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Mirko was in K-1 for years & then got into MMA in 2001. Ended up developing good TDD over time.
Pure strikers in MMA as late as 2001
- Thread starter KBE6EKCTAH_CCP
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The evolution had already happened both in Japan and the UFC with strikers that were good on the ground, or good enough to win. Mo Smith shocked the small MMA world before the time you speak of (97). Those guys weren't good enough on the ground to beat the elite, but others were.
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I think so, lol. But he trained by a legit grappler from what I understand. There was also the Dutch guy (name escapes me) who was a very accomplished grappler who wanted to fight the Gracies. The problem was he was like 50 when the UFC started but he had a big size advantage over Royce.
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No he ain't. Dude hasn't fought since 21 and he's 38. And Ilia did us the greatest favor by tucking him in for nap time.
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Shit i should have researched Semmy Schilt better. Still my point stands, dude looked like a fish out of water vs Barnett.
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There are counter examples of course. But for one Alex Pereira there are 15 strikers that got humiliated on the ground.
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I get that. But didn't these guys watch some MMA before going to the UFC/Pride? Didn't they try some grappling prior, enough to realise that they would get humiliated on the ground?
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probably because strikers can knock people out before the grappling part ever happens.
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Doesn't mean much more than "there are levels to this shit".
Josh is a hell of a grappler.
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Fair enough. What about the overall point i am making though
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Semmy is a long time karateka. He was a European full contact karate champion before becoming the King of Pancrase.
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That fight with Lawler had him being the cannon for 90% of it.
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I don't agree with that, neither of them were pure strikers by 2001.
Semmy especially I think was a pretty good submission grappler by that point, his problem was though he was facing a shark tank of elite grapplers at HW in Barnett, Nog, Fedor and Sergei. Someone like Gan Mchee though could do nothing to him on the ground and then ended up being subbed.
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Yeah i messed up my thread with Semmy. But you do see my point though, we kept on seeing strikers with nonexistant / inadequate ground knowledge very late. Gilbert Yvel in Pride as I said is a good example.
In b4 Gilbert Yvel was actually a sub expert.
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He wasnt nearly as good as Semmy but I would not say he was totally green, by 2001 he'd been fighting in MMA for 4 years.
Better examples are probably the K-1 fighters who were pushed into MMA fights with almost no prep, hard to tell exactly with Mirko as he actually won vs Fujita very quickly and I think Hunt was also clearly not clueless on debut but Leko, Aerts, etc looked clueless.
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Holland (Fuck "The Netherlands", I ain't speaking in Dutch) was the first Euro country to develop a taste in "freefight" and mixing Kb with Catch/grappling through the Akira Maeda - Jon Bluming connection.
In fact Jon's student Chris Dolman was created the first stable of Dutch apprentices, which included Dick Vrij, Gilbert Yvel and Valentijn Overeem to fight in RINGS. Bas Rutten got interested in MMA after being chocked bad by this guys. The thing is that there is a very limited number of RING spots so these guys kept fighting in KB, being their main style and bread and butter.
There were exceptions. Dolman himself was a very decorated Judoka ans Samboist. Remco Pardoel was a Jujutsu champ with some judo accolades in his youth. But most traditional martial arts shed away from NHB.
TL;DR: They have some schooling, but lacked freestyle wrestling and BJJ, so, in the early days "grappling" was mostly guillotines and leglocks. Is not that they were pure strikers, some of them just kind of sucked in grappling.
Valentijn Overeem beat big names with his grappling though. and Semmy had like eight submission wins. Barnett is the most accomplished HW Catch wrestler in MMA history, and had a folkstyle/collegiate wrestling background. He was a tough cookie.
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Only Bas Rutten did. Dudes like Gilbert Yvel, Sammy Shilt, Bob Shriver and others were stuck mainly in dutch kickboxing mode.
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As much as I have to give Schilt a pass, I don t think i can be convinced that Yvel was not an absolute can on the ground.
