing to keep in mind, the goal of this series (as opposed to the Top 50 Matches series) is to focus on what happened inside the ring/cage, not the outside. For our purposes here, its the fights that mattered, not the commercial or legal implications.

A couple of installments back, I talked about the three main MMA groups in Japan in 1996 -- Pancrase, RINGS and Shooto. For all their differences -- in short, Pancrase had a close-but-not-quite-MMA rule set, RINGS was still doing mainly worked (predetermined outcome) fights, and Shooto wasn't a promotion but rather an attempt to create a set of rules for a sport -- they had one thing in common. They were all founded by wrestlers who had either been trained in "Strong Style" wrestling directly by Antoni Inoki/Karl Gotch or by students of theirs.

This Sherdog piece sums it up best:

Gotch, who passed away in July, was instrumental in the development of MMA in Japan, including Pancrase. He headlined the first ever New Japan Pro Wrestling event in 1972 against Antonio Inoki, and would go on to become a trainer for New Japan. More importantly, Gotch's students included Akira Maeda, Satoru Sayama, Nobuhiko Takada and Yoshiaki Fujiwara. Maeda founded the RINGS Network and now plays a role in K-1 HERO'S, Sayama founded Shooto, and Takada played a pivotal role in PRIDE. Fujiwara's two top students, Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki broke away from pro-wrestling to found Pancrase in 1993.

By 1997, one of those Inoki students, Nobuhiko Takada, had run out of options as a pro wrestler. His promotion, UWFi had been absorbed by New Japan Pro-Wrestling and the reputation of UWFi as a "strong style" had been damaged through a series of worked losses to New Japan Wrestlers. More damagingly, Takada's student Yoji Anjoh had traveled to California to challenge Rickson Gracie after the latter's domination of Japanese fighters at Vale Tudo Japan 1994 and been humiliated by the Brazilian.

Takada was a massive popular draw in Japan -- more than 65,000 fans saw him lose the title to Shinya Hashimo in April 1996. So when he decided to attempt full-fledged MMA, debuting against Rickson Gracie, no less, at the first PRIDE event in October 1997 it propelled Japanese MMA into a whole new level of mass popularity in Japan.

What it meant from the inside-the-ring perspective that this series is about, is that catch wrestling and Japanese MMA in general had thrown up yet another champion only to be humiliated by Gracie jiu jitsu again. Revenge was coming in the form of an ugly ducking protege of Takada, but we'll talk about that fighter in a future installment.

Note: I did some serious updates to Part III of the series while working on this post. Check it out.

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In the wake of Brock Lesnar's win over Frank Mir at UFC 100 we are experiencing a focus on personality and theatrics in the fight game.  Rather than allow this to simply be passed over as a product of a former WWE star I will be taking a look back at the history of theatrics in combat sports in a multi-part series.  Part 1 (Clay/Liston) can be found here.

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Once upon a time, professional wrestling was a legitimate sport.  The world's champion was recognized around the world as one of the greatest athletes alive.  The pinnacle of this period (and also the end of the legitimate era of pro wrestling) came when American Heavyweight Champion Frank Gotch took on World Heavyweight Champion Georg Hackenschmidt (pictured).

Georg Hackenschmidt was a huge man who possessed incredible strength.  He was not as much of a technician as other men of his era but his natural strength translated well to his devastating bearhug.

Georg also had more to him than simply being a great athlete.  From WrestlingMuseum.com:

Realizing the value of showmanship, despite having to deal with bouts that were often true, legitimate contests, Hackenschmidt would often play up to the crowd, making him even more popular. He was known to perform elaborate exhibitions of strength before his matches, creating yet another reason for people to attend his matches.

Gotch was no slouch as a showman himself as he performed in vaudeville shows and acted in numerous plays.  The two of these men meeting was a huge story across the world.  The bout was held in Chicago and lasted over two hours before Frank was able to get his patented step-over toe hold and force Hackenschmidt to submit.  Following the bout Hackenschmidt claimed that Gotch was greased up which prevented him from grabbing any sort of hold (most notably the bearhug).  Yes, this was the original greasegate.  There were also accusations that Gotch rubbed oil in Georg's eyes, scratched, gouged and punched (all illegal moves).

This of course lead to a huge rematch, again taking place in Chicago - this time in front of a crowd of 30,000 at Comiskey Park.  In the lead up to the fight, Gotch allegedly paid a talented grappler by the name of Ad Santel to injure Hackenschmidt in training.  From Wikipedia:

The injury was so severe that Hackenschmidt nearly withdrew from the match, but agreed to go on with the match only after Gotch had fabricated the claim that he also had an injury (his neck), but was still willing to compete regardless. Before the match, the two had allegedly agreed on Gotch winning the match, but under the condition that Gotch would lose the first fall so that Hackenschmidt would look strong in defeat. Despite their agreement before the match, Gotch ended up double-crossing Hackenschmidt by quickly defeating him in two straight falls.

Gotch would go on to remain champion of the world for roughly five years.  This was one of the first high profile meetings of two entertaining personalities who were also the top of the sport in the history of combat sports and also one that changed sports promotion profoundly going forward as the value of controversy and theatrics as relates to ticket sales began to be fully understood.

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Sergio Non has a great piece up -- one I wish I'd written. He makes a top 9 list of pro-wrestlers who have impacted MMA: 

1. Kazushi Sakuraba
   UFC lightweight contender Kenny Florian last year said that if MMA had a Mt. Rushmore, Sakuraba's face should be on it. One of the sport's leading trade publications calls him "the greatest fighter in the history of MMA ... by such a wide margin that his skill level may never actually be met by another competitor for generations, if ever."
   Even UFC President Dana White wanted to borrow him from Pride, back when White still believed promotions should share fighters.
   Sakuraba earned that status by saving pro wrestling's reputation as a legitimate fighting style.
   
2. Ken Shamrock
3. Masakatsu Funaki
4. Akira Maeda
   Modern MMA arguably began when Maeda formed the Rings organization in 1991 after the collapse of his previous pro wrestling organization, the Universal Wrestling Federation. Maeda favored a pro-wrestling style called "shoot" wrestling, which emphasizes realistic-looking performances, and eventually Rings evolved into a full-fledged MMA group that groomed many fighters who later starred in Pride, K-1 Hero's and UFC.
5. Dan Severn
6. Kiyoshi Tamura
7. Kazuyuki Fujita
8. Nobuhiko Takada
9. Antonio Inoki
   He didn't engage in many actual fights, but he was already well on his way to becoming Japan's version of Hulk Hogan when he started a series of bouts against fighters in other disciplines, including a match-up with Muhammad Ali that was the most notable mixed martial arts fight of the 1970s. The action stunk because Inoki did nothing except kick Ali's legs and flop to his back, but nevertheless, it was a real fight that left the boxing legend's legs in the worst shape they'd ever been after a competition.
10. Bob Sapp
11. Satoru Sayama, aka Tiger Mask
    He never fought in MMA, but he founded Shooto, the oldest continuing organization in the MMA (world). Sayama and Maeda were rivals in UWF, and their very real feud eventually led to Sayama leaving to form Shooto.

UPDATE: As a result of reader feedback right here on BloodyElbow, Sergio has added two more to his list. They're #10 and 11 above.

Go read the whole thing. A couple of my history of MMA pieces relate: I: UFC 1 Pancrase meets BJJ, III: More on Japan, IV: Rickson Brings Jiu Jitsu Back to Japan, VII: A New Phase in the UFC, XV: Pancrase, RINGS, and Shooto 1996, and XVII: The Lion's Den Roars.

If I can ever settle down and focus the next couple of installments will focus on PRIDE and Sakuraba's great early fights and another piece on Akira Maeda and RINGS late evolution into MMA -- the 1999 and 2000 King of Kings tournaments that arguably set the course for MMA through the first decade of the 21st Century.