Physical Chess

by Billy Robinson

  Billy Robinson and Karl Gotch sightseeing in Japan.

  The way that things are taught is also different. When people come to my trainings, we teach concepts. We’re not teaching how you do a technique. In the Japanese cultural system, teaching is a 1-2-3-4-5 process. If you’re going to nail two pieces of wood together, one, you put the pieces of wood where you want them. Two, you pick up the nail. Three, you put the nail on the wood. Four, you pick up the hammer. Five, you hit the nail. There was no way a Japanese guy would pick the hammer up first; he’d do it as he’s taught. That’s how they teach jiu-jitsu and judo in all the schools that they have. People here are beginning to learn in the Japanese style, too.

  But in real fighting, and in a real contest of catch wrestling, there’s no one way to do a thing. That’s why catch wrestlers were the best. It’s because everybody reacts differently. I may go for a single leg on you, on Karl Gotch, or on Billy Joyce, and when I go for it, I’ll do it the same way, but each of their reactions will be different. If I’ve been taught the 1-2-3-4 style, I’ll follow the set pattern that I’ve been taught and fail, whereas in catch wrestling we’re above that. We’ll say, “Oh, that’s a lot of work, now. I’ll do this.” I may change the angle or I may change to something else, which is why it’s called catch-as-catch-can.

  THE MMA

  Mixed Martial Arts really got started with Antonio Inoki fighting Muhammad Ali. Inoki was trained by Gotch, and I’ve wrestled and worked out with him. To me, Inoki was the best of all the Japanese guys of that time. After fighting Muhammad Ali, Inoki wrestled Aslam in Pakistan, followed by different boxers and different martial artists. That’s really where mma started, and then promoters got interested in it.

  I thank God for the Gracies, because when they took over there were no catch-as-catch-can wrestlers left. That’s when everybody was calling the old catch wrestling moves a “Gracie triangle,” a “Gracie Kimura,” etc. That pissed off a lot of the old-time wrestlers. They came down to the different amateur championships and picked up guys, showed them submissions for mma, and then the grapplers started taking over everything. Basically, it was because all of the real catch wrestlers (not the show wrestlers) had retired or were injured that the Gracie style of jiu-jitsu was really allowed to peak.

  Unfortunately, what is happening now is that guys pick up a few finishing holds—like a double wristlock or a few neck cranks—and they call themselves catch wrestlers. It’s like they only know the first chapter of a thousand-chapter book. There are so many different ways to beat a guy. There are so many submissions on the arms and the neck, the legs, the hips, the stretches, the splits and all kinds of front-face locks, cross-faces, if you know how to do them right. Nobody is doing that now, because none of the old-timers are around to show them how to do it.

  When amateur wrestlers and folkstyle wrestlers get cross-faced, or grovited, for the first time in our seminars, the usual response is “Shit, I didn’t know that was the way you did that.” An amateur wrestling champion said he knew how to ride a guy, but he’d learned the amateur style. Then, when I showed him how to get the legs in and how to keep them in, he said it was so easy. He didn’t realize it was that easy to get a man and to control him, and that’s just one little thing. Catch wrestling is physical chess. With two tough guys, it’s like a chess game.

  There are a lot of Japanese names that were very tough guys—Maeda, Fujiwara, Fujinami, and others. Fujiwara was another of Karl’s boys who came along after Inoki and who might have been even better than Inoki, but I don’t know, because I never saw them actually wrestle each other. Fujiwara was younger than Inoki, and was coming up after I’d left Japan. Fujinami, too, could look after himself very well.

  Billy in a match with Sugiyama.

  Sakuraba and Tamura were two of my boys. Tamura had a big head, he had an attitude, and he thought he was God’s gift to mma. The problem with him was that he didn’t learn the basics well. Tamura was more experienced than Sakuraba when they first started. When they had their early matches, Tamura could beat Sakuraba. But then Sakuraba came into his own and beat everybody.

  Sakuraba had learned his basics very well with Shozo Sasahara as his coach in his high school days. To me, Sasahara is one of the greatest amateur wrestlers of all time, technique-wise; he was an Olympic gold medallist and world champion and a very good friend of mine. As a matter of fact, out of all the great amateur wrestlers that I’ve either seen or wrestled against and beaten, Sasahara is the closest to a Wigan-style wrestler. The only difference was that he didn’t know the submissions.

  When I started training Sakuraba, he was Takada’s underling. So anytime Takada was there, which was every day, Sakuraba would do all his sparring and everything with Takada. While anybody was there, Takada would beat the living shit out of Sakuraba. It’s a Japanese custom, like I said earlier. I complained about it a little bit and took Sakuraba to the side (on a lot of different occasions) and told him to try different things. Well, things started to work for him with other guys, but he still wouldn’t really try anything with Takada, out of custom.

  Such bullying happens not just in Japan, but everywhere when people become the boss and the promoter. Take Verne Gagne, for example. He was the awa world champion, but he always had guys, like Karl Gotch and me, who were policemen for him. Before he brought me in, it was Baron von Raschke. After I left awa, it was Khosrow Vaziri, then Brad Rheingans, whom I had trained and who was also a great amateur wrestler. Gagne always had a person around him who took care of matters. He didn’t have the submission experience, or the stamina, because he didn’t believe in sparring a lot. His idea was to get everybody tired, and then he’d come on the mat with them at the end and beat the shit out of them when they were dead beat.

  Billy in victory over Karl Gotch.

  Well, Karl couldn’t stand that, and when I did the camps, I wouldn’t stand for that, either. I did everything that I asked all the students to do, which was the style at Wigan and was Gotch’s style, too. You just don’t take advantage of somebody. You don’t make them bridge when they’ve never bridged before. It’ll ruin their necks. There are bullies all around the world. That sort of stuff doesn’t happen just in Japan.

  Anyway, I think that the groupings—uwf, the uwfi, Pancrase, etc.—were great. The only real problem that I ever really had with them was very simple. When they formed these organizations, they should have had pinfalls. Lou Thesz and Danny Hodge thought so, too. Now, that was the biggest mistake they’ve ever made, because it is far more entertaining for the audience to watch a guy fighting off his back who doesn’t want to get into the guard position because he might lose by being pinned.

  When a guy is fighting off his back to try and escape, that’s when you get a lot more different opportunities to get arm submissions, neck submissions, and ankle submissions and get into riding positions. They’ve really cut out 50 percent of the sport by not having pinfalls. I think that mma will finally turn around and realize that you need pinfalls to make it more exciting. Then, when people are fighting out of pinfalls, they will leave themselves open for striking, kicking, kneeing, and submissions—my style.

  Billy and his tag team partner Wahoo McDaniels.

  Mixed Martial Arts fighters are now being educated to know chokes, submissions, and knockouts, and that’s a start. A great boxer doesn’t go out to try and force a knockout. He’ll go out and fight; the knockout will come to him. A catch-as-catch-can wrestler is the same. I don’t go chasing a submission—which is exactly what it seems everybody who calls themselves a “catch wrestler” is doing now. I go out and wrestle catch until the submission comes my way. Like, for instance, take the collar and elbow—that’s where you grab the guy behind his neck. He grabs you and you hook your arm over the elbow, and you’re pulling and pushing. It used to be one of the more basic things in the old style of amateur wrestling, but not so much now, becaus
e they bend over a lot and go to defend the legs. Well, one thing you can do is when he grabs you behind the head, you grab the fingers and pull them off. The guy will grab you again. This time you don’t block it. You allow him to grab you. Then, a little bit later, you take his hand off. You allow him to grab you again. After a little while, you can see he’s not worried about grabbing you, because he feels safe. That’s the time you say thank you, take his hand off as he comes to grab you, knock his arm up, take a single leg, change to a double leg, and pick him up and drive him through the mat as hard as you can. Then you can end it with whatever submission is available. I’ve set him up in such a way that I can do all that from his just grabbing my neck.

  If that doesn’t happen, I’m not worried, because I’ve got so many more things that I can do, and I’m trying to set him up. It’s like I want to set up a guy to put his leg out. Every time I take him down, I drive into him on the opposite side so that he’ll stick his leg out to push back into me to stop me from rolling him over. I’ll do that many times, and then, when the time is right, I’ll make as if I want to do the same thing. He’s going to stick his leg out again, but instead of pushing against him, this time I dive over the top and cradle him. These are very basic examples of how catch wrestling is truly physical chess.

  Mixed Martial Arts has improved a lot in the last 10 years because they’re starting to learn how to learn. Ten years ago, I was telling everybody about the importance of knowing how to stand up. Right now, people are standing back, looking at a guy to see if he’s fallen down or not. You can’t do that in a fight. Nowadays, at least some of the top strikers are learning more about the real boxing standard and moving away from the Muay Thai square-shoulder stance, which really just makes for a big, open target. But we’re talking about things that mma’s improving on only now; catch wrestlers were masters at these things in the ’20s and ’30s and for a hundred years before.

  Distance, too, is becoming better. The idea is that I want to get close enough for you to either grab me or for me to grab you and do what I want to you. A guy like Billy Joyce would put himself in position so that you would grab him or go for him, and he’d beat you from it. That’s catch-as-catch-can. I was brought up with my dad and uncle, with street fighting, with good pro boxing and great catch-as-catch-can wrestling. It’s all been mostly forgotten, but now it’s coming back, and they’re picking up things from old-timers that are telling them, “Try this and try that.” There’re so many techniques from catch wresting that can improve any mma fighter if he just learns the basics and doesn’t limit himself to a few submissions.

  In my seminars and camps, I get coaches from different gyms or different styles, like jiu-jitsu. Sometimes what they say makes me cringe. They say things like, “If he did this to me, I’d do that.” Or, “He can’t do this to me, because if he tried, I would do that.” What a load of nonsense! Top grapplers, and top catch wrestlers especially, don’t plan what they’re going to do. They don’t know when they’re going to do what. I mean if I knew what a guy was going to do, I could stop anybody from doing anything. So why train? Why practise? In catch wrestling, the reason why we can beat any of the other martial arts sports is that we can adjust better. If I go to do something, as soon as I see you are trying to do your counter, I’ll be countering that. I’ll always be two or three steps ahead of you. Not only that, each fighter reacts differently—I may react to a move in one way, Gordienko may react in another way—so you cannot have a set plan. That’s what is difficult to explain to people these days. One Wigan old-timer said to me, “Billy, you never know what’s going to happen. If you want to trick somebody, one rule of thumb is put the obvious forward and do the opposite.”

  Billy Riley puts it in another way: “You break your opponent, take him down, get control. Put him in a position where there are four ways to get out of it. You close three of those doors. There’s only one way for him to come out. You just keep those three doors closed until he attempts to come out this way. Sooner or later he’ll figure that that’s the way out, and when he tries to come out that way, you say thank you and beat him.”

  Billy and George Gordienko after having wrestled to a draw in Japan.

  In the old days, it was fun to go down to the gym and listen to the stories of four different generations and their champions. They’d describe funny things that happened in different matches. It was just great. I would love catch-as-catch-can wrestling to become an Olympic sport and a professional sport—a legitimate, professional sport with pinfalls and submissions, and reasonable time allowances, maybe one-hour time limits. You can have shorter time limits in the preliminary matches.

  Now, with matches cut down to three two-minute rounds or so, everything has become about power. You can train a 240-pound guy to be exceptionally powerful for two minutes, but it doesn’t make him a good wrestler. If you get him on the mat and wrestle for 15 or 20 minutes, all his power will be gone. His extra power from the extra weight will be gone.

  These days, almost everybody’s coming into combat sports through the Japanese style of learning, with the belt system. That’s what is great about Jake’s and my idea about the certification. It wouldn’t have been necessary in the old days, but it’s necessary now. It helps create an interest among all those people who want to come to a seminar and get a certificate, so we can actually teach them the old catch-as-catch-can way—to learn how to learn. And I can’t blame them for wanting to have their names noted as part of the history of catch-as-catch-can.

  There are a lot of old-timers who I haven’t mentioned here that people have just forgotten about. Martial artists from the ’20s and ’30s were better at catch wrestling and boxing than the guys now, simply because there was a lot more of them. But there was no publicity, even in the late 1800s. I’ve asked guys at the certification camps about George Hackenschmidt, and some have never heard of him. Hackenschmidt was a huge name in catch-as-catch-can, like a Jack Dempsey or a Rocky Marciano was in boxing. All those guys learned their greatness from people who came before them, and those people learned from people who came before them. But none of the names were recorded back in those days.

  Catch-as-catch-can wrestling is no doubt the greatest sport in the world. You learn humility. You learn discipline. You learn to respect others. You are humbled when you begin learning the sport. You realize that everybody who gets on the mat and practises this sport does it because they love it; it’s tough, it’s hard on the body, and if they still come down to the gym to be your sparring partner, it’s because they love it. You have respect for that. You don’t say somebody is a piece of shit. You will not allow anybody to talk bad or do anything bad to those people who actually get on the mat. Catch-as-catch-can is a knowledge sport. It’s a fun sport. That’s why I call it physical chess. It was so much fun, and nobody complained about injuries. They’d just tape it up because they just wanted to get on the mat. It was like a great brotherhood. There was no brotherhood like it.

  Now, it’s like people have lost the discipline, knowledge, and humility of knowing that on any given day, anybody can be the best. That’s what you learn in catch-as-catch-can wrestling. It’s like life. It’s not all ups and it’s not all downs. If you are a multi-millionaire, you cannot say, “I’ll be a multi-millionaire for life”; the market may fall, and you get members of big, powerful families committing suicide or whatever. Catch-as-catch-can wrestling is like that. Even when you are the best, you know it’s not going to last forever.

  BILLY ROBINSON

  I would like to say thanks to the people that really helped me at the end of my pro career—Miyato and the Snake Pit Gym in Koenji, Tokyo, Japan, and sport reporters Koji and Fumi Sato, who helped me a lot and who I am still in touch with. Jake Shannon, you and Sondra and the kids are like my own family. I’d like to thank Josh Barnett and Erik Paulson and to wish Josh success as a competitor—he’s great. Thanks to Harry Smith (one of my new boys) and Billy
Scott, too. Thank you to Drew Price, Matt Hamilton, and Roli Delgado, who welcomed me with open arms in Arkansas. Last, but not least, thanks to my son, Spencer, and his wife, Mary Alyce, who put up with me and looked after me during the surgeries on both knees and one hip—that had to be tough.

  JAKE SHANNON

  Very special thanks to Billy Robinson for so selflessly sharing with me his knowledge of the history and techniques of catch-as-catch-can wrestling over the years. Also, thank you to C. Nathan Hatton and Liza Joseph for their critical review of my work. I would also like to thank every single patron of ScientificWrestling.com for supporting our efforts to document and share the ideas of catch-as-catch-can. I would also like to thank my wife, Sondra, with whom I’ve been able to pursue my dreams.

  Copyright © William A. Robinson with Jake Shannon, 2012

  Published by ECW Press

  2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada m4e 1e2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated.