Author: raymond santella
Rating:
not much out there on catch and its real history, this book is it. get it

Author: simen
Rating:
very interesting to finally get to read about some of the history of catch wrestling! i like catch wrestling a lot, and ive had catch wrestling instruction by a legit catch wrestling instructor. im also a bjj practitioner. I love them both but this book to me appears extremely biased. it recounts that catch wrestlers have beat judo and jiu jitsu masters many times all through out the last 100 years. ok fine, but why as mentioned in this book are so many of the wins by the catch wrestlers by pin fall? if their submission are so good why can they not win by submission? also the book mentions things like when matt hughes dominated royce gracie. ok fine hughes dominated Royce, no doubt. but the authors try to claim this as a victory for catch wrestling when its blatantly obvious matt hughes used BJJ to win that fight! it also fails to mention that hughes a man they consider a catch wrestler for some reason was dominated buy bj penn in their first! Penn who is a bjj master! other fights that are mention are the fight between catch wrestler josh barrnet and Antonio nogueira. it mentions nogueira won but never mentions that hes a BJJ master. it refers to masakatsu funaki as a catch wrestler, because the style of submission often used in japan came from american catch wrestling ,ok fine. and then it mentions that rickson gracie gracie defeated funaki but has no mention that rickson is a BJJ master. this book claims that count koma the man that taught jiu jitsu to the gracies was a pro catch wrestler before he taught the gracies. and then goes on to make it sound like catch wrestling is responsible for the development of BJJ! ok fine count koma worked as a pro catch wrestler. but i dont see a few years of working(and training with catch wrestlers) as a pro catch wrestler negating his life time of jiu jitsu experience. it doesnt make sense to me. if bjj is a product of catch why does bjj look sooo different then catch? so apparently if catch is responsible for bjj then that means the Gracies kept the gi, that catch wrestling doesn’t use, removed most of the leg locks (tradtional bjj doesn’t use many leg locks) took out the neck cranks and most of the riding positions. so the gracies took all that out but added the gi and EXTENSIVLEY IMPROVED the guard? A position that catch doesn’t use much. I dont buy it. count koma may have been a pro catch wrestler but im guessing his jiujitsu skill if what he relied on the most and taught jiujitsu to the gracies, NOT catch. this book actually goes on to take credit for sambo! again so catch spawned sambo...ok but catch doesnt wear a gi and sambo they wear a jacket that looks a lot like a gi top and if u look at sanbo it much more resembles judo and jiujitsu then catch. ...but ya catch was a huge influence on sambo? maybe it was but not as much at judo and jiujitsu apparently were. also it doesnt mention that many of the catch matches mentioned in this book were probably worked"(show matches with predetermined out comes) its also tells the story of how catch spawned the current form of Japanese submission. the kind u see on old school pancrase from the shamrock and bas rutten days. ok fine all thats true as far as i know. but when you watch old pancrase you can see how sloppy there ground work was. the submissions were good. but the guard work and transitions where terrible. and far inferior to bjj. it also mentions the fights between royce gracie and ken shamrock. it says the fights were epic. the first was far from epic and royce a bjj master submitted shamrock quick and easy. (shamrock a guy who this book considers a catch wrestler because he was schooled in the style of submission that the Japanese use witch was spawned by catch.) it says shamrock dominated the royce in the second fight! neither fighter did much of anything in that second fight! to say either fighter dominated, I think is BS! shamrock gave gracie a nice black eye but i dont think that is dominance. It says shamrock dominated but fails to mention shamrock was the much bigger man. It goes on to say that modern mma was spawned by catch. Maybe catch wrestlers were doing what we recognize as mma a hundred years ago but the fact is modern mma as we know it in this country(usa) came from vale tudo witch is from brazil. MODERN MMA is a product of vale tudo, Not to say brazil the only country with a history of nhb fighting. Im just saying that modern american mma cam from vale tudo witch is Brazilian. And modern mma has no direct roots to catch wrestling. Japanese mma certainly has roots to catch though. Bottom line i love catch, i love bjj, this book is really interesting if you are interested in the history of catch. however im not sure how objective the perception in this book is.

Author: Jason Bradley
Rating:

Author: James Frederick
Rating:
Finally a great book based on FACTS. Its nice to see the actual history of Submission Wrestling with specific dates. Including the INFLUENCE Catch Wrestling has had on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and SAMBO. All backed by dates and facts based on real people. Anyone history buff curious about the real history of Submission Grappling regardless of their preference in style will probably enjoy this book. This book also covers a great deal of interesting American history from our grappling presidents to coal miners wrestling for entertainment fusing rough and tumnble fighting with Lancashire Catch as catch Can Wrestling. Oh ya, and if Catch influenced the development of Bjj (which it did, since Mitsuyo Maeda trained in Catch and competeted in 2,000 matches before training Carlos Gracie) and the Japanese fighting circuits and it was prevelant here in America long before any other style and 100's of years older in England then yes it did most definitly spawn MMA (directed to ranting 2 star rating/coment). Check Wikipedia and what Renzo stated in his book on Maeda's combat philosophy much of which was learned by "training alonside Catch Wrestlers". Boom!