Shoot wrestling

Shoot wrestling or shoot-style is a Japanese hybridgrappling style and combat sport. Shoot wrestling incorporates techniques from various wrestling, submission grappling, kickboxing and karate styles. It was particularly inspired and influenced by catch wrestling, a form of wrestling with submissions that was the predominant style of professional wrestling in the 19th and early 20th century, at the time a legitimate competitive sport and not yet predetermined.

Shoot wrestling originated in Japan's professional wrestling circuit (puroresu) of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly stemming from the "strong-style" scene. Professional wrestlers of the era increasingly incorporated more realistic or "full-contact" techniques into their matches to heighten their intensity, while diminishing or eschewing some of the theatrical elements and acrobatics of mainstream professional wrestling. The style incorporated techniques from martial arts and combat sports such as catch-as-catch-can wrestling, judo, karate, kickboxing, and other forms of grappling and striking. Matches emphasized hard-looking strikes and kicks, takedowns, suplexes, realistic grappling exchanges, and submission holds, with wrestlers seeking to make predetermined contests resemble legitimate fights through struggles for position, exchanges of strikes, and attempts to force opponents to submit or be knocked out. This emphasis on realism extended to the presentation and structure of matches, presenting some traditional wrestling conventions, such as gimmicks and heel-and-face dynamics, in a more subdued form, with wrestlers commonly wearing simple trunks, singlets, or other combat sports-inspired athletic attire rather than elaborate, colorful costumes, while incorporating elements of legitimate combat sports into their rules and presentation, including rounds, point systems, and kayfabe judges and officials; some also eliminated the three-count pinfall in favor of submission, knockout, or point-based finishes to provide clearer conclusions to matches. The name "shoot wrestling" comes from the professional wrestling term "shoot", which refers to any unscripted occurrence within a scripted wrestling event.

The first wave of shoot wrestlers were students of Antonio Inoki and Karl Gotch from New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), two wrestlers which already were advocates of a stiffer and more realistic wrestling style, and influenced by wrestlers such as Lou Thesz and Billy Robinson, all who had an enduring popularity in Japan due to their serious submission wrestling style. Their students left NJPW to form the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF) in 1984, which developed and codified shoot-style wrestling into a distinct form. After the UWF closed in 1990, its wrestlers went on to establish or join several successor promotions, including Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi, Fighting Network RINGS, and UWF International (UWFi), the latter becoming the most popular and commercially successful of the UWF successors. These promotions helped popularize shoot-style wrestling, which reached its peak popularity in the late 1980s and mid-1990s when UWF-derived promotions drew tens of thousands of spectators, including reported crowds of 60,000 at the 1989 U-Cosmos event and 67,000 at a joint NJPW–UWFi event in 1995.

Shoot wrestling was popular in Japan from the 1980s until the mid-1990s, when its popularity declined sharply amid the demise of the leading shoot-style promotion UWFi in 1996 and the simultaneous rise of mixed martial arts (MMA) in Japan. The decline was particularly notable for its speed: within a few years, many of the wrestlers and organizations that had helped popularize shoot wrestling had transitioned to legitimate MMA, while others returned to more theatrical forms of professional wrestling. Shoot-style wrestling nevertheless survived in smaller independent promotions, such as BattlARTS and Lidet UWF, which continues to present UWF-style matches. Shoot wrestling had a considerable influence on the sport of mixed martial arts.

Prior to the emergence of the current sport of shoot wrestling, the term was commonly used in the professional wrestling business, particularly in the United Kingdom, as a synonym for the sport of catch wrestling. Shoot wrestling can be used to describe a range of hybrid fighting systems such as shootfighting, shoot boxing and the styles of mixed martial arts done in the Shooto, Pancrase and RINGS promotions. Organizations, promotions and gyms with origins in shoot wrestling are referred as the "U-Kei".