The Fall Is The Law - The Meaning of FALL Wrestling

"Why FALL Wrestling?" is a question exactly no one has asked me, but I'm going to answer it anyway. This could have had any of a number of subtitles. Like "Why Folkstyle Is Better Than Freestyle". Or "What Akira Maeda Got Wrong".

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Years back, I got Zolan Zavoral's A Season on the Mat: Dan Gable and the Pursuit of Perfection. It chronicles Gable's '96-'97 season, his last as head coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes. One line stuck in my head. At the NCAA tournament, Minnesota's Jason Davids contrasts the very conservative Kasey Gilliss he wrestled with Gilliss's more aggressive (and more successful) teammates. "Watch, when [Mark] Ironside and [Lincoln] McIlravy go, there's a big contrast. With those guys, the fall's the law."

The fall is the law.

The fall is the law.

The fall is the law.

You can throw an opponent. Take them down. Ride. Control. You can break someone down and tire them out. Put a hurting on them and rack up points. But if you don't seal the deal, all of that can be for nothing. In a heartbeat, a tough and skilled or just lucky opponent can reverse things and stick you.

The fall is the law.



We saw this just over a week ago, as Curran Jacobs rode out the storm against three successive larger opponents. They could take him down (sometimes), throw him around, hit some hard crossfaces... Jacobs got beat up. He got worn down. But no one could stick him. He found the room to work his way free, back to his feet, back on top. And when he had the chance, Curran Jacobs sealed the deal.

When I was writing the Catch Scouting Reports, I kept going back to folkstyle experience. I did this for two reasons. One is that American folkstyle is a direct descendant of catch. The other is that I treated catch as catch can like mixed martial arts. For two decades now, commentators have expounded on how "wrestling is the best base for MMA". And that's true. But what they mean - whether they know it or not - is that folkstyle wrestling is the best base for MMA. In MMA, like in catch, you want to be able to take an opponent down and then control them. Put them in a helpless position so that, no matter how they struggle, they stay where you put them. No style of wrestling puts the emphasis on that process that folkstyle wrestling does. Almost every element of scoring - escape points, reversal points, near fall scoring, the riding time point, even team scoring - is geared towards rewarding constant effort to pin an opponent offensively and to actively escape an opponent defensively.

The international styles - freestyle and Greco-Roman - used to. But it's been decades since actually attempting to turn and pin an opponent was a significant part of international wrestling. Compare Dan Gable in 1972 -

This shoulder's going this way. You can come along if you want.

to Jordan Burroughs in 2016 - 

Round and round and round and round and...

For reasons I have never understood (but am currently investigating), the governing bodies of international wrestling have spent basically my entire lifetime trying to reduce the amount of wrestling that happens in wrestling. These groups have always seemed genuinely afraid no one actually likes wrestling, and that if they can make wrestling be... not-wrestling, somehow it will be more popular. I've seen no evidence this is the case, and if anyone anywhere prefers an endless series of ankle laces to a wrestler getting stuck on a chicken wing, I've never met them.

But that's just an aesthetic argument. Such a person must surely exist somewhere in this wide, wide world and I have no interest in trying to convince them their tastes are wrong. (But if that's you and you're reading this, your tastes are wrong.) As a purely practical matter, one of these is clearly a more applicable combat skill than the other, be it in the field of catch as catch can or mixed martial arts or in another, less sporting context.

The fall is the law.

If FILA and UWW forgot the aesthetic and practical value of the fall, though, they're in good company. In 1984, Akira Maeda, Satoru Sayama, Nobuhiko Takada, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, and a handful of others broke away from New Japan Pro Wrestling to found the UWF. They built on the bedrock of Antonio Inoki's Strong Style vision to create what became known as shoot style - the organized attempt to make pro wrestling look as real as possible. While it was initially more or less indistinguishable from the New Japan product, the company gradually stripped out rope running and dives, making realistic suplexes, submissions, and kicks their signature high spots. The UWF begat a second UWF, UWFi, PWF-G, RINGS, BattlArts, Shooto, Pancrase, and Pride. It is arguably the central and essential element in the creation of Japanese mixed martial arts, and inarguably integral to the resurgence of catch as catch can.

And Akira Maeda screwed it up.

A lot of things went wrong in the shoot style movement - inevitable clashes of egos and styles between top stars leading to endless Balkanization, failure to create a new generation of stars with the right combination of skill and charisma, ill-fated forays into real shoots, the inevitable collapse of the Japanese bubble economy - but the one thing no one ever talks about is how Maeda and company stripped the pinfall out of their paradigm. I understand why they did it. The knockout or submission felt more visceral, more dramatic, and more "real" compared to the commonplace pinfall of pro wrestling. Very probably they felt that eliminating it would help separate them from the "fake" pro wrestling. And perhaps it did. But Billy Robinson told them to keep the pins, and they should've listened to Billy.

But as time went on and real shoots came to pass, the absence of the pinfall created two issues for the children of Maeda. First, those still devoted to the worked shoot got exposed. What they did looked kind of like a real fight, but not actually like a real fight. Shoot style was caught in a middle ground - not pro wrestling enough for pro wrestling, too pro wrestling for real NHB. It retained its adherents and fans, to be sure, but it chose to be in a position where it would constantly be compared to a thing it could never be. In 1989 it was "real". By 1995, it could no longer make that claim, and looked bad for continuing to try.

The second issue was it made all of the UWF wrestlers worse wrestlers and worse fighters. Go back to the beginning. What's the best base for MMA? Wrestling, specifically folkstyle or catch as catch can wrestling. Why? A genuinely psychotic training regimen married to a combat metaplan that emphasized constant body control. The UWF and its offshoots, by all reports, kept the psychotic regimen but lost focus on the plan. Wrestling is the root of personal combat. 

In judo, ippon is the symbolic death. The submission or pin or perfect throw that ends the match could, in less controlled circumstances, end a life. Osaekomi - the judo pinfall - is a less dramatic finish than sudden throw or submission, but no less certain. A pure grappling sport that intends to have any sort of broader combat applicability needs to have a pinfall element or (like in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) some sort of significant position-based scoring. If it doesn't, it forgets the second most important part of personal combat - getting punched in the face.

Like the modern submission-only grappling movement, the UWF emphasized the destination over the journey. And, like sub-only competitors, they could be very effective within their chosen realm but dramatically less so when taken outside it. Watch a sub-only competitor in a "combat jujitsu" match that allows palm strikes on the ground and you'll see someone have to completely change their game. A thousand "modern" techniques - sweeps and inversions and odd positions - get thrown out the window in service of the great commandment Not in the face! Not in the face! and a return to much more basic and old school jujitsu. Similarly, a UWF wrestler could fare just fine against a kickboxer with no grappling experience, but faced with a BJJ expert or top folkstyle wrestler who understood and had mastered positional control, the lockflows they'd learned for working purposes became a lot less useful. I don't think it's a coincidence that the UWF-descended wrestlers who had the most success in MMA competition were, for the most part, those who had strong wrestling games going in - Ken Shamrock, Kazushi Sakuraba, Minoru Suzuki.

The fall is the law.

And there's a third element, which is pure aesthetics. The original UWF brought in luchadors and British World of Sport style wrestlers to mix with the Japanese strong stylists and the American... whatever the Americans were doing at the time. And they didn't let these grappling wizards break out the weirdest pinning combinations they could think of! This blows my mind. It is insane to me that you would hire across the pro wrestling spectrum like this and not take advantage of the possibilities. (On the off chance Josh Barnett is reading this - Josh, when you restart the UWF, hire, I dunno, Blue Panther and Ben Askren and lock them in a room for two solid days with orders to come up with the craziest pinning moves they can come up with. You will not regret this. I promise.) In a worked context, the need to stay off your back while also attempting and defending submissions and strikes opens up a world of storytelling opportunities. It becomes another element to chain in with your suplexes and takedowns and submission holds. One more thing to force an opponent to move a certain way, to open up a new avenue for attack as they try desperately to close one down.  

The NCAA and American schools in general treat wrestling like a winter sport. The Olympics class it as a summer sport. They're both wrong. From the beginning to today, from now til the end of time, it's a fall sport. The fall is the law.