MMA or Mixed martial arts is a full contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and

Mixed Martial Arts is the fastest growing sport in the world. Mixed Martial Arts (or MMA) is a combat sport that combines every and any fighting technique in a bout. To look closer at this sport as a discourse community, we will break down the sport into 5 different categories. We will take a look at the goals and values of MMA, the typical fighting styles or genres of MMA, the general rules of MMA, tasks and roles of each MMA community, and the targeted audience of MMA.

Throughout world history people have enjoyed watching two men compete in hand to hand combat. Professional boxing made its debut here in America around the turn of the 20th century. Unlike boxing, mixed martial arts is a relatively new sport. Both sports are very technical and require their fighters to be in superb condition. Many fighters train all their life to make it big, but few ever get there. Although both sports are immensely popular, one stands alone as the dominant sport. In this paper I 'll prove that the sport of MMA is more technical, more exciting, and much safer than boxing.

Boxing had always been around in which its origin started back in Ancient Greece where Greeks found the sport of violence very entertaining (Hirsley par. 17). Despite its huge popularity at that time, it soon died off with the rest of Greece to where it would not be revived until the 1600’s. Medieval Europe played around with the idea of boxing, but it would later perish due to the rise of the Salem Witch Trials (Hirsley par. 18). Boxing would then come back around once more, but only this time being the most effective. The 1920’s eventually came around, and with the rise of entertainment, boxing was born again. It was previously

Mixed martial arts have been around for a long time. It was first introduced in the original Olympic Games in Athens. In the beginning, fighters used a combination of

Dunn, James. "The History of Mixed Martial Arts." (2007): n. pag. Web. 1 Nov 2010. http://ezinearticles.com/?The-History-of-Mixed-Martial-Arts-(MMA)&id=651615

Elliott J. Gorn’s The Manly Art is a unique book that tells readers the origins of boxing in American culture. The book was published in 1986 by Cornell University Press, the book discussed the development of boxing and American society. Gorn takes sport history, a commonly misunderstood and misinterpreted topic and wrote a book that not only was easy to read but allowed readers to gain knowledge on the sport. Gorn says “To understand prize fighting, I have discovered, is necessarily to understand something about nineteenth-century America. Ideology, ethnicity, social class formation, violence, urbanization, gender roles, religious world views, productive relationships, all are a part of sports history in general and boxing in particular.” (Gorn, pg. 12)

In this essay, the background of boxing and this specific event in time was given. The main goal of boxing is to please the people. Nobody wants to see people just dodging one other in a ring. People want to see somebody get hurt.

Mixed martial arts go all the way back to the first Olympic games of 776 b.c. (“What is Pankration”). This sport combined boxing and wrestling and was used by the Spartans and Thracians (“What is Pankration”). Back in those days these contests were to the death, but today are modernized for society and to allow fighters to fight again after a loss. This is not the only instance of the first mixed martial arts events, but there was Vale Turo in Brazil and most recently the Ultimate

Through Brazilian Jiu Jitsu I grew to fear no man. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a martial art all about the smaller opponent using leverage to defeat the larger foe. Learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has improved my life in many aspects. Before my life on the mat I was a unconfident, chubby kid who couldn’t stand up for himself, but Brazilian Jiu Jitsu would sculpt me in the confident, strong, and leading person I am today. Before learning martial arts, I didn’t feel like my life had meaning.

In the Movie, Gladiator, the practice of men fighting amongst themselves for pure entertainment reflects today’s sports leagues. As we see our own athletes training in combat for MMA, strength and speed for football and stamina for soccer, we see how entertaining it is to watch individuals surpass each other. Arena-like sports have fans, teams, and intense matches. Fans are able to watch the game close enough to touch the players, for example basketball players often run into spectators, soccer players can celebrate by going to their fans. MMA has the octagon where fighters are enclosed in cage until one wins. Compared to Gladiators in Rome, they fight for entertainment and the first to die are the weak. The ones who last the longest are those

Furthermore, Guttmann suggests that “Poliakoff’s stipulation that the criteria for determining victory in sports must be “different from those that mark success in everyday life”...one can nevertheless assert that the rules...were sufficiently different from the rules of war...to allow us to distinguish the two forms of combat.” Combat sports in the modern world benefit much greater from this definition, considering the rules of modern warfare don’t hold much for hand-to-hand combat nor fencing or other forms thereof. However, a modern equivalent can possibly be found in Poliakoff’s reasoning in the difference between a martial art and a combat sport, where the move from sparring into competition distanced martial arts from their combat-oriented origins.

Often known for short as MMA, Mixed Martial Arts is a relatively new combat sport which has been gaining vast amounts of popularity recently

As a combat sport, it is a very simple fight between two sportsmen wearing gloves and other equipment, who try to win each other by having a bigger score or sending the opponent to knock-out, or by throwing punches with fists. However has very strict rules, depending on whether the sportsmen are professionals or amateurs, or , if the match is supervised by the referee, which tend to make the fights less dangerous, lower risks, resulting in less injuries for boxers and also makes for a more entertaining spectacle.

until early 1990s with the introduction of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The UFC at first was

The Tae Kwon Do style of fighting is different than many other styles of martial arts fighting. Tae kwon do could best be