MMA, or mixed martial arts, has only been an official sport in the United States since 1993 when the Ultimate Fighting Championship emerged as a pay-per-view event; this new sport offered a unique fighting opportunity that, originally, only had basic rules banning things such as eye-gouging and biting. Though this specific sport has only recently emerged, the idea of mixed martial arts and unarmed combat competitions existed thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece and has since reappeared in Europe, Asia, and South America.
The first historical example of no-bars combat was the sport of pankration in Ancient Greece; derived from the Greek word meaning strength, pankration was an all-out, one-on-one fight that only ended in submission or death by one of the contending parties. As it was practiced in most of Ancient Greece, the sport’s only rules banned eye-gouging and biting, but in the city-state of Sparta, even these attacks were legal; pankration arose from the combination of wrestling and boxing, and the contestants in this sport were brutal, ruthless, and never gave up. One notable case of perseverance in a match was when the contestant by the name of Arrhichion won the contest but died in the process. Desperate to break the hold he was in, Arrhichion broke the toe of his opponent, forcing him to submit because of the pain; however, when Arrhichion was named the winner, it was discovered that he had died in the bout. Throughout the years, contests similar to pankration have arisen throughout the world, but none, until modern times, have been as popular as pankration.
Mixed martial arts, as is used as a term in the United States, arose from the need to describe the fighting style of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. As the UFC offered opportunity for different styles of fighters to compete against one another, the logical name for this new style was mixed martial arts; fighters in these championships are generally trained in various styles of fighting such as judo, karate, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or Greco-Roman wrestling as the modern purpose of MMA is to combine the best aspects of every form of martial-art and fighting sport into a style of unarmed combat that is most effective in an actual fight. Conclusively, though most people assume that MMA is a unique fighting style, it is actually a collection of the best aspects of thousands of years of combat sport.
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