I think there was talk at the time of Funaki coming to the UFC, but it is possible this was just a promotional tactic because a couple of months after UFC 8, SEG started airing Pancrase events and compilations on US pay-per-view. This might also have been a hedge against the political opposition the UFC was facing at the time, but I don’t think the idea ever took off.
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Yes, perhaps the rule was worded in a strange way, because as you note, the ban only seemed to cover the standard hand positioning for the heel hook. In September 96, for example, you have Funaki going hard after Bas Rutten’s legs and nearly catching him with what was, in essence, a heel hook using his head/neck to brace Bas’s toes and spinning the heel around with his hands. This and a few related moves were the “work around” to the heel hook ban.
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Right, I think it was like April of 1996 when US PPV debuted their first Pancrase event (an edited version of the January 1996 event). UFC 8 was February 1996. Ken apparently had a lot to do with setting that up. But that was the first time I had seen a Pancrase event; I must have watched that tape a couple hundred times.
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The heel hook ban and later reintroduction was strange, in the sense that Pancrase banned it, but later on Funaki did a different version of it, seemingly getting around the ban. Funaki was one of three people (with Suzuki and Ozaki) who voted equally on the rules, and there seemingly wasn’t a whole lot of head butting on decisions between the three of them. But IIRC Funaki got Frank Shamrock in a modified heel hook five months after the ban (November 1995)–using his palm instead of the underarm or neck. And in March of 1996 Bas did it to Guy. To be fair, Bas felt it was a modified toe hold, not a heel hook (while Guy felt it was a heel hook). So, there’s debate on which twisting leg lock it actually is (I just always felt it was a modified heel hook, but I’m no expert).
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Anything with the heel cupped and rotation is a hook
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You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Just found this today about Ivan Gomes, awesome. Been into NHB/MMA history since 1994 so after UFC 1 and Shooto, but pretty early in and can’t get enough of the history pre-UFC:
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I loved how the wwf presented him as a master submission artist.
However the only thing he did was twist an ankle. Something that needed zero skill.
Ken is not a bright guy. He’s smarter than Tito by a little.
Great stuff. We need much more info on pre-ufc mma ..
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I think Len is broke ass, Tito still has money
I wouldn’t want the two of them building my rocket ship.
leg locks in general in this era werent nearly as refined as they are now. not even the same universe. Ken was prob one of the most proficient but man you dont drop for a foot lock in a fight (A) if youre on top (B) if your opponent has a collar grip/tie on you
Yeah I remember back in the mid-90’s that I was terrified of leg locks. So many people I knew had blown out knees or had surgeries or sprains (I blew out a guy’s ACL with a toe hold - sounded like a dry piece of wood snapping). Any time anyone got remotely close on a leg lock, I just tapped early. I didn’t want to fuck around with that stuff back then.
Hopefully these days the knowledge, structure and defense is better on leg locks and it’s maybe a bit safter.
Here is another one by the same guy, more old fascinating stuff:…thought it was Adam Hunter at first, lol:
And one other:
Here is a picture of Gomes performing a heel hook in an NJPW match in the 1970s:
There is another interesting wrinkle about heel hook history that I discovered after the discussion earlier in this thread. Yoshiaki Fujiwara has confirmed in interviews that he learned the heel hook from Gomes, but he has also claimed in some interviews that he only learned the outside heel hook from Gomes, and that he himself was the one who modified it to an inside heel hook. Here is a rough translation of a relevant Fujiwara quote from one Japanese language source for these claims:
…I stole it from Gomes because he was using a technique that we did not know at the time, the heel hold. What Gomes was using was the technique of hooking the heel from the outside, but I improved it to my style so that it could be perfected from the inside.
This is from アントニオ猪木はなぜ「プロレスの技術書」を書かなかったのか？愛弟子・藤原喜明が明かしたワケに納得感しかない… | ニュースな本 | ダイヤモンド・オンライン
In other sources Fujiwara explains that he made this adaptation to chain the heel hook from an ankle lock position he liked, and credited Karl Gotch, not with the technique, but with the inspiration to always try to improve and adapt the techniques you learn to make them more effective for your own personal wrestling style.
Interestingly, all of the pictures I recall seeing of Gomes using the heel hook show only the outside variation. Likewise for most of the luta livre sources before the modern MMA boom started and information flowed freely. Of course, it is also possible that Gomes knew and used the inside heel hook but only showed Fujiwara the outside variant.
Incidentally, Fujiwara has a bit of heat with Gomes, apparently because Inoki assigned him to help Gomes adapt to Japan and in response Gomes took to treating him like a servant. Fujiwara claims that Gomes was not especially good, but this might be influenced by his personal distaste for the man.
Fujiwara also shows the heel hook/hold in the published version of his Gotch notebook. This is the book that purports to be a published version of the hand-written notebook that Fujiwara kept while staying with and training with Karl Gotch. However, even in the Gotch notebook the heel hold is credited to Gomes instead of Gotch. To show this, I took a picture of the page in my copy of Fujiwara’s Gotch notebook and had google translate the text into English:
The translation is rough and imperfect, but you get the gist.
There is a lot of fascinating history about this issue. I might do a full write up or article on it if I can find the time.
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So it turns out Adam isn’t a Jew, he’s a Brazilian this whole time!
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