Grounds To Pound

A more lasting example is judo. Rooted in Japanese jiu-jitsu (itself a seventeenth-century coinage covering a range of grappling styles), the style incorporated ideas from everywhere, including Western wrestling. It also became the basis for the first twentieth-century attempt to create a truly interdisciplinary combat system, sambo, which blended folk-wrestling styles from across the Soviet empire before being codified by the Red Army in 1938.

The direct progenitor of North American mma, however, is vale tudo (anything goes) competition, which began in Brazil in the 1920s. For decades, vale tudo was dominated by Rio de Janeiro’s Gracie family, which created and refined a style called Brazilian jiu-jitsu (bjj), a blend of Japanese jiu-jitsu and judo that emphasized joint locks and chokeholds. The Gracies brought their sport to North America in 1993, staging the first Ultimate Fighting Championship, a round-robin tournament without weight classes or time limits, in an eight-sided cage at an arena in Denver.

ufc 1 was promoted not as a showcase of a merged style, but rather as a way to settle the debate over which martial art was best — a meme that had gained traction among young North American males thanks to Bloodsport, the 1988 genre flick that brought Jean Claude van Damme to fame, and to the releases of the wildly popular arcade games Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, in 1991 and 1992, respectively. ufc’s first champion was Royce Gracie, who easily defeated bigger opponents with his bjj submissions. bjj soon became the base style of choice for most fighters, with other disciplines layered in to create the amorphous mixed martial art seen today.

As the 1990s progressed, ultimate fighting developed both a cult following and a seamy reputation, the latter owing in no small part to Arizona senator John McCain’s high-profile campaign to ban the sport in all fifty US states. The disrepute began to change in 2001, when the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts were established in New Jersey, the first of many jurisdictions to adopt them. Among other strictures, the Unified Rules prohibited thirty-one especially violent actions, including headbutting, eye gouging, and striking the groin, spine, or back of the head. This made the sport friendlier to advertisers and, crucially, to legislators.

Quebec was the first Canadian province to stage mma events. Initially, the athletic commission there was loath to endorse the sport, so starting in the mid-1990s First Nations reserves acted as hosts, at first illegally and then under an agreement with the provincial regulatory body. These events — and the financial windfalls they were reaping — paved the way for Quebec to start officially sanctioning fights in 1998. Municipalities in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia later followed.

In Canada’s largest and stodgiest province, meanwhile, mma remains illegal despite an abundance of top-notch pugilists such as Nick Denis. Debate has been rancorous, with advocates charging that Ken Hayashi, head of the Ontario Athletic Commission, is gumming up the legalization process because he’s biased against the sport’s violence. With Hayashi adamant that sanction is not forthcoming, a group of Ontario promoters decided late last year to follow the Quebec model of legalization, setting up the province’s first-ever “legal” mma event on the Six Nations reserve near Hamilton.

It’s a crisp Halloween morning in southwestern Ontario, three days away from the Rumble on the Rez. A few doors down from Crystal Wedding Chapel and Drive-Thru, in a strip mall in the heart of London, the Punishment Pound has been operating at near-capacity since 8:30 a.m. Chester Post, one of three members of the Pound, finished his shift on the loading dock at a heating and cooling supply company at 4 a.m., and now he is here, launching lumbering high-impact kicks at a heavy bag while Gaston Jarry, his teammate, wrestling coach, and boss on the dock, hugs it in place. The room, shared with a karate club, is littered with mats and pads. Long wooden bo staffs hang on a white wall embellished with painted belts and martial arts platitudes.

Like Denis, Post is twenty-four. His parents brought him to Canada from the Netherlands when he was one, moving the family from town to town as they operated small businesses and farms to make ends meet. An imposing six-three, 210 pounds, he sports a shaved head and two silver barbells that radiate from his eyebrows like antennae.

Post’s mma career to date has been a Forrest Gumpesque series of unlikely encounters, from the way he got into the sport (by hunting down Gary Goodridge after seeing a tape of him fighting in one of the earliest ufcs and convincing the Barrie-based brawler to train him) to inflicting a concussion and a broken eye socket on a former wwe wrestler, to his knockout win over a 525-pound sumo wrestler who had to be weighed in on a truck scale. Next up: headlining Ontario’s first stab at an official mma card.

Clad in bright blue and yellow shorts with a stitched-on cobra poised front and centre, Post halts his training session and begins acting as a takedown dummy and coach for Shaun Hogan, the newly arrived third member of the Pound. When they finish, Post sits down at the edge of the mat, revealing an easy smile and a soft-spokenness that belie the latent aggression he says led him to the sport. More than someone who enjoys hurting people, he sounds like someone who has often been hurt. He talks about betrayals by promoters, about wanting to shelter his teammates from the harsher side of the business. About needing to take a punch before he can focus during a bout. He keeps fighting, he says, because he is “a pain addict.”