My God this kicking by Galore Bofando

UFC color commentator and three combat sport black belt Joe Rogan has several times identified Sport Karate as the next style that will influence the play of the game. Karate takes many forms, and the style that Rogan references has a specific evolution.

In the early 1950s, Tsutomu Oshima developed the first sportive rules for karate sparring matches in Japan, inspired by the fact that there were a lot of pretty girls at baseball games. The underlying theory was that like fencing with a real sword, a real karate blow was too dangerous to actually do full power on another person. So like fencing, a points system was developed.

Punches and kicks were thrown, but controlled to the body, and pulled just short of the face. The action was then stopped, and a center referee and four corner judges determined whether the pulled blow was thrown with sufficient power and speed.

Oshima brought his rules to the United States, and they spread worldwide; these traditional karate sparring rules continue to be used to this day, with modifications.

Oshima’s rules proved to be popular in the USA, and remained largely intact, until Pat Worley, a student of Jhoon Rhee’s, suffered a broken jaw. Rhee, The Father of American Taekwondo, set out to develop protective gear for the hands and feet.

In 1974, he debuted Safe-T-Gear, foam-pool floaties for the hands and feet. They were widely adopted in the USA, and radically changed the play of game for those athletes that adopted them. Footwork increased, as did the distance at which the players competed, and variations on basic punches and kicks were developed. The sport was very much like fencing – the object was to dart in and land a clean, controlled punch or kick, all without being hit. It was called variously “tournament karate or ” point karate or point fighting or semi contact or sport karate. Detractors called it What’s The Point Karate.

Simultaneously, athletes looking for more contact and realism were starting Full Contact Karate, a trend that began with karateka Joe Lewis in 1970, wearing conventional boxing gloves and sneakers.

Lewis’s innovation turned into PKA full contact karate – The Kick of the 80s.

The mix of karate kicks with boxing hand techniques, was almost entirely ignorant of low kicks, clinching, and Muay Thai, and was gone by the 1990s. Kickboxing in Japan rose and fell and rose. Muay Thai remained the national sport in Thailand. A number of European countries, notably Holland, developed world-class competitors. But kickboxing was and is not a real sport – it entirely lacks agreed upon rules or champions. And kickboxing was largely gone from the USA.

However, point karate continued to evolve, with some rules allowing for continuous points, where the action was not stopped whenever a point was scored. The contact however still had to be limited.

Then this long-range, flashy, super fast, timing-based style of striking made its way into kickboxing. And now it can be found at the elite level of mixed martial arts.

Although Lyoto Machida’s father realized the need for more footwork, and added it to his Machida-Do Karate, it is still a distinctly different animal than what Rogan is talking about.

Stephen ‘Wonderboy’ Thompson and Michelle Waterson in the UFC, and Michael ‘Venom’ Page in Bellator are examples of this lineage in mixed martial arts.

Now a new figure is emerging. Like Page, Galore Bofando hails from England. Watch this video of Bofando hitting the bag. The first reaction is HOLY F@$%ING $#!@ and the second is, “this would never work against an opponent.”

Well, here is Bofando employing the same techniques in a kickboxing bout.

Kickboxing, ok sure, but you might think it still wouldn’t work in mixed martial arts.

Bofando fights in UCMMA at welterweight, with a record of 4-2. Both losses came via DQ for illegal knees.

H/T CagePotato

Image courtesy of Mark Blundell