Catch Wrestling

My father grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, and was trained in amateur freestyle wrestling. He also learned catch wrestling, which we would call today submission wrestling. I don’t really know where he learned it from, I never had the opportunity to ask him, and when he was teaching me I was too young (9-12 years old) to know what even to ask.

Since I was wrestling in school (which was, back in the day, a sport just about everyone participated in during the winter in Pennsylvania), my father showed me some of the classic freestyle moves. Take-downs, escapes, etc. etc.

After we would practice for a while, he would then bring out the catch wrestling moves. He usually told me that they were used to stop an over aggressive opponent who might be trying to hurt you. He would come up with clever names for these moves, and tell me stories of wrestling strongmen who would arrive in town and challenge the local men to try to beat them in a wrestling match and putting up some money as incentive. The locals would pay the entrance fee with their own money to compete and enter the roped off area (usually in grass) and they would start, with the wrestling strongman usually winning by applying some form of submission hold. These traveling wrestlers had colorful names, which are escaping me now.

Most of the moves that I remember him showing me involved arm locks and using the arm to leverage the opponent into other positions.

In fact, what was really interesting to me was that at a recent Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu seminar I attended, the instructor was explaining how you need to keep your arms in tight and not let them flounder about because it is easy to snatch and lock a loose arm like that.

Reminded me of my dad and our lessons.

Wish he was still here

Judo’s North-South Effect

I was speaking with a friend and this topic came up, and it was about judo’s role in the development (or lack of) of martial arts in North America as well as south America.

Judo came to north America looking to prove itself, with some elite judo practitioners ready to take on America’s best. They took on mostly catch wrestlers, these are the submission wrestling specialists that were around that travelled from town to town taking on locals to wrestling matches with a cash prize to whoever could beat them. Most of these wrestlers were schooled in traditional wrestling and then learned the submission arts from an experienced catch wrestler.

The judo players did not always fair to well against these experienced submission pros, thus giving the impression that judo was inferior to wrestling that led to a long absence of a grappling based eastern art from entering into the northern hemisphere.

So what about south America? Judo entered here as well, but the challenges came to the Jiu-Jitsu clubs that it found, and was a traditional match up as judo’s parent art is based from jiujitsu.

As was the case in japan, jiujitsu had a hard time dealing with the takedowns and pinning techniques of judo, and as was the result in japan, jiujitsu suffered from the defeats.

But unlike japan, the brazilians were able to work through this dilemma. Instead of trying to compete in takedowns with judo, let’s assume they take the jiujitsu down, and let’s build from there. You can see that the elemental foundations of brazilian jiujitsu are starting from positions that a judo practitioner would put them in.

It was a brilliant concept and resolved the great problems of countering judo. Now it was jiujitsu that started becoming the dominate eastern arts based grappling style in brazil that started to migrate north ward, took on western wrestling and had initial success, however it must be stated that the wrestlers that it first faced were not catch wrestlers (unlike when judo first came to north America).

This some thoughts of mine. My next blog I will tell you how my father trained me in catch wrestling that he learned.