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It’s unfortunate that Sambo is too thin on the ground to find training, is just as tough on the body as judo and is 100% funded by a corporation that is a combination of the worst parts of Exxon Mobil and Blackwater/Constellis.

I hate that Catch Wrestling outside of Japan is composed of carnies fighting with each other, while putting together less than two competitions a year with a grand total of nine total competitors. That is, when they aren’t getting “worked” by dead pro wrestlers.

I despise the fact that Muay Thai is a continuous car wreck of bodily abuse that leaves most fighters with wrecked bodies and scrambled brains before their pre-frontal cortex even develops.

Then you have boxing, which is a Darwinian filter that finds mutants who are resistant to brain damage. How do you know if you have a non-rattling brainpan? We dunno!  We’ll find out by the time you retire from fighting! If you weren’t, there’s always hospice at 40!

Of course, you can’t go to the traditional martial arts. They are full "Lightning bolt Lightning bolt!" LARPers with people playing "who can pretend the hardest" and coming to blows over Batman vs Superman arguments, except those superheroes are ‘Chinese druggie movie star’ vs ‘Japanese Carnie’.

You could maybe do a western or eastern weapon based martial art, but, uh… No.

The western style ones are buried in the tradition of trying to figure out techniques from woodcuts before people knew how anatomy and perspective-in-art worked. Oh, and the art is literally full of literal Nazis.  No, not Neo-Nazis, but “I have three Schutzstaffel uniforms in my closet and one in my car at any time” type of Nazis.

The eastern style weapon arts? Well, they combine the orientalist worship of tiny brown psychos (fuck off, those are my people) who will kill you for singing Frank Sinatra at Karaoke. This is combined with their own Johnny Knoxville & Steve-O level of disregard for their own personal safety. No one is under 30 and everyone is ready to serve 10-20 years from using that clip-it in their pocket to cover themselves in your blood. 

So what does that leave? The Infomercial Version Brazilian Pre-War Judo - Sorry, “Gracie Jiu Jitsu”. A sport created by a family legacy as legit and sane as the Von Erich’s legacy, just with more Victorian age mysticism and Mormon-style bigamist compounds.

It’s a miracle that BJJ is as widespread as it is. It should have gone "worked" like pro-wrestling but the two headed dragon of Latino machismo culture & the socio-economic classism of Brazil kept it "Alive" - the Gracies were rich compound dwellers.

Unlike every other carnie, they loved their machismo displays more than money. So they'd come down from their compound and beat on the karate nerds, capoeiristas and wrestlers in the slums to prove the superiority of their art and their family’s bloodline.

So with the west primed by a 20 year parade of scam artists pretending to be Shaolin monks and mulletted men cosplaying as both Samurai and the resistance against the samurai, it all culminated with a tubby fake special forces LARPer, who roleplayed his way into writing a script to the penultimate martial arts experience: Bloodsport.

After that, we were ready for a "Bloodsport but IRL!" and Rorion was ready to serve it up, with his law degree and the blood of his carnie ancestors flowing through him. He even pushed his scrawny & socially awkward brother to be in the starring role: Royce.  I am sure he would have liked to do it himself, but, you know…

Even with a carefully managed opponent list, Royce could have gotten cracked and absolutely embarrassed, but somehow he didn't and Rorion had his angle to work them marks! No more training some locals out of a garage, the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu myth was ready for sale.

So, plenty bought into this repackaged Japanese jacket wrestling in huge numbers on seeing the skinny, awkward and “manageable” Royce strangle his way through a crowd of clueless fighters. They bought into it so much so, it’s now become its own sport and has a competition scene completely divorced from the roots of anything-goes fighting. But that comes with its own problems.

Here’s a sport that is so disorganized that even with six times the number of practitioners in the US than Judo, and nearly 10 times as many fencing, there isn’t a national governing body in the United States, Australia or anywhere in Europe. 

Meanwhile, the international governing body is run by the biggest gym association in Brazil. For those who don’t understand how patently insane this is, imagine the Premier League was straight-up run by Manchester United, the NFL run by The Cowboys or the NHL run by the Maple Leafs.

There is no organized syllabus of instruction. There are only nascent attempts at an objective test of skills for the various ranks and they are far from widespread. Want to start a fight online? Ask for “the essential techniques for a blue belt”.

Then there are the competitions. Matches are conducted on mats of random composition, size and protective value. Competitors are allowed to continue attacks off the mat and into other competitors’ areas or into the other competitors themselves.  Matches scramble out into the stands, into the crowd and coaching areas, smash into medical tables and even fall down stairwells with frightening regularity.

That all said, it is the only grappling art with any sort of aliveness and a measure of effectiveness that you can realistically do after your athletic peak. This is a damn tragedy, because everything about it is so astonishingly clown-shoes, it is embarrassing to be involved in it.