In 1950 Riley opened The Snake Pit with a Spartan training regimen, a low threshold for whiners, and no tolerance for women and children. It would become one of catch wrestling’s greatest historical fixtures, turning out some of the best wrestlers to ever live, including a man who would eventually be known as Karl Gotch.
Gotch wrestled in the 1948 Olympics under his birth name of Charles Istaz. After eight years at The Snake Pit, perfecting the art of the catch, he became Karl Krauser and dominated the European wrestling scene. In 1959, he came to the United States as Karl Gotch and quickly established his legacy as one of the greatest true wrestlers to ever step on the mat. It was Gotch who would use catch wrestling to sow the seeds of MMA, but not in America.
BURGEONING PRIDE
Jim Miller invited Gotch to teach his skills in Japan. Starting in 1972, Gotch spent a decade instructing and influencing a slew of who’s who in Japanese wrestling, including Antonio Inoki. In 1976, Inoki promoted a series of mixed martial arts bouts against the champions of other disciplines (including Muhammad Ali), which were hugely popular and gave him a stage to showcase some of Gotch’s favorite moves, like the sleeper hold, cross arm breaker, seated armbar, Indian deathlock, and keylock. Much like Wrestlemania in the 1990s, these matches spread like wildfire in Japan.
During and after his time in Japan, Gotch was a boon to Japanese wrestling, personally teaching many of the greatest wrestlers there, who in turn embraced wrestling the same way Brazil embraced jiu-jitsu. Twelve years after Gotch began his work in Japan, a handful of his students formed the original Universal Wrestling Federation and Shooto, which gave rise to shoot-style wrestling matches and eventually paved the way for MMA in Japan. Catch wrestling is the base of Japan’s martial art of shoot wrestling and has found a home in an ironic case of reverse immigration. Japanese martial arts have been exported throughout the world for centuries. Catch wrestling is the first western martial art to establish a following in Japan.
“Everyone thinks Japanese martial arts are so mystic, but catch wrestling had so many more techniques,” says Shooto champion and MMA trainer Erik Paulson.
“We were learning the north-south choke, the D’Arce choke, the anaconda choke, and the head and arm choke, all those way back in the ‘80s. Nowadays everyone knows them and thinks they come from MMA, but they were really some of the basics of Shooto.”
In the late 1990s, Yuko Miyato established the UWF Snake Pit in Tokyo, Japan, in order to keep the sport of real wrestling and catch-as-catch-can alive. The head coach was Billy Robinson, a wrestling legend who trained at the original Snake Pit in England and who was widely feared and respected in the wrestling community. At the UWF Snake Pit, Robinson trained MMA legend Kazushi Sakuraba and current top-ranked heavyweight Josh Barnett.
“[Catch wrestling] is a root on the tree of MMA,” says Barnett. “Catch went to Brazil with Mitsuyo Maeda, formed the basis of New Japan pro wrestling and later Japanese shooting through Gotch and Robinson, and was an art based on battle testing. It’s aggressive and explosive and has a deep history throughout the world and was my first major exposure to submissions. I see many top amateur wrestlers who go to BJJ gyms because that’s what they think you have to train to learn submission. Most of the time though, those BJJ trainers train the wrestlers in ways that are counter-productive to a wrestler’s skills and strengths.”
“Today’s MMA, modern Olympic wrestling, WWE-style pro wrestling, and even the reality-based self-defense system of Krav Maga are all derivative of catch-ascatch- can,” adds Shannon, whose Web site (
AUTHENTIC Catch Wrestling - Welcome to ScientificWrestling.com, the best in Submission Grappling!) is an Internet shrine to catch-as-catch-can. “The father of the founder of Krav Maga, Imi Lichtenfeld, was a carnival acrobat and wrestler who went on to win championships in wrestling before developing the Krav system for the IDF. Even Frank Shamrock credits learning his submissions from Minoru Suzuki in Pancrase, who learned them directly from Karl Gotch.”
