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This is something I've felt for awhile and always felt he never really got the respect he deserves for this. I'm curious to see what everyone else thinks.
Typically when people talk about the first complete fighters they talk about frank shamrock or Sakuraba or someone else. I believe it was Ken though.
Now let me preface this by saying he wouldn't be considered well rounded by today's standards. Frank and Sakuraba were eventually more well rounded than Ken. I definitely won't dispute that. Here is my reasoning though..
Ken could definitely wrestle and had a good submission game. He was a good amateur wrestler. His sprawl in particular was good. His sprawl lead to the guillotine that beat Severn to win the title. He submitted guys like Bas and Severn and Masakatsu Funaki, so for that time his submission game was high level. He used wrestling to more or less control royce in their rematch.
True godfather of ground and pound. Coleman had FAR better gnp, but ken was the first to actually use it effectively, and that was against royce. He used it to do damage to royce little by little and neutralized his jiu jitsu. Severn had invented lay n pray by that point but didn't ever really strike on the ground up until that point.
He also created the lions den, which was the first true super team where guys got together to improve. Frank became so good because he had guys like ken and Maurice smith and guy merger to train with him.
The last thing is striking. Ken was never a great striker but he did have the ability to brawl a bit. He had competed in tough man contests before his Pancrase days. He used striking to hurt oleg in their title fight. He hurt royce with a punch in their 2nd fight. For that time his striking was ok.
What do you guys think? I apologize for a long post but I actually wanted to provide some examples to the points I was making.
Typically when people talk about the first complete fighters they talk about frank shamrock or Sakuraba or someone else. I believe it was Ken though.
Now let me preface this by saying he wouldn't be considered well rounded by today's standards. Frank and Sakuraba were eventually more well rounded than Ken. I definitely won't dispute that. Here is my reasoning though..
Ken could definitely wrestle and had a good submission game. He was a good amateur wrestler. His sprawl in particular was good. His sprawl lead to the guillotine that beat Severn to win the title. He submitted guys like Bas and Severn and Masakatsu Funaki, so for that time his submission game was high level. He used wrestling to more or less control royce in their rematch.
True godfather of ground and pound. Coleman had FAR better gnp, but ken was the first to actually use it effectively, and that was against royce. He used it to do damage to royce little by little and neutralized his jiu jitsu. Severn had invented lay n pray by that point but didn't ever really strike on the ground up until that point.
He also created the lions den, which was the first true super team where guys got together to improve. Frank became so good because he had guys like ken and Maurice smith and guy merger to train with him.
The last thing is striking. Ken was never a great striker but he did have the ability to brawl a bit. He had competed in tough man contests before his Pancrase days. He used striking to hurt oleg in their title fight. He hurt royce with a punch in their 2nd fight. For that time his striking was ok.
What do you guys think? I apologize for a long post but I actually wanted to provide some examples to the points I was making.
