This post isn’t going to be long.
Lots of people who want to claim that Kosen-Judo(Judo before the olympics fucked it up) was still inferior to BJJ in terms of the quality of it’s overall grappling and ground work. Never mind Kimura, Mifune, Maeda were doing De La Riva guard and X-guard long before modern BJJ players did it, they simply don’t want to admit they understood NeWaza before BJJ.
Often they attribute Kimura beating Helio due to the fact Kimura was much bigger than Helio was. And yeah, Kimura was big. He’s wasn’t just big, he was basically really muscular too, making it easy to understand how Helio could be technically better on the ground, but Kimura just smashed him.
Okay I can grant that.
But again, much of BJJ history though openly available to the public, you can find this information on Wikipedia with plenty of citations, and then googling much of the Wikipedia information about these guys tends to yield more articles.
Yet it isn’t generally well known even to most BJJ players. There are guys much more technically skilled than me, black belts and world champions that don’t even know there was a lineage of BJJ that wasn’t related to the Gracies.
Part of that ignorance is the fact that Helio wasn’t the only BJJ black belt that Kimura defeated.
Valademar Santanna was a BJJ black belt under Helio Gracie. Who fought Helio in a Vale Tudo match and knocked him out. Santanna wasn’t weak and frail, and he wasn’t small. Santanna had defeated Helio by defending against submissions and literally kicking Helio in the head and knocking him out, because Santanna was also a boxer and capoeira practitioner. He could strike.
Kimura has a submission win against Santanna, and has one draw.
This is a fight Helio officially won. But there wasn’t the typical result where a Gracie basically held someone down in guard, slowly working to a submission. Helio had a hard time getting anything done.
THe first time Kato fought Helio it was a draw. Helio couldn’t get any submission on and Kato generally seemed to stay on top. Kato isn’t that much bigger than Helio. This wasn’t a Kimura vs Helio situation or a roided out ken Shamrock vs Royce Gracie (I totally side with Royce over Ken Shamrock.)
The second fight, Helio won was because both fighters went out of the ring. The referee tried to call them back, but while Kato was stunned, Helio choked him unconscious. The foul wasn’t recognized and Helio was declared the winner.
Not only was the victory contreversial, but Kato wasn’t floundering on the ground or outpowering Helio. He threw him around and generally got good positions.
What’s the point of this?
Functionally Kosen Judo is largely dead. The ground work of Kosen Judo is found more in modern BJJ gyms rather than Judo schools. One can argue Sambo has also largely preserved Kosen-Judo techniques. We just never saw them until recently because western exposure to Sambo even in the 90s wasn’t high skilled guys, mostly Olympic Judoka that dabbled in it. Only recently are we seeing some really qualified people teaching the art, particularly Combat Sambo.
But that’s sambo not Judo.
The reason this topic is even worth talking about is the fact that no one has created anything new. What seems to be new in martial arts is almost always rediscovery. Or things falling out of fashion, forgotten, until brought back, and we think it’s new.
I have a book on Chin-Na(Chinese locking) from the late 1800s that shows guys doing closed guard and sweeps from guard, translated by Tim Cartmill.
I have another book also translated by Tim Cartmill on Chinese wrestling. No ground work here. Just a Tai chi/Hsing I/Pa Kua guy using grappling techniques which looked a great deal lot like No Gi Judo.
I have a Kushti-Wrestling book that shows leg locks, submissions, what essentially looks like Catch Wrestling but goofy looking desi brown dudes rather than British and American wrestlers.
What's the deal with Adeel? 