MMA - Bruce Lee's Wing Chun Legacy

MMA was first created by Bruce Lee's Chinese Kungfu spirit that he learned from Wing Chun.

Thus, MMA was first invented by Bruce Lee in the spirit of Chinese Kungfu, and was a result of him wanting to demonstrate and teach competitive fighting through safe sparring - as a more sportive representation of the martial arts he loved. As a result, he began to incorporate further distancing - competitive posturing and squaring off, and lower stances, in order to launch attacks, like in shoot fighting, for example, which opened up his style to more wrestling potential.

Then the UFC was created to showcase BJJ, and so wrestling took center stage, even though Bruce Lee had began MMA in the West with WingChun's Chinese Kungfu dimension as his "heart of martial arts" concept. UFC gave an excellent impression of BJJ as a martial art because it exploited the traditional separation that there had been between traditional MA and wrestling - and especially so since the advent of the gun, and thus less hand-to-hand combat on the streets. For 'Civil' brawling had either become more like wrestling, and more serious violence had involved more sophisticated weapons - there was no longer any middle 'grappling' ground for people to be concerned with for self defense purposes.

Just think of a cowboy more than a hundred years ago - what need would he have for grappling in a bar full of gunslingers? And so grappling defenses during proper fights fell out of use and out of sight - until BJJ brought it back into the picture.