BRAWL: Behind-the-Scenes of MMA
Published by on April 6th, 2008 in Book Reviews

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BRAWL: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Mixed Martial Arts Competition
Erich Krauss and Bret Aita – with introduction by Bob Shamrock
(ECW Press, 2002, 300 pgs., $19.95)

It seems that mixed martial arts, for better or worse, is continually being compared with boxing. Well, boxing, with its long history, should be so fortunate as to have an account of its early days that is as detailed and historically accurate as “Brawl: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Mixed Martial Arts Competition.” Kudos to authors Erich Krauss and Bret Aita for their painstaking research in chronicling the formative years of MMA in America, which started, of course, with Rorion Gracie’s marketing of himself and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which subsequently morphed into the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Remember that there was no internet culture, no “underground,” no mainstream publicity, no organization to speak of within what the early MMA promoters were doing. With this book you get lots of “inside stuff” you would be hard-pressed to know even if you were closely following the limited number of mixed martial arts shows that were available at the time.

Obviously, there was an “outlaw” quality to all those early promotions, and “Brawl” is especially good at breaking down the political and regulatory difficulties encountered by the MMA pioneers, including anecdotes about cards that had to be moved from stuck-in-the-mud places like New York to safe havens that were unregulated by athletic commissions. If you were wondering about the hows and whys of John McCain’s campaign to destroy the sport, or the travails of Bob Meyrowitz that ultimately forced him to sell off the UFC, this is the right place.

Krauss and Aita also impressively detail the other MMA organizations that opened up shop in the mid-to-late 1990′s, many of which were operating on a shoestring, often moving under cover of darkness, sometimes paying their talent, sometimes not, but consistently helping to quench the thirst of a fan base that went largely ignored for years by the mainstream media. The background material on all the fighters who shaped the sport is impeccable. And this would have to be the publication of record for the first decade of UFC events, from its inception in 1993 to the post-Meyrowitz takeover by Zuffa LLC, because it contains information that is archived nowhere else. If you want a comprehensive story about every UFC show right through 2001, you will never find anything more authoritative, or more engrossing.

Perhaps the greatest compliment one can bestow on “Brawl” is to say that someone who was not familiar with mixed martial arts might easily become a fan after picking this book up, because it recounts a short, often obscure, but always eventful history with such color.

And for those who consider themselves a little more hardcore, it is, along with Clyde Gentry’s “No Holds Barred: Ultimate Fighting and the Martial Arts Revolution,” a mandatory historical reference.