Ultimate Necromancy Championship: Digging Up Corpses for Fights

I have dumped all over this weekend's Bellator card (except the carefully hidden good fights) every which way I can because it is headlined by a fifty year old heavyweight who hasn't won a meaningful fight in a decade, and a fifty year old welterweight who hasn't even fought in a decade. And that is not to mention the co-main event between Kimbo Slice and Dada 5000. But every time it is brought up there will be one guy who jumps up and says "It's a fun fight. Not everything has to be about title contention, man. Let them bang, bro." I'm not sure how a garbage fight is a fun fight, Shamrock vs Slice was supposed to be a fun fight and it was just embarrassing for everyone involved, but it did get me thinking.

Right now I have an ebay bid down on the Necronomicon Ex Mortis and I'm feeling lucky. If relevance, fighter safety and good taste are non-factors for today's unscrupulous promoters why don't I take it a little further? Through necromancy and shrewd negotiation I suspect I could put together a card worthy of the dark lord Rebney himself. In the hopes of procuring a financial backer on the level of Viacom or Fox, I share with you my prospective fight card for Ultimate Necromancy Championship 1: Rebeginnings. (Though I plan to push the name Slackator nearer the air date.)

Abraham Lincoln versus Billy Baldwin

Honest Abe is remembered for his contribution to the history of the United States, for the emancipation proclamation, and for getting capped in the head in a theatre. His greatest accomplishment was as the role through which the world's greatest screen talent, Daniel Day Lewis was able to win yet another well deserved Oscar for Best Actor. What you might not know about Lincoln is that he was a tremendously accomplished catch wrestler. With a reported record of three hundred wins and a sole loss, Lincoln was a force in the clinch.

If you believe the accounts, the town of New Salem was run with 'feats of strength' being seen as currency. If you believe the most extreme accounts—because we love to make gods of those in the past—a young Lincoln could be seen down by the river lifting boxes which weighed a thousand to twelve hundred pounds. When the town was being run by the Clary's Grove boys, Lincoln bet their leader, Jack Armstrong ten dollars that he could find a man to beat the latter in wrestling. When Lincoln's nominee no-showed Lincoln stepped in and depending on the account either sat on Armstrong's face or chokeslammed him.

A cut hundred and eighty pounds in his prime and standing six foot four, Lincoln is suspected to have suffered from Marfan syndrome because of his ludicrously long limbs. Unfortunately, exact figures on presidential reach are hard to come by but supposedly Lincoln had the arms of a seven footer. A gangly wrestler with a ludicrous reach advantage for his weight class… sounding familiar?

And in the grand tradition of old timey open challenges like John L. Sullivan's infamous "I'll lick any son of a bitch in the house", Lincoln performed his own call out to a crowd of onlookers with shades of the orator he would become.

"I'm the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns."

Imagine that line delivered by Daniel Day Lewis and you have an Oscar winning sports movie on the cards. But back to the fight. Abe's opponent will be decidedly less dead than him, but certainly not as accomplished a wrestler: Billy Baldwin. Famous for being the younger brother of Alec Baldwin and also for being an actor, Baldwin competed as a wrestler at Binghampton University and has done a tremendous amount to help the cause of Olympic wrestling during the Olympic committee's last two attempts to drop the sport. He has also made the team for the legendary Thanksgiving day Baldwin Bowl every year, so his athleticism even today is not in question.

I'll be honest, this is a bit of a squash match if Lincoln comes in anywhere close to the form of his heyday. An eighty-inch reach on a six foot four frame is just unfair, but until the rules prohibit disproportionate reach Lincoln and Jon Jones can continue holding men at arms reach with no skill required. May be a squash but it will set Lincoln up for a future match against the winner of the next 180lbs bout.

Masahiko Kimura versus Kazushi Sakuraba

The word 'kimura' has become part of the mixed martial arts culture without many realizing just how significant the name is. Before it was the kimura it was the reverse arm entanglement or gyaku-ude-garami in Judo. The reason for the name change was the success of the brilliant judoka, Masahiko Kimura. Kimura's list of accomplishments is incredible: being the youngest man ever awarded a godan (fifth degree black belt) by the Kodokan, and supposedly only losing four matches in his life (though you will find that almost every judoka at a certain age starts to generate rumors of having never been thrown or lost a bout).

Kimura spent time training karate with Gogen Yamaguchi and Masutatsu Oyama and claimed that commitment to learning to punch, and striking a makiwara every day vastly improved his judo. He noticed that many judoka would leave their thumb too loose while gripping and believed that constant practice of a tight fist taught him to fully utilize his grip on his opponent's gi. Kimura would supposedly perform thousands of push ups a day, spar for hours, and bunny hop a kilometer at a time (all of which you would probably be advised to not do). Oyama, a martial arts zealot who retreated into the mountains to train alone for months in pursuit of perfection, always claimed that Masahiko Kimura was the only person who trained harder than him.

Kimura's tokui-waza (favourite technique) was always his osoto-gari (large outer reap). Nowadays this is seen as something of a strength move or a 'heavyweight throw', but that never seemed to bother Kimura who spent his life developing strength anyway. Kimura could routinely throw opponents hard enough to cause concussions and when he met Helio Gracie in a grappling challenge match in Brazil, it was his strategy to attempt to knock Gracie silly on the floor but he found that the mats were too forgiving.

Being a Helio Gracie match, this one has been reimagined and exaggerated severely over the years. In the last telling, Kimura outweighed Gracie by eighty pounds and 200,000 people were in attendance at a stadium whose modern capacity is less than 80,000. Both of these are obviously not true. Whatever the case, Kimura wound up locking in the gyaku-ude-garami and broke Gracie's arm.

Years later the other competitor in this match up, Kazushi Sakuraba would use the exact same hold to get the better of four Gracie's. Though Sakuraba was a catch wrestler and was likely taught this as a 'double wrist lock' by Billy Robinson and the other professional wrestlers he trained with. Sakuraba would turn his back on fighters in an age when showing the back was considered the beginning of the end. When they grabbed a hold of him around the waist he would break their hands apart and begin attacking one arm with the kimura and roll into a sumi-gaeshi style roll from either one knee or the feet or simply attempt to wrench the opponent's shoulder off.

The point of this fight would be to find out how a fighter whose entire MMA game was grappling built around the kimura would fair against one of judo's most revered competitors and the man who made the hold famous. How would Kimura fair in the clinch without a gi? How would he deal with Sakuraba's low single and continuous work on the ground? Would Sakuraba's famously shoddy striking shock us all and let him down against the judo world champion who had trained so extensively with top notch karateka of his day?

I'm sure you're already sold on the idea and set to hand over your credit card but in case you're worried that two fights is not enough to make an event, we'll stock up the undercard with some jobbers with a little ring experience—Mickey Rourke, Akebono, Bam Bam Bigelow, Michael Flatley—and rake it in hand over fist. What's more, if we follow the model set up by one popular promotion we won't have to pay any of our fighters until after UNC 2: Josh Barnett vs. Frank Gotch.

Pick up Jack's new kindle book, Finding the Art, or find him at his blog, Fights Gone By.