layman wrote:I always liked boxing but my views of MMA were pretty low due to its beginnings. I watched some fights in the 80's that looked just like glorified bar room brawls.
Saw some youtube vids recently and it has clearly come a long way!
Yeah, but there are both a good and a bad side about that. On one hand, the new rules that were added as time passed made sure MMA became an actual sport. Now athletes are professional. Their physical safety is protected, etc.
It wasn't exactly a proper sport back when it started, though. It was just a NHB competition, which was pretty brutal. But there was a purpose for that. Back in the 1920s, there was a huge rivalry between BJJ and Luta-Livre in Rio. And people from both styles wanted to prove their style was superior. So they started organizing these early MMA competitions. As they wanted to prove their styles were effective against anything, striking was part of it too, so those competitions attracted fighters from other backgrounds as well (boxing, karate, capoeira, etc).
Even when the UFC was created in the US, the purpose was similar: Rorion Gracie simply wanted to prove that his BJJ was more effective than other martial arts. And well, whatever the truth on the matter is, he managed to convince people that he was right when Royce Gracie won UFC 1, surprising everyone. And then, there was this boom in BJJ.
Nowadays, MMA is less NHB and more mixed, as the name implies. Practitioners choose one or more grappling styles, as well as one or more striking styles and compete professionally.
PoFo ethnic party statistics: http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8&p=14042520#p14042520