I just watched a fairly spectacular UWF event from January 1985 and feel the need to start this thread, I'm pretty excited. There are so many UWF's, you had the Bill Watts UWF, the Herb Abrams UWF, then the Japanese UWF shoot style which can be broken up into two parts of history; the first one that launched in 1984 and went out of business in 1985, then the reborn UWF when they resurrected it in 1988(which was huge and drew record pro wrestling crowds).

Through it all I felt the need to just post this thread to exclusively focus on the original Japanese UWF that started in early 1984 and went out of business in September 1985, the one with Tiger Mask; Satoryu Sayama, the man that Bret Hart called the Bruce Lee of pro wrestling. 

UWF was professional wrestling. Shoot style pro wrestling. I've seen modern younger wrestling kids/reviewers/forum posters around the "IWC" kind of not know what to think of this wrestling style. If you were to see a modern day promotion start up and try to emulate this style they would get labeled as MMA or fake MMA. But how does that apply to a UWF show I just watched from 1985? It's actually quite simple; pro wrestling is in fact quite strong.

Pro wrestling that you watch on WWE and AEW has a lineage and a trace of DNA in it's blood that goes back to a very legitimate grappling style that was quite dangerous, and very real, just as real as any other strip mall "self defense" dojo martial art in your local shopping center. It just all evolved and was bred in as many different directions as dog breeds over generations until what you see now, all of these different styles around the world, the pit bull, the labradors, retrievers, miniature pom-poms, from mean and ugly to soft and cuddly, but they all trace back to their common ancestor the wolf. I've developed my own theory that MMA is just one of several vastly different styles of professional wrestling that evolved into it's own entity, it's real, it's violent, it's unscripted, but at the end of the day a pit bull is still just a dog. What it is is what it is, if you trace the evolution it's all right there. 

Some bullet points on what I can remember about the original 1984 UWF off the top of my head. 

It all really started with Inoki bringing in Karl Gotch in the original New Japan feud in the 70's. Gotch was a master black belt level in the forgotten martial art of pro wrestling submission grappling, catch wrestling, wigan style snake pit wrestling, whatever you want to call it. Gotch's best student in the Japan dojos was Yoshiaki Fujiwara, who became like one of Inoki's enforcers in NJPW(Fujiwara was in Inoki's corner for the Ali fight). Because Fujiwara was really good at what Gotch taught him, the real pro wrestling, which was freakishly ahead of it's time when you look at how knowledge of grappling evolved over the years in the UFC. Submissions that everybody thought were new in the UFC in 1994-95-96 were being done by Gotch and Fujiwara in Japan in the 70's and 80's.

Wrestlers in NJPW in the 80's were disgruntled because they weren't getting paid, Tiger Mask and Akira Maeda were the big names. They got into the shoot style stuff from Fujiwara and Gotch, Tiger Mask had his own martial arts background as a striker. Somewhere in there Tiger Mask released a book giving away all the secrets of pro wrestling as being worked, this was after he had left NJPW after the dispute with Inoki.

So Maeda, perhaps a very young baby Nobuhiko Takada and another major money guy that I can't remember his name break away from NJPW to start the UWF in like January 1984. They do like a week of shows to start with and it's an oddball mixture of wrestling, shoot style with Maeda but with a lot of luchadores on the card and traditional wrestlers like Dutch Mantell.

Later in 1984 they severed ties with one of the main influential financial backers and Tiger Mask came in with Fujiwara. Because of the book Tiger Mask released they shifted the whole UWF into the shoot style. This is where shit gets interesting. 

I've come to the realization of how the UWF became like this battle cry, like they declared a war on all fake pro wrestling like they were doing away with all the shame of being embarrassed to be a fan of the shit show it had become and they were on a crusade to take it back to being a respectable sport. And this became like a major fucking do or die lifestyle for this promotion. How awesome is that? I read in one of the Observers from 85 that the UWF wrestlers had talked such a level of shit about pro wrestling in Japan to the point where they would have trouble finding work had the promotion went under. 

Can not be understated what all effect this little Japanese promotion in 1984-85 had on the history of combat sports and where it would go in the 90's-2000's with direct lineage leading to K-1 and Pride FC. I feel like it needs it's own spotlight focus for a while, let me dig around and find some events/matches, dig out some books for some juicy details. 

This original UWF never really got that big, they only drew around ECW level crowds 1,500-2,000 if I remember correctly.

Was the Maeda vs Andre The Giant shoot incident before the launch of the UWF? I think maybe it was. Way too lazy right now to look anything up. My hands hurt. The splinter is the cost of the wood. But I think that is why Maeda got so popular.

The Ali vs Inoki and all the other various mixed style wrestler vs martial arts matches that Inoki was doing was really the genesis of everything it seems. I really dig the big 6'7" black karateka Willie Williams(that got famous for fighting a bear) that Inoki fought that was a fucking rad bout. That same guy has some killer matches in my 91-92 Rings set he's a fascinating character, him or his family should have/be getting paid by Sega for using his likeness for Jeffrey Mcwild in Virtua Fighter.

But Maeda vs Tiger Mask became a big feud that got very real in the ring. They couldn't work together and split and it killed the whole UWF in September 1985. Tiger Mask left wrestling to start Shooto, so add that to the direct lineage along with Pride/K-1 that ties into UWF. The UWF guys went back to New Japan.

I took a quick look at some NJPW results from this era and they didn't start working the UWF guys into the roster until January 1986, the very first show of the year. And they did it where the UWF guys fought each other under UWF rules isolated on the card for a while before they started mixing up with the NJPW roster in the spring. There was a big 5-on-5 elimination match with Inoki leading a team against UWF guys in like March, that looks really cool.

Somewhere in there Maeda and Takada teamed up a lot and won some NJPW belts before possibly feuding with each other. That's crazy they never did a Maeda vs Inoki match at all during all of this.

So I Imagine they jobbed the UWF guys out over the rest of 86-87. I know somewhere in there Maeda had another incident where he did a shoot kick and blasted Riki Choshu in the face and legit injured him. This led to Maeda being fired by NJPW and they restarted a newborn UWF in 1988. This time they were fucking huge, breaking box office records with some of the biggest crowds for any pro wrestling shows at that time. They were huge from 1988 to 1990 when politics within the ownership group brought it down again.

Maeda and Takada tried to keep it going on their own with Rings and Pride, while Fujiwara led to Suzuki/Funaki starting Pancrase. All 3 of the UFC's original 3 Emperors that laid the groundwork for what the sport is and will always be; Severn, Shamrock, and Royce Gracie. Two of them were pro wrestlers to begin with(Shamrock actually wrestled in UWF and was of the lineage of Gotch/Fujiwara, while Severn did UWFI feud with Takada and was doing pro wrestling weeks before his debut at UFC 4, lands textbook German Suplex in the Octagon and wears NWA World title belt into next 2 shows) while Royce's family learned judo that had been filtered through pro wrestling carnival circuit from a traveling judoka that had been up and down late 1800's/early 1900's pro wrestling territories. 

This is the show I watched from January 1985, just 3 pretty interesting matches. Takada is a different animal here in a different shape than I'm used to seeing him in. The Tiger Mask vs Maeda match was really good, high end 3 star shoot style match if not 4 stars. Great finish. Then the main event I don't know why but I got the biggest laugh at Fujiwara just so effortlessly stretching the fuck out of his training partner Stu Hart style in the warm up video:

Timestamped:

I’m starting to really understand the brilliance of this whole wrestling style and UWF. UWF was a fucking credo, a mantra, a lifestyle, like an army on a mission, pro wrestling's own past reawakened full circle, out to take back its own legitimacy from all the con men and carny promoters that transformed the sport into little Japanese girls wrestling each other in babydoll costumes(flying into each other with ass strikes to entertain the thirstiest level of weirdos).

The level of shit the UWF guys talked publicly about Japanese promoters and wrestlers is so glorious. Then showing up at the doorstep of NJPW the way they did may be the goat wrestling storyline. 

Edit: while I'm in here I was playing the K-1 game on Playstation 1 yesterday and it hit me how directly the K-1 evolved out of Rings. Satake and a lot of the K-1 guys were doing shoot kickboxing matches(and worked matches against Rings wrestlers) in some of the Rings shows in 91-92 I have, Rings were also responsible for scouting and discovering a lot of the Dutch heavyweight kickboxers like Peter Aerts that dominated K-1 and elevated the whole sport of kickboxing in doing so. Then the impact that K-1 had as huge as they were in MMA and kickboxing in the 2000's(and the power struggle they had going with Pride and what it did for the sport). You can trace it back from K-1 directly to Rings directly back to UWF it all ties back to wrestling quite literally, like by blood dna.  

The Rings pipeline into Holland for the Dutch kickboxers they were bringing in was so huge looking back. When you look at kickboxing like the Muay Thai style the heavyweights that were at the top of that style all came from Holland. Rings connections with Russia bringing in guys like Kopylov, Volk Han, was huge too because of Fedor(easily the next level peak of the sport at his peak). DNA is DNA and your blood is your blood, it all traces right back to UWF.