is a Japanese mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion company based in Tokyo. It was founded in 1993 by professional wrestlers Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki. It is one of the oldest continuously operating MMA promotions in the world and played an important role in the development of modern mixed martial arts in Japan. The promotion grew out of the Japanese shoot wrestling scene, combining catch wrestling-derived grappling with striking and a competitive format inspired in part by professional wrestling.
The name was based on pankration, a fighting sport in the Ancient Olympic Games. Suzuki and Funaki conceived Pancrase as a shoot wrestling promotion with genuine combat, instead of predetermined matches, while retaining elements of the professional wrestling tradition. Its early events featured distinctive rules that differed from those of most modern MMA: closed-fist punches were prohibited to the head but permitted to the body, while open-handed strikes to the head were allowed. Fighters competed in a professional wrestling-style ring with three ropes, and could also escape a submission by reaching the ropes, although doing so cost a point; exceeding a specified number of rope breaks, normally between three and five, resulted in disqualification. Fighters competed without gloves, in close-fitting trunks and professional wrestling-style knee-high boots. Suzuki and Funaki coined the term "Hybrid Wrestling" for this new combat sport. The term "Shootfighting" was also used at the time to describe this type of legitimate hybrid combat; Ken Shamrock, Pancrase's first champion, for example, represented "Shootfighting" at UFC 1 in 1993. Pancrase's champions are known as "Kings of Pancrase".
The first event held was Pancrase: Yes, We Are Hybrid Wrestlers at Tokyo Bay NK Hall in September 1993. The promotion subsequently became an important proving ground for Japanese and international fighters and helped establish MMA as a distinct competitive sport in Japan. Ever since, Pancrase has held over 400 events featuring "hybrid wrestling" and mixed martial arts competition. Currently, Pancrase operates as a developmental circuit for Japanese fighters.
During the late 1990s, adapting to a rapidly changing MMA landscape, Pancrase gradually revised its rules to more closely resemble those used by other MMA organizations, in particular PRIDE Fighting Championships. By 2014, Pancrase had fully adopted the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, used by the UFC. However, it still calls itself "Hybrid Wrestling" rather than MMA, preserving its traditions and origins in Japanese shoot wrestling.
History
Establishment and first event The Japanese professional wrestling scene of the 1970s and 1980s placed a greater emphasis on realistic combat than its American counterpart, particularly through Antonio Inoki and New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW). Influenced in part by catch wrestling practitioner Karl Gotch, Inoki promoted a style that incorporated legitimate combat techniques and sought to blur the distinction between professional wrestling and real fighting. These ideas were further developed by the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF), founded by former NJPW wrestler Akira Maeda in 1984, which became known as "Shoot-style wrestling" or "shoot wrestling". Following the UWF's dissolution in 1990, several of its wrestlers continued to develop the style through other promotions, including Yoshiaki Fujiwara's Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi, from which Pancrase emerged in 1993.
In 1993, Masakatsu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki, Ken Shamrock, Takaku Fuke, and others from the shoot-style Fujiwara Gumi wrestling promotion left the company, due to (mentor and promoter) Yoshiaki Fujiwara's decision to cooperate with the likes of Universal Lucha Libre and W*ING and favoring showmanship over in-ring work. While shoot wrestling was more realistic than other forms of professional wrestling, promoters at the time generally believed that genuinely competitive matches would be difficult to sell to audiences. Earlier in 1992, a rare legitimate match was booked where Ken Shamrock (fighting as Wayne Shamrock) faced international kickboxing champion Don Nakaya Nielsen. Shamrock took Nielsen down immediately and submitted him with an arm lock in 45 seconds. Previously, Funaki and Suzuki also had experimented in a real, unscripted shoot match, which was well-received. The success of these matches made young pro wrestlers Shamrock, Funaki and Suzuki question the prevailing belief that real matches were not commercially viable. Encouraged by Karl Gotch, former pro wrestling star, important catch-as-catch-can coach who advocated for professional wrestling to be a legitimate and genuine combat sport, they brought together a group of pro wrestlers that were interested in developing a promotion centered on legitimate competition, with limited gimmicks and no predetermined outcomes. Gotch also suggested name "Pancrase" from Pankration, the Ancient Greek Olympic sport which mixed grappling with striking.
On May 16, 1993, they established World Pancrase Create Inc. (WPC) with the capital of 30,000,000 Japanese yen.Company Profile pancrase.co.jp Retrieved on 2011-02-20
On September 21, 1993, Pancrase promoted their first event, Pancrase: Yes, We Are Hybrid Wrestlers at Tokyo Bay NK Hall. All the matches were finished with knockout and submission and it attracted a sellout crowd of 7,000 fans. While the public was unfamiliar with what to expect from the new form of fighting, the event received widespread praise from both the fans and media. The event's five matches had a combined duration of only 13 minutes and 5 seconds, contrasting with the longer, slower-paced matches common in other shoot-style wrestling promotions, which often used prolonged positional exchanges to maintain the audience's interest. The unusually short bouts were nickamed byōsatsu (秒殺, "instant kill", literally "killing in seconds") by Japanese wrestling press and fans to describe Pancrase's rapid finishes. Besides Funaki, Suzuki, Shamrock and Fuke, the inaugural event also featured future King of Pancrase and UFC Hall of Famer Bas Rutten, as well as future UFC competitors and Pancrase veterans Vernon White and Kazuo Takahashi among its participants.
Early era The first King Of Pancrase Openweight champion was Ken Shamrock (later becoming famous for his exploits in the Ultimate Fighting Championship), who had previous experience in the newborn UWF and Fujiwara Gumi. Over the years, Funaki and Suzuki held the title alongside other big names, such as Bas Rutten, Frank Shamrock and Guy Mezger.
While founded with the objectives of having real, unscripted combats. On its early era, some match were reportedly worked or otherwise arranged in advance. The promotion did this to protect its performers from potentially damaging losses or injuries, to control the outcomes and maintain the status of its principal stars, and to preserve planned matchups and rivalries while the promotion gradually transitioned from professional wrestling to legitimate competition. Scott Bessac, one of the promotion's early fighters, recalled that Pancrase featured both "works" and "shoots", and "works where the other guy didn't even know it was a work", while Ken Shamrock also recalled that fighters sometimes reached prior agreements concerning how their bouts would be conducted, including arrangements intended to prevent inexperienced opponents from being seriously injured. According to him, his fights against Maurice Smith and Matt Hume were among those worked, as both were relatively inexperienced compared with Shamrock, who agreed with them beforehand to avoid seriously injuring them while still doing a competive or semi-competitive exhibition. The Ken Shamrock–Minoru Suzuki fight is probably the best-known alleged example of a worked Pancrase bout. According to Jeremy Wall, Pancrase asked Shamrock to surrender the King of Pancrase title to Suzuki in a worked fight because the promotion did not want its champion to risk losing the title or damaging Pancrase's standing shortly before Shamrock was scheduled to face Dan Severn at UFC 6. Pancrase participant Guy Mezger said that "there was [sic] not very many works [predetermined outcomes]. Maybe 4 or 5 total and most of them were before I was fighting for them. I hate when people say that there was [sic] so many works in Pancrase, they truly do not know what they are talking about". On the other hand, UFC co-founder Art Davie recalled that, while developing the concept that became the UFC, he studied Pancrase and other Japanese shoot-style promotions, and was convinced that Pancrase was "80 percent work and 20 percent shoot", describing it as a more sophisticated form of American professional wrestling that nevertheless featured legitimate "shooters" such as Masakatsu Funaki.
On its early 90s heyday Pancrase attracted large audiences, with several major events drawing crowds of more than 10,000 spectators. In May 1994, Pancrase: Road to Championship 1 at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo drew 16,000 attendees. The two-night sixteen-men King of Pancrase tournament at the Ryōgoku Sumo Hall in December of that year was one of the largest and most notable mixed martial arts events of its era, one of the first major international MMA tournaments outside the UFC and featuring many of the sport's leading fighters, including future UFC champions Bas Rutten, Ken Shamrock, Frank Shamrock and Maurice Smith, alongside prominent Japanese fighters such as Masakatsu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki and Manabu Yamada. The tournament drew approximately drew approximately 11,000 spectators on its first night and 11,500 spectators on its second night respectively. Ken Shamrock was crowned the first "King of Pancrase" after defeating Alex Cook, Smith, Funaki and Yamada in sequence.
The Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG), at the time the owners of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), purchased the rights to Pancrase shows and ran them on pay-per-view (PPV) to coincide with their UFC events at the time.
Transition to modern MMA The promotion's relatively technical style was increasingly contrasted with the more aggressive styles associated with the UFC and the newly established Pride Fighting Championships. Many of its fighters were also leaving the organization or retiring. In an attempt to adapt to the changing MMA landscape, in 1998 Pancrase experimented with matches held under more permissive vale tudo rules, which it referred to as "Pankration rules" matches. These experiments preceded a more extensive revision of Pancrase's rules the following year.
In 1999, Pancrase eventually revised its rules to more closely resemble those of other mixed martial arts promotions. The new rules permitted closed-fist strikes to the head, bringing Pancrase closer to the emerging modern MMA ruleset. The promotion also introduced a more conventional judging system and standardized shorter bouts, while retaining the prohibition on knees to the head of a grounded opponent. Fighters now had to use open-fingered gloves, a new boxing-style ring was adopted and the attire was changed to fighting shorts. The changes were intended to make Pancrase more accessible to fighters from other MMA organizations and to reduce the differences between its rules and those used by promotions such as Pride Fighting Championships. The revised rules were introduced during the 1999 Breakthrough series, marking the end of Pancrase's distinctive early ruleset.