ImGladUmad - Honest question.....Do you guys think today's guys would be champ in that era or will these guys be too tough for today's fighters?...
Impossible to know, especially considering the fact that anything can happen in a fight. But I do think we underestimate the skills of fighters of old. MMA has been around for something like 20 years in it's modern form, ancient Pankration was around for a couple of hundred.
As well as the fact that they hade even less rules than old school vale tudo, and there were no weight classes.
but back then you have to realize the pool of talent was much more shallow. it would be like the advantage in a team sport that a massive school has over a small town one.
Then you look at extremely limited communication (how do you get people to train with you, who is allowed to train, how do you know what other schools are doing in terms of innovations).
Extremely limited travel - how often could the pool of people train, how easy was it to compete against other schools, etc?
The advantage we've had in the last 20 years and the explosion is certainly due to these factors. The pool is insanely deep. Travel and global competition is very easy.
I just don't see a comparison.
How many people were getting into "fist fights" back then? People brawl in the streets all the time now. At school, in prison.
Back then the farmer class and merchants probably didn't do much. Ruling class, highly doubtful. Warrior class? They probably spent a lot of their time with weapons learning how to kill.
Modern CACC is probably the closest to what we had. Certainly there are monster wrestlers but technique wise the superiority of position>sub has been demonstrated over and over...
the final thing to consider, we are comparing hundreds of years of 'evolution' in martial arts back then when things changed slowly due to the factors referenced previously.
currently, we're at 25 years. That does not sound comparable, but realize that is an ENTIRE GENERATION of people potentially exposed as early as they can crawl.
