Posted on 03/27/2008 7:16:22 AM PDT by Callahan
CARTHAGE, Mo. - Ultimate fighting was once the sole domain of burly men who beat each other bloody in anything-goes brawls on pay-per-view TV.
But the sport often derided as "human cockfighting" is branching out.
The bare-knuckle fights are now attracting competitors as young as 6 whose parents treat the sport as casually as wrestling, Little League or soccer.
Truly barbaric behavior.
Our civilization is falling so far and so fast I sometimes wonder if it deserves to survive.
You and me both. We are as a virus...feeding off of ourselves. The arrival of the macrophages cannot be far off.
Either bring back wrestling scholarships so we can have true scholar athleats...
OR
just scap it all and start little league rollerball.
(the original not the pansy BS remake type)
What’s worse, I hear kids are playing tackle football in their backyards. The Horror!
Sports are a dangerously addictive activity marketed to children. Thousands of children are injured by sports each year. I guess we should ban sports.
Please folks. MMA is a sport and an exciting one, so it’s no surprise kids want to give it a shot. There are rules and refs. Statistically, it’s safer than boxing. The ground & pound aspect that so freaks out the uninitiated isn’t even allowed in this kiddie league.
Ah, the slope is slippery.
I wonder how the gladiatorial games got started...
Did you even bother to read the article?
Of course you can read the deadline and lead in from Liberal AP or you can read the piece and then make an informed judgement.
When my son is of sufficient age he will be trained in these arts so when the time comes he will be the one to choose if he fights or not and if he has to it will be closer to his terms than whomever is bothering him.
This one has parental involvement, coaches and teams and the kids learn lessons about keeping it in the gym.
Guns kill more people than MMA so maybe we should ban those first.
Anyone? Anyone?
Didn’t think so.....
Absolutely nothing barbaric about it.
MMM is an extremely technical sport that builds character and discipline. It blends wrestling, boxing, and many martial arts.
I think its a great activity for all ages.
Michael Vick should have raised kids instead of dogs. He wouldn’t be sitting in jail right now.
My BJJ instructor has a kids and juniors class.
Its a merit based martial art that's totally different from the silly karate and Taekwondo classes that soccer moms drop their kids off to be baby sat at so they can come home with a new belt every week.
You guys never got in trouble for fighting?
I don’t believe it.
It is the same doctrine that goes with RKBA. Do we cede the means to protect ourselves by relying upon police or do we protect ourselves when danger emerges?
Yeah, kids getting in fights in school and on the playground are a completely new development, and something that is part of society's perpetual downfall.
Your point is proven.
This is nothing new. In 8th grade the school bully went after me like this weekly, unless I paid him off. Last I heard, he was killed in prison.
Two thoughts on this:
1) Kids already hack around wrestling with each other like Hulk Hogan in a very unstructured way. MMA will be safer than that. If anything it is a positive development that I hope displaces the junk they see on WWF and its ilk.
2) Parents are kidding themselves if they think their kids will learn anything particularly useful for defending themselves from this activity. They won’t — real fights do not have rules or pads and you don’t score points or have a referee or mats.
If I were still a kid this would bore me to tears. Six years old? Don’t six-year-old kids ride bikes and build tree forts anymore?
We will reap what we sow.
I think you're quite wrong on this.
Someone trained in MMA will have a verifiable advantage against someone who doesn't. No, there aren't rules in real life, but someone who thinks that being strong and swinging their arms will win a fight will be surprised when they're taken to the ground and choked unconscious by someone half their size.
You’re really short on details.
what is MMA?
What IS allowed? ARe gloves worn?
None of it makes sense for any child imo.
Now, a good style like Krav Magda can some in handy when you are facing a multiple opponent attack since going to the ground is the last thing you want to do when there are more than one people looking to beat your ass.
Learning self defense is wrong for a kid?
Krav Maga is also good for situations involving opponents with weapons. How you defend against someone's punches and how you defend against a knife are two very different things.
Kali or other forms of Filipino martial arts are great as well. Those people are some of the best in the business when it comes to knife fighting and by default, open hand.
I did a weekend with Tom Sotis about 10 years ago and that system was unreal.
That’s such a dumb statement and obviously from someone who doesn’t watch or understand the sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).
As a martial artist who’s fought in tourneys in the US and Canada while younger, I am extremely passionate about the sport of MMA. It is a sport, not “human cockfighting.” There are rules all fighters must follow. Failure to do so results in disqualification.
MMA today has considerably evolved from its early years during UFCs 1-4 15 years ago. All leagues follow the rules of state sanctioning organizations. Every match has EMP and sport doctors at ringside. AFAIK, there have only been two fatalities WORLDWIDE in the past 15 years, and both deaths may have been caused by pre-existing medical conditions. The risk of a traumatic brain injury is vastly lower in MMA than in boxing. This is due to two reasons: the smaller gloves gives more immediate knockouts than the larger boxing gloves that batter the brain, boxers deliver much greater impact force from a standing position than those on the ground. Sure fighters get injured, but so do boxers in every boxing match and so do many other athletes in many other contact sports like football, rugby, and wrestling.
MMA arose from the need to know which martial arts fighting style was the best. Bruce Lee’s vision of combining the best in different styles can be considered one of the precursors to what MMA has become.
An MMA fighter has to develop expertise in three very different categories of fighting, which used to be isolated by differing styles: STRIKING, GRAPPLING, and SUBMISSION. Dismissing any one of these three results in an incomplete artist, and one that cannot be considered a “well-rounded” fighter.
Ask yourself, WHY do people take martial arts? There are many reasons, but a significant one is “self-defense.” Well, boxing is a fantastic self-defense skill to become an expert in, but what happens when the boxer is wrestled to the ground (which occurs in nearly all street encounters)? The same goes for wrestling, What happens to the wrestler who gets kneed in the gut during a clinch? What happens to a joint-lock specialist before he gets a chance to close with his boxer opponent?
Which is better, Taekwondo or Karate? Kung Fu or Boxing? Muay Thai or Greco-Roman Wrestling? These arguments have been going on for generations and now can be answered truthfully: NONE OF THE ABOVE. A person needs to become a well-rounded MMA fighter, expert in Striking, Grappling, and Submission.
Finally, there’s no more baloney. Anyone can put their respective style up to the test. No more of the BS like the Kiai Masters. No more of the imaginary Kung Fu or Taekwondo purists. No pure style can possibly compete against an expert MMA fighter and this goes double for undisciplined brawlers and street fighters.
I hesitate to mention ancient Greece to you. Not to mention the fact that the kids were naked when they wrestled.
A traditional martial education along with a martial art breeds out aggression, and turns a fighter into a warrior. Many of the BJJ schols I've seen do not ever teach people how to fight, rather, they teach them to be fighters.
Sadly, the traditional aspects of American M.A.s are disappearing. But yeah, you do have a point though. The TKD schools are the worst when it comes to handing out blackbelts.
> Someone trained in MMA will have a verifiable advantage against someone who doesn’t.
...depending on whether or not that “someone who doesn’t” has no training at all, or has been trained in something more useful like KM or CQB. If the former I agree with this assertion, if the latter I disagree.
> No, there aren’t rules in real life, but someone who thinks that being strong and swinging their arms will win a fight will be surprised when they’re taken to the ground and choked unconscious by someone half their size.
That much is true to an extent. And it misses the point: the kids aren’t learning MMA, they are learning a subset of it.
I doubt the kid are taught to choke their opponent out — or do anything much that can really hurt their opponent. So that leaves basic grappling, a few trips and throws and perhaps a few joint locks.
They will be getting great exercise, sure. They will be improving their overall flexibility, true. There’s nothing wrong with learning a few throws and locks and grappling techniques either. And it will build their interest in MMA or BJJ which they can indulge when they grow up. Fantastic.
But all of that is *miles* away from learning how to defend yourself. So parents are kidding themselves if they think that is one of the likely outcomes of this.
That said, I think it is great.
There, I fixed it for you. :) (I'm a sucker for the Korean arts.)
It's sort of like when the Power Rangers were popular back in the early '90's. Kids were going around doing misplaced roundhouse kicks horrible punches to other kids. They didn't know what they were doing, and every time they tried to do one of those fantastic moves that the Power Rangers did, they ended up flat on their butts. The risk for injury was a lot lower than it was for MMA.
In MMA, chokeholds, joint locks and "ground 'n pound" are commonplace. Imagine a kid that doesn't know what the heck he's doing a blood choke on another kid, not realizing that he needs to do it correctly in order to make sure that he's not going to kill the other kid, but he ends up killing the other kid. It's a lot more dangerous than some idiot kid trying to do a leaping roundhouse on another kid and then falling on his butt after he can't keep his balance. This is why it's a major concern. These kids aren't trained mixed martial artists and they will hurt somebody.
And what's worse, these kids only learn a few moves from MMA, not the theory that teaches the moves, so they're going to be screwed if they're in a situation where they need to use the theory behind the moves.
> And what’s worse, these kids only learn a few moves from MMA, not the theory that teaches the moves, so they’re going to be screwed if they’re in a situation where they need to use the theory behind the moves.
I agree completely with you there.
> These kids aren’t trained mixed martial artists and they will hurt somebody.
If they have pads and supervision and a ref and rules that stops all the ground & pound and chokes &tc? That seems to be what the story indicates is what is happening.
I am of the view that its value as a self-defense technique for kids is highly questionable. And if it is a structured activity supervised by adults, it is really only a harmless pretend subset of MMA. It certainly isn’t the real thing.
We are rapidly devolving into the LCD society (lowest common denominator)
I feel the same way. In many ways, I put animals on a higher plane than humans.
This is NOT self-defense. It is ruthless fighting!
Wake up!
So we are no better for 2000 years of civilzation?
Just like kiddie Kempo isn’t the real thing that grown ups study. You start somewhere though.
MMA combines judo/jujitsu, kick boxing, wrestling take downs and submission styles. I can sign my kid up to take any of those disciplines at a host of martial arts centers. In karate you spar, in boxing you hit one another, in judo you toss one another around the mat, etc., etc.
Will you please stop spouting off about things about which you are uneducated?
You have no idea what you are talking about. Your complaints reveal the feminization of society.
Oh, you cannot reason with the righteous. I think that PA blue is rubbing off on him. I’ll let my kid to MMA before I’ll let him play football.
Maybe I shouldn't tell him that when I was a kid, I never wore a helmet when I rode my bike. He might have a heart attack.
I’ll let my kid to MMA before I’ll let him play football.
I think it'd be a great family activity, and a chance to blow off a little steam at each other.
> Just like kiddie Kempo isn’t the real thing that grown ups study. You start somewhere though.
I agree — no arguments there. Kids should do these things for sure, if that’s something they want to do.
I contend that they will not learn anything useful by way of self-defense until much later in these studies, when they are older. And that parents are kidding themselves if they think they will.
The school bully is not going to wait around while the kid does his kata. And if the smaller kid is misfortunate enough to get the bully on the ground, he will soon learn that “the bigger they are, the harder they fall — on top of you.” The smaller kid will not have the skills to make it happen any other way.
Not until later in his studies.
A 6-7 year old isn’t really going to learn much of the finer points of anything. But I completely disagree that the falling on top of you thing is something to fear either.
> A 6-7 year old isn’t really going to learn much of the finer points of anything. But I completely disagree that the falling on top of you thing is something to fear either.
A 6-7 year old kid is far, far better advised to run away from bullies, screaming, rather than trying to take them on.
To that extent, the most helpful thing for them to know is how to break out of a hold.
That is what I teach, anyrate.
But some times you don’t get to choose when you fight or when you don’t. Best to avoid one whenever possible but it doesn’t always work that way.
> But some times you don’t get to choose when you fight or when you don’t. Best to avoid one whenever possible but it doesn’t always work that way.
I don’t disagree with that at all. I maintain, tho’, that this teeny subset of MMA is not going to help them much in a fight — it won’t.
If they have to fight at that age, they would be better served doing what kids would do naturally: biting, scratching, slapping, gouging at eyes, pulling hair, kicking — rather than trying to apply some silly wrist lock or do some fancy throw against a galloot twice their size who will likely be doing all the above and more.
That's libertarianism in a nutshell.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.