For those who met Ken Shamrock...

[mraa1]

I would say that combat sambo has had different origins and iterations. For example the ethnic folks of Koryo-sam (Russian/Korean mix) took the sambo and mixed it with what they knew with Taekwondo and Tang Soo Do. Of course this is not a good answer to give because it lacks proof which is hard to provide due to the time and how secretive people were in that part of the world.

However one combat sambo origin story can be found and traced easy. It starts with Victor Koga who brought combat sambo in to Japan. One of his famous students went on to start Shooto because they were inspired by the idea of hybrid fighting. From there, it gave birth and inspiration to Shootfighting which is the style Ken Shamrock used which revolves around striking and grappling.




Victor Koga - Wikipedia


Gokor Chivichyan was a sambo fighter who earned the adoration and respect of Judo gene lebell when he came to America and defeated all of Genes black belts back to back. From there, they started a local fight team. But back then there was no internet or anything in particular and so fighters and fight teams were not being recorded.

Karo Parisyan at 14 years old ( 1996) was fighting in MMA ( Shootfighting/vale tudo/No Holds barred) back then and it was a thing that was very obscure but hybrid fighting did exist. They had fighters before Karo Parisyan that fought in MMA.

Thank you brother, much appreciated. Anytime I do some (admittedly half-hearted) digging into Sambo, I don't get much further than its very early foundation by those 2 Russian soldiers back in pre-WW2 Russia and then its influence in modern MMA. I remember reading that those two fellas (can't remember the names) simultaneously and independently developed their own respective mixed styles but I didn't realize there were more. From what you are saying it sounds almost like there are regional versions of it, which surprised me at first, but considering the diversity of the population and the Russian love of a good scrap, that would make sense.

But again it seems there is dearth of info in the middle of those two points in history. That's why I was inquiring about the striking aspect.

Had no idea about Victor Koga either, so thank you again. As far as I knew, Volk Han was the guy who put Sambo on the map in Japan.

 

[JSN]

I just finished this.

He sounds like an asshole, randomly taking advantage of his 'students' by beating the living shit out of them for real.

Same here. Not the kind of person you’d want to spend time with.

 

[MikeyB]

If you were wearing a gi, would've been a whole different story. Those pajamas are Ken's kryptonite

I was in the airport I wasn't expecting jui jitsu to happen. I should be more like John Danaher

 

[LazaRRus]

I saw Ken Shamrock at a grocery store in Miami once. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.

The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.

When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

Never gets old

 

[Joe]

He seemed pretty wound up too tight

 

[fatmanthenextbatman]

Met him once at a King of the Cage event at Soboba Casino in So Cal years ago. He was signing autographs and was nothing but smiles and coolness.

 

[90 50]

Was he really a bad guy? I noticed every person who met him at an event t's that he was rude and disrespectful.

Was this due to him being an active UFC star or was it his personality?

Did anyone have a positive experience meet ing ken?

Yeah I first met him at City Streets when they had fights. There back in the day in Houston. Was cool and huge AF back then.

That was in the dark ages of mma though. Somewhere between ufc 2 and 3 iirc

 

[Ogata]

I agree with you but there were certainly more hybrid fighters before fedor but no one as great as fedor.

shamrock neutralized gracies game in part 2 and just stayed in gracies realm and beat him up under the current rule set at the time.

it should have been unlimited. They had a set time. They kept adding extra time and Royce was always much worse for the wear.

there first two fights established the time and how they matched up.

when shamrock became a Victim and a basically a version of bob sapp. That’s no an accurate representation of who he was as a fighter.

even before ken lost to Royce the first fight. He was capable on his feet in the ground and knew his way about submissions and he showed it many times.

Royce was better when they first fought. Ken fought to a draw despite doing more damage in the second fight.

but even to this day. You to your shitty bjj school. And guys will complain wen they lay in there back and if you just step in ther leg or ankle and have two hands to fight a leg.

they act like it’s illegal. Or in guard and control a leg with your weight on inner knee or calf. Even I. 2021. They act like it’s a cheat code.
You can look at the ruotolo sp? Vs Nicky Ryan. How you can see some idiot like me can exploit some bjj. No go. Positions that are so obvious that very few are catching onto.

So true about Ken standing up. He had real good thai kickboxing skills and had MEAN leg kicks that was on my par with a real solid thai boxer. I think it was the injury that messed him up.

I highlighted the bold, I just want to understand correctly that BJJ schools don't want to try new things?

This what I hear, I train recreationally with a sambo team and they mention that some BJJ places have no sense of adventure or are unwilling to try new moves. I don't know how true it is but I take their word for it and it sounds the same with your experience.

 

[Ogata]

Thank you brother, much appreciated. Anytime I do some (admittedly half-hearted) digging into Sambo, I don't get much further than its very early foundation by those 2 Russian soldiers back in pre-WW2 Russia and then its influence in modern MMA. I remember reading that those two fellas (can't remember the names) simultaneously and independently developed their own respective mixed styles but I didn't realize there were more. From what you are saying it sounds almost like there are regional versions of it, which surprised me at first, but considering the diversity of the population and the Russian love of a good scrap, that would make sense.

But again it seems there is dearth of info in the middle of those two points in history. That's why I was inquiring about the striking aspect.

Had no idea about Victor Koga either, so thank you again. As far as I knew, Volk Han was the guy who put Sambo on the map in Japan.

Anytime bro, I love spreading the sambo gospel. My instructors instructor trained with one of the founders. One thing to mention is, sambos core if you will does come from those two Russian soldiers, one got his black belt from Jigaro Kano himself and the other one ventured in to Japanese jujitsu. However, they also picked up technique from karate and they also picked up moves from Armenian wrestling called Kokh and Romanian wrestling form called trîntǎ ( always fascinated with the name) as well as Mongolia.

There is a sambo movie made in 1983 that is loosely based on the development of sambo. It has English subtitles:

 

[king of theRing]

if any of you noobs actually watched season 3 of tuf, he always seemed incredibly arrogant throughout the entire series.

I mean the guy made his team watch clips of him fighting.

To be fair, they watched the whole event he maim evented... lol

 

[Dusty Rhodes]

Thought he was a legend in the 90's,
met him in the 2000's.

Absolute clown.

Lmao awesome av.

Sounds like you didnt "get off"

 

[Dusty Rhodes]

how does every WWF wrestler from the Attitude Era return back to WWE at least one time since the 90's except for Ken Shamrock? lol makes you wonder...

Must have something to do with HHH. Ken showed up in '97 and was immediately main event, while HHH was still a jobber

 

[Deleted member 449757]

I might be mistaken when it comes to the "this guy knew, this guy didn't" part because I only read the book when a friend lent it to me, I didn't buy it... so this is all from memory.
I'm certain that he says that Bas wasn't aware that the Pancrase guys allegedly told Ken to go easy on him and make it last a bit, and he talks about how if he could do it again he wouldn't have thrown the Suzuki fights, but don't quote me on the Funaki ones...

This one i actually believe 100 %. I have done quite some research on the whole Pancrase / work situations and from all i can conclude, they only worked fight if they absolutely needed a certain outcome for political reasons (like the Funaki/Shamrock choke situation). What happened a lot though was that top guys intentionally extended matches against inferior opponents (who weren't aware and fought as hard as they could) to add to "ticket value". See, when they tried this whole style first at "Pancrase: Yes, We Are Hybrid Wrestlers 1", the combined time of all fights on the card was like 14 minutes. They charged above average though for tickets, so to fix this, you saw a lot of matches against jobbers where top guys were clearly going easy on them. When you watch some of them (Masakatsu Funaki vs. Gregory Smit for example), you can clearly see Funaki is turtling with no intention to advance position and is letting Smit ride him for like a minute. Then he takes him down and chokes him out in like 3 seconds. Those things even led to accidents some times, like when Jason DeLucia beat Funaki with a kneebar, i think Funaki wanted to give him the kneebar and rope-escape but couldn't make it.

When you look at the first fight between Funaki and Bas Rutten, there was this infamous incident where Funaki was in Ruttens guard and Bas accidentally hit him in the face with a closed fist. Funaki got pissed and tapped him out in like 2 seconds. So it's plausible to me that Bas in his early fights before he became a top guy was also one of those people who had other fighters try to make the fights longer.

Well, aside from the "all the fights I lost were worked" part.

That might be Ken's convenient truth, lol

Yeah according to this latest bout, until the day of the fight, Ken thought that this UFC thing wasn't going to be a legit competition.

He also complains that the Gracie wouldn't allow him to wear his shoes in the first Royce fight, which threw him off his game and blabla.
And that the second fight was supposed to have no time limit, but it was changed 5 min before the fights in a "take it or leave it, and we declare Royce winner" kind of situation, like Ali pulled against Antonio Inoki when his team said "no grappling or no fight".

But that's just a small part of the book, which is too bad since it's the part that I was the most interested in ^^'

Oh well.

I can see how a guy who worked in a whole bunch of worked-shoot promotions got used to people pretending it was all legit right before the event when they'll tell the participants "alright, here is what we're gonna do ...", but the no shoes thing is a total excuse. Apart from the fact that he didn't even try to take down Gracie, he was allowed to wear shoes in the tournament. It would have only made it illegal for him to kick ("there are no rules ... except you can't kick with shoes, lol" - probably someone at the UFC). That's why he wore shoes in his subsequent UFC bouts.

It's a similar situation with the second Gracie fight. I wouldn't be surprised if it's true they changed the rules right before the fight (he is fighting a Gracie afterall), but it's still his fault for doing jackshit for 30 minutes in Gracie's guard. In the overtime, he beat Gracie into a pulp in like 5 minutes, so why not start a little earlier?

 

[Richard Fannin]

I can see how a guy who worked in a whole bunch of worked-shoot promotions got used to people pretending it was all legit right before the event when they'll tell the participants "alright, here is what we're gonna do ...", but the no shoes thing is a total excuse. Apart from the fact that he didn't even try to take down Gracie, he was allowed to wear shoes in the tournament. It would have only made it illegal for him to kick ("there are no rules ... except you can't kick with shoes, lol" - probably someone at the UFC). That's why he wore shoes in his subsequent UFC bouts.

It's a similar situation with the second Gracie fight. I wouldn't be surprised if it's true they changed the rules right before the fight (he is fighting a Gracie afterall), but it's still his fault for doing jackshit for 30 minutes in Gracie's guard. In the overtime, he beat Gracie into a pulp in like 5 minutes, so why not start a little earlier?

First, thanks for that great post
I don't want to get too much into Pancrase, because I'm in the process of rewatching as many events as I can chronologically and I might write something today that I will regret tomorrow when I get to the next events...
I had already watched plenty of fights of course, but not always full events, so I'm learning new stuff everyday these days...

(sadly I'm getting to the part where it's difficult to find certain events... my kingdom for 2006's Pancrase 165: Blow 6 )

But you're absolutely right about Funaki's loss to Jason Delucia, I had already heard about that particular breakdown.

I had also read several times that Funaki's loss to Rickson Gracie might have been another "accident", because of the weird way Funaki let go of his standing guillotine.
To quote TVTropes:

There is the theory that his loss against Rickson Gracie was another backfired carrying. While having a standing guillotine choke secured in the corner, you can clearly see Funaki looking at his cornermen and nodding before releasing the hold and allowing Rickson going to the ground. Many a Japanese insider noted that it looked fishy, and even Hidehiko Yoshida, who was in the announcer table during the match, sounded puzzled about what was Funaki doing.

When it comes to Ken Shamrock, I didn't want to make it sound like those complains of his when it came to the Gracies weren't founded, because they certainly were.

I've heard some good stories about shitty Gracie behavior, from France to Ohio
those Hammer House vs Gracie events were the shit! Gotta love the typical Gracie bullshit during Wes Sims vs Daniel Gracie 1



But I never turned into a Gracie hater either, because back then pretty much everyone was acting like that, the Gracies happened to have more spotlight...
Well that's not exactly true, as they were always a bit more extra, buuut that was how things were done then, boys will be boys, yadda yadda

Cheers!

 

[DespicablePeep]

Copy pasta of what?

Legends

Its from another thread

 

[Achilles00]

I met Ken years ago and he was cool.

 

[Deleted member 449757]

First, thanks for that great post
I don't want to get too much into Pancrase, because I'm in the process of rewatching as many events as I can chronologically and I might write something today that I will regret tomorrow when I get to the next events...
I had already watched plenty of fights of course, but not always full events, so I'm learning new stuff everyday these days...

(sadly I'm getting to the part where it's difficult to find certain events... my kingdom for 2006's Pancrase 165: Blow 6 )

But you're absolutely right about Funaki's loss to Jason Delucia, I had already heard about that particular breakdown.


I had also read several times that Funaki's loss to Rickson Gracie might have been another "accident", because of the weird way Funaki let go of his standing guillotine.
To quote TVTropes:


When it comes to Ken Shamrock, I didn't want to make it sound like those complains of his when it came to the Gracies weren't founded, because they certainly were.

I've heard some good stories about shitty Gracie behavior, from France to Ohio
those Hammer House vs Gracie events were the shit! Gotta love the typical Gracie bullshit during Wes Sims vs Daniel Gracie 1



But I never turned into a Gracie hater either, because back then pretty much everyone was acting like that, the Gracies happened to have more spotlight...
Well that's not exactly true, as they were always a bit more extra, buuut that was how things were done then, boys will be boys, yadda yadda

Cheers!

I don't really hate the Gracies either, at least for the douchebaggery during fights, of which there is plenty (Daniel Gracie vs. Wes Sims as you mentioned, tapout ignore during Gracie vs. Gordeau, tapout ignore during Gracie vs. DeLucia, Renzo Gracie vs. Ben Spijkers ending, etc.), because as you mentioned, that was pretty common among plenty of others as well. My beef with them is more with the petty excuses and demands for special treatment ("Royler didn't tap to Sakuraba", "Royce didn't tap to Yoshida", "Royce vs. Harold Howard wasn't a real loss even though he walked out, got paid for the fight and threw the towel", "Eddie Bravo's techniques don't pass the Helio Gracie filter and Royler dominated him", etc.). That's why i usually don't shit on Rickson Gracie, as i've never heard him complain about time limits or bulky gloves in the Vale Tudo Japan tournaments.

 

[mraa1]

Anytime bro, I love spreading the sambo gospel. My instructors instructor trained with one of the founders. One thing to mention is, sambos core if you will does come from those two Russian soldiers, one got his black belt from Jigaro Kano himself and the other one ventured in to Japanese jujitsu. However, they also picked up technique from karate and they also picked up moves from Armenian wrestling called Kokh and Romanian wrestling form called trîntǎ ( always fascinated with the name) as well as Mongolia.

There is a sambo movie made in 1983 that is loosely based on the development of sambo. It has English subtitles:

haha! believe it or not I have heard of this movie too but I never saw it. That's actually the other thing I was wondering about; Sambo's impact on popular culture within Russia/Ex-Soviet Union, particularly on film since I used to be a pretty big film nerd when I was younger. I always kind of wondered whether they had a cinema martial arts craze that corresponded with our own here in America back in 70s-80s. I will definitely give this a watch later on when I got time. Thanks man

 

[VodkaDrunkenski]

Jesus Christ!

I don't even know what to say.

Aaaaaand... a quick life tips.

You can’t believe every unsubstantiated rumour posted by an anonymous account you read on the internet....

 

[Robbie Corleone]

if any of you noobs actually watched season 3 of tuf, he always seemed incredibly arrogant throughout the entire series.

I mean the guy made his team watch clips of him fighting.

His team’s ideas on nutrition were hilarious.