Robert Riley, Lawrence senior recoverers from a left hand blast to the face as Trent Tiemeyer, bouncer, raises his shin to block a right leg kick. The principles of Muay Thai kick-boxing include striking and counterstriking from opposite angles. Tiemeyer seems to be getting the upper hand as Riley returns fire.
Sensible violence
Sometimes you have to beat up your best friends to find out who you really are.
By Robert Riley, Jayplay writer, photos by Joshua Kendall
feel a cool, refreshing breeze as it caresses the fresh blood leaking out of my right elbow. Lance Yoder, one of my best friends, is pinning my head to the ground while I struggle with every fiber of my being to free myself from his grip. His elbow slides under my chin to crush my throat, primarily as a distraction. He is giving me advice, but it is hard to hear over the involuntary pig-like grunting noise coming from the back of my trachea. Suddenly, I feel his knee crushing my free-floating pain. The pain is intense, but tolerable. More importantly, my friend has made an error in judgment. The stability he has lost by taking his knee off of the ground gives me more than enough room to turn the tide. Living on my back, I shoot my arm straight toward the sky as I tighten my abs to roll up, and literally switch positions with Yoder in one ballistic movement. The game has changed. The dominant position is now mine, and I am not going to give it up easily. From this point on my objective is to trap one of his limbs, or his neck in a hold, and crank on until he has to tap the mat — or whatever he can reach — to avoid more serious ramifications. Yoder and I are sparring in a mixed martial arts match, a sport we have been practicing for the last two years. The sport has consumed my life from the moment I
first watched it, and I am definitely not alone.
alone. For people who practice mixed martial arts, or MMA, it is a journey. The sport is physically painful and exhausting, but has great rewards. MMA is not a sport for barbaric, meat-headed powerhouses. It's a thinking person's sport, more akin to chess. Every movement is a mistake or a success. Each time you advance or retreat, you give up position and opportunities. To every move there is a counter move — the game is infinite. Kristin Doeblin, Wichita senior, hast trained in MMA since 1999, and says that to her, MMA is all about strategy. She says in addition to having well-planned fighting techniques, you must respond to each challenge and attempt concisely.
concisely. MMA is basically a mixture of two forms of fighting: stand-up fighting and grappling or ground fighting. A fighter must practice both to be successful. Grappling consists of sports like American wrestling, Judo/Jui-Jitsu, Brazilian Jui-Jitsu, Sambo, submission wrestling and Japanese professional wrestling. All are forms of fighting that do not involve directly striking your opponent. Stand-up sports which are more popular in the United States, include boxing, kick-boxing, or Muay Thai, Karate and Tae Kwon Do. The
largest event for MMA in the United States is the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which has evolved from savage bar fighting in a cage to a refined competition for remarkable athletes.
The sport has undergone a series of changes but has always been fairly simple. The fighters wear only shorts, a protective cup and special gloves. The gloves are fingerless with an open palm to facilitate grappling, and have four to six ounces, about a half inch, of padding to cover the knuckles. Yet, the gloves are not padded for the benefit of the person getting hit. The gloves prevent the fighter's hands from being injured when they strike. The rules for MMA events vary, but most competitions have made head-butts, strikes to the groin, eye gouging and hair pulling illegal. Head-butts were previously allowed in most MMA competitions, but the results were quite brutal and messy. There are a few ways to win a match in MMA. The obvious one is to knock out your opponent, but you can also submit him or her.
him or her. Submissions are a subtle and beautiful thing and can happen in the blink of an eye. When a submission hold is applied effectively, the fighter has nowhere else to move to avoid injury and must tap out for the opponent to let go of the hold. Most
holds use the leverage of your limbs to put pressure on your opponents joints, threatening to tear or eventually snap them. Some submissions are intended to cut off oxygen to the brain by closing off the airway or arteries in the neck. MMA competitions are often called no-holds-barred matches, meaning that there are no holds that the fighters are prohibited from using. The fight can also end if a fighter is in no condition to intelligently defend himself or has incurred an injury that prevents him from completing the match. The fighters 'corner can throw in the towel to stop the fight, or the fighters may simply run out of time.
time. People often become infatuated with MMA after exposure to an event such as the UFC. I can recall watching the original UFC with Yoder in vivid detail. The first UFC was a true experiment in Mixed Martial Arts. The event was set up tournament style, and nobody knew quite what to expect. There were boxers, traditional martial artists, submission wrestlers and one man who would become a living legend, Royce Gracie. Each fighter tried to strike or wrestle his way to victory, but the out-muscled, outweighed, and seemingly frail Brazilian stood fearlessly before his gladiatorial competitors. Once a fighter was upon him, he fought from under-
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