Does A Professional Karate Competition Career Mean MMA?

For those of you who don't follow Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) competitions, most of the people who are successful use a combination of three other competitive styles: wrestling, Muay Thai, and Brazilian JiuJitsu (BJJ). Most traditional karate people realized years ago that most MMA skills and techniques are also found in traditional (not modern sport) karate but the way we always trained didn't transfer skills very well to MMA competitions. Traditional World Karate Federation (WKF)-style competitions develop a lot of skills and attributes necessary for successful striking and takedowns in MMA competitions. A lot of top American competitors that I spoke to either had fought Muay Thai and/or MMA fighters or trained with them and felt that karate was superior in a number of ways. The only problems we had were adapting our "ground game" to MMA competition because when we train we stay on our feet and control the other person on the ground (think law enforcement).

Years ago, I started realizing that you can easily adapt karate techniques to the MMA arena. Someone who is well versed in traditional karate principles of timing, distancing, positioning, and leverage can apply their striking, takedowns, arm locks, and leg locks to fighting standing up or on the ground. I started showing in classes and seminars how karate form (kata) applications were easily used in MMA fights. I always looked at it as nothing new since these were techniques that I had done for many years and people were always curious about this new creature called "MMA." To me, MMA was just another expression of karate fighting.

I first saw Brazilian Lyoto Machida in UFC 79 when he fought Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou, a very large African who was coming off of big upsets in Pride competitions in Japan. As soon as the fight started and I saw Machida move, I immediately said "That's a karate guy!" Since then he has risen to the top of his weight division using mostly "karate" fighting even though he has also trained a little in Muay Thai and has a black belt in BJJ. He uses expertly-honed timing and distancing to dominate his opponents while rarely getting hit himself. Other successful MMA fighters that have a karate background include Dutchman Bas Rutten and Canadian Georges St. Pierre. I have seen others use a karate background become successful in MMA but not to as high a level as those three.

So this brings up an important issue. Amateur athletes always have the option of going pro to do what they love and get paid for it. Most sports have this career track. Wrestling, as popular as it is, traditionally has only had the "pro-wrestling" track for it's amateur athletes to go pro. Otherwise, you coach. You really can't wrestle Freestyle or Greco-Roman professionally. Now, a legitmate career path is to get into MMA but you have to learn a whole bunch of new skill sets to be successful but a lot of wrestlers are doing this now fairly easily. These wrestlers are now some of the best fighters in MMA.

Karate is in a similar predicament. You can be a World Cup gold medal champ but the only thing that you can do afterward is coach. Lyoto Machida has shown that you can take a traditional karate competition background (he was a Pan-American champ) and transform that into a successful professional MMA career. Cross-training with good coaches is essential but the base from a strong traditional karate competition background is an absolute.

Could traditional karate make a separate break onto the pro scene like judo did about fifteen years ago with Pro Judo? This was an attempt to make judo more palatable for the general public and turn it into a legit professional sport. They changed the rules to promote more action and make it more dynamic. It wasn't enough. The movement only lasted a couple years at the most and it was never heard from again. Could karate come up with a format that could catch on with the general sports public and offer a different option than MMA? Would it be similar to a Shidokan tournament format that combines rounds of knockdown full-contact karate, kickboxing, and grappling? Or could we use a variation of current WKF rules? During the first Titan Games against Mexico a number of years ago, many spectators and other sports athletes said that karate was the most exciting and dynamic of the other sports. The Titan Games was an Olympic-style amateur format that pits the US against another country in combat-type sports, i.e., karate, wrestling, boxing, judo, tae kwon do, Olympic weightlifting. Multiple cameras were placed around the stadium to catch the action and put it up on huge screens around the arena along with a lot of WWE-style bravado. It also, unfortunately, didn't last very long but it did show that the current WKF rules were exciting and dynamic for a wide audience.

Right now, the only thing an aamateur karate athlete can plan for as a profession is teaching and coaching other amateur athletes. Unless they own their own successful club or dojo, they will have to maintain a primary job to pay bills. Even if they own their own place, their time will be spent mostly on business things and not training or coaching.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.....