Harold Howard attacks Steve Jennum in a parking lot!

[MMA_scientist]

With that said, I have heard that ITF TKD is more "pure" as compared to WTF/Olympic style. Having seem some ITF stuff, I would agree. It's kind of like kickboxing in their tournament/competition style. I wouldn't mind training in it myself.

If you watched the Fightquest TKD episode, that definately looked more hardcore than what we normally see. I don't know how effective it would be, but I wouldn't want to trade kicks with those guys.

[SPX]

If you watched the Fightquest TKD episode, that definately looked more hardcore than what we normally see. I don't know how effective it would be, but I wouldn't want to trade kicks with those guys.

I think Fightquest is available for streaming on Netflix, so I will go home and look that up. If I can, I will watch it tonight, because that sounds interesting.

From what I understand, many ITF practitioners are actually a little arrogant about it and like to go on about how they practice "real" TKD because the ITF--and I guess this goes back to lineages, like you were talking about earlier--can be traced back to General Choi, who could more or less be called the creator of modern TKD. The WTF spun off and changed the style considerably, at least in emphasis if not technique. In fact, I remember reading a comment attributed to Gen. Choi where he said something along the lines of, "I would be happy to see the martial art I created receiving Olympic recognition, but what you see in the Olympics is not the martial art I created."

I know that, unlike WTF/Olympic TKD, ITF practitioners don't wear 20 lbs of pads when they spar, punches are allowed to the head, and instead of stop-point competitions they usually go for two 2-minute continuous rounds.

There are some things I don't like about it, like no clinch fighting and only straight punches allowed, but overall from what I've seen it's kind of pimp and I would like to maybe give it a try at some point.

[SPX]

Here's a vid of an ITF TKD guy who has made a a relatively successful foray into MMA with a record of 14-9:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8048hXhXKs4

I've known about him for a little while, but was quite surprised to learn that, quite surprisingly, he's actually supposed to be fighting on tonight's Moosin card.

[Svino]

Actually, a lot of those early UFC strikers did train in grappling, it just wasn't enough. I remember reading that Johnny Rhodes had originally impressed the Gracies by being a karate guy who "also did some stuff on the ground." Harold Howard tried to play up his jiu-jitsu skills in the interview. You could usually see the guys practicing some type of submission wrestling in their intro clips. Patrick Smith impressed me a bit by immediately taking the right lesson from his loss to Shamrock and trained nothing but grappling for a while, which took him to the finals in UFC 2, and Abbott wouldn't have had even his modest semblance of success without his wrestling background.

I'm glad to see someone mention the Gracie / Hackney fight. It was one of the underappreciated scraps of the early era.

[SPX]

Keith Hackney is a bad ass. He runs an MMA school now.