Читать книгу Ali vs. Inoki. The Forgotten Fight That Inspired Mixed Martial Arts and Launched Sports Entertainment онлайн

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Until 393 A.D., when Theodosius I, the last man to rule the entirety of the Roman Empire, abolished gladiatorial combat and pagan festivals including the Olympics, pankration created many star athletes celebrated by the Greeks. Mixed fighting held a prominent place in that part of the world for more than a thousand years, yet at the return of the Olympic games to Greece in 1896, bareknuckle brawlers capable of punching and grappling weren’t welcome. Not that it mattered much. These types of fights persisted as humans across a multitude of generations, regardless of the social mores of the day, were compelled to participate in or watch sanctioned violence.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Martin “Farmer” Burns, whose headstone at the St. James Cemetery in Toronto, Iowa, reads “World’s Champion Wrestler,” was the man to challenge. Shy of 175 pounds yet incredibly strong, Burns was the obligatory bear on the mat during his heyday, boasting a twenty-inch neck that allowed him to perform carnival circuit stunts like dropping six feet off a platform wearing a noose, as if he’d been convicted of a capital crime, while whistling “Yankee Doodle.” Burns’ power and skill made him an effective enough grappler into his fifties, handling almost anyone with the “catch-as-catch-can” wrestling style—an influential 1870s British creation that made full use of pinning positions and, absorbing what worked from other parts of the world, a menagerie of painful submissions holds.