A number of preposterous judo videos on youtube

And yet this may be the strangest one

Hirotaka Kato (JPN) - Flavio Canto (BRA) (-81kg) 2008 World Judo Team Championships - Tokyo

Oh man, this is such a match.

Canto goes for the juji-gatame off of the tomoe-nage feint pretty much right away, but Kato wants no part of that game with arguably the best ne waza player in the sport. He stands, and lifts Canto off the mat for the call of "matte." Before you know it Canto tries it all again, hooking the leg this time to try and keep Kato from raising him off the mat, but Kato still manages to lift Canto for the matte. We some high-speed grip fighting, then Kato works his left arm around Canto's back and, I must say, it looks to me like Canto bails to the mat in a way that could have earned him a shido (a "slight infringement") but what do I know. After a strange scramble, we’re back up.

And here’s where it gets really awesome: Canto hasn’t been able to take the juji off the direct entry (well, the tomoe nage entry, I guess, but come on), but he is able to secure a rolling juji-gatame after taking Kato’s back off of an incredibly quick right uchi mata that doesn’t score, but that provides him the entry into ne waza that he needs. Note how Canto tries his best to grab Kato's far leg with his left arm, which is the textbook way to perform the rolling juji, but, unable to secure it, he hooks the near leg and finishes all the same.

A training partner of mine was of the opinion that I totally needed to see this match. I kept forgetting, but he persisted, and I'm glad he did. Because it is awesome.

Review: Total MMA by Jonathan Snowden

Total MMA: Inside Ultimate Fighting is, without question, the definitive history of mixed martial arts. Author Jonathan Snowden charts the two distinct historical paths that lead us to modern MMA, the first from Brazil, the second from Japan.

He traces Mitsuyo Maeda's travels around the globe spreading the techniques and training methods of Jigoro Kano's Kodokan Judo -- but not necessarily it's spirit. Maeda fought professionally, and fought all comers, in both legitimate contests of skill and "worked" performances more akin to professional wrestling than genuine athletic competition. This is the man who quite briefly taught Carlos Gracie the rudiments of his fighting system, basic techniques and principles that the Gracie family ingeniously developed into their own distinct style of grappling. Certain members of the Gracie family (by no means all) have been notoriously inconsistent, incredible, historically inaccurate and downright dishonest in their accounts of Maeda and the origins of their art, trying to make their already impressive history all the more spectacular. This is one respect in which Total MMA shines: it does its part to set this record straight. Snowden gives the Gracie family all due credit -- and indeed much credit is due -- for their tremendous innovations, but he also calls a spade a spade, revealing many aspects of "The Gracie Myth" to be exactly that.

Even better than Snowden's account of how Maeda brought submission grappling to the Gracies, who then helped popularize it in America through the creation of the UFC, is Snowden's history of the independent and simultaneous rise of something akin to MMA in Japan. This is perhaps where the book is strongest. From the Inoki/Ali debacle, to the rise of Akira Maeda and the UWF, to the eventual experiment of the early days of Pancrase, which blended pro wrestling rules and real competition, Snowden provides the most thorough account of the emergence of Japanese MMA out of the strange world of Japanese professional wrestling that is available in print.

Total MMA is not only a study of origins, however. It's an impressively thorough account and assessment of virtually every fight, fighter, promotion, and event of any real significance to the ongoing history of mixed martial arts, from the early tournament wins of Royce Gracie, to the dark days of the UFC's largely untelevised middle years, to the modern boom of the Spike TV era. And there is considerable attention paid throughout the book to the Japanese incarnation of the sport, which attained a cultural presence far in excess of what we see even today in North American MMA. Snowden gives us the early days of Pancrase, where Ken and later Frank Shamrock competed against and alongside the young stars of Japanese pro wrestling; the early years of Pride FC, where wrestling legend Nobuhiko Takada faced the great Rickson Gracie; to Kazushi Sakuraba's emergence as "The Gracie Hunter." We're taken through the heady days of Japan's MMA peak, where fighters like Bob Sapp, "Kid" Yammamoto, and Hidehiko Yoshida drew television crowds in the many millions, and through Pride's downfall to a backroom Yakuza scandal.

Total MMA lives up to its title. It's simply all here, from a Kodokan expert far from home teaching a young Brazilian the basics of grappling eighty years ago through the build-up of Brock Lesnar's UFC title bout with Randy Couture only a few short weeks ago. Snowden's prose is never less than clear, and at times excellent, with an uncommonly fine feel of flow from one section to the next. His meticulously researched text documents every one of its many sources, which number in the hundreds. That inspires confidence: Snowden isn't "spinning"; he isn't telling half-truths here. He's got nothing to hide; he's inviting you the reader to test his facts and arguments against the source materials he's drawn upon.

In short, Snowden's mixed martial arts history is the standard against which any and all future such works will be measured. The bar has been set high.

Total MMA at Amazon.com

Getting to Know the Gogoplata

If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that kagato jime -- which most of us know (and love) as the gogoplata -- is among the raddest of chokes. Earlier this year I wrote a semi-scholarly piece on the technique, tracing its modern history at least. I say "modern history" because you know this technique is on some Kito-Ryu scroll somewhere or something. Anyway, a fine fellow by the name of Abrantes translated this article into Portuguese! How cool is that!

2008 Beijing Olympic Judo Retrospective

Content! Here's a day-by-day recap of this year's Olympic judo tournament that originally appeared at the vaunted Total-MMA.com mixed martial arts blog. It has been converted to its present and enormous(ly readable?) PDF format by Iain Liddle. There are some passages of awkwardness due to the transition from hyperlinked html intertextuality to static PDFness, but much more is gained than lost, I think. I hope that you enjoy this more than Nicholas Tritton did -- dude was not pleased that I called his match some of the least appealing judo you're likely to see at this level. Let me again say: Nicholas Tritton is awesome; matches with six shidos are definitely not awesome. Six shidos! That's not something you see everyday.