History UsefulNotes / CatchWrestling

* OneHitKill: Interestingly subverted. While most modern sport competitions only need to be won once, catch wrestling contests usually were ruled in two out of three falls. Some bouts featured modifications like 3 out of 5 falls, 4 out of 7 falls, etc.

* OneHitKill: Interestingly subverted. While most modern sport competitions only need to be won once, catch wrestling contests usually were ruled in two out of three falls. Some bouts featured modifications like 3 out of 5 falls, 4 out of 7 falls

However, always in search of the contentment of the audience and the money they would throw, catch wrestling would take over the years a road to theatricality and showmanship over all-around competitions. Matches became deliberately back and forth instead of being boring stallfests or fast squashes, wrestlers started taking on larger-than-life [[TheGimmick gimmicks]] with [[{{tecnico}} heroes]] and [[{{rudo}} villains]], and finally, "worked" elements like {{tag team}} bouts, [[ActionGirl female wrestlers]] and [[GarbageWrestler weapons]] were introduced to spice up the party. Catch wrestling stopped being a competitive sport and turned into the violent soap opera we know and love as ProfessionalWrestling – or did it?

* In Brazil, catch-as-catch-can attracted the crowd's attention both before and during the rise of the ''vale tudo'', a system of bouts which saw people beating down each other with lots of blood to entertain the average Brazilian and which would take invariably the same route towards modern MMA. Local wrestlers mixed catch wrestling with judo and striking arts specifically to adapt to this kind of competition, and it received the antonomasia name of "luta livre," a Portuguese word which formerly referred to any kind of sport wrestling, catch or not, and to differentiate from them, it uses the name "Luta Livre Esportiva" ("sporting") or "Luta Livre Submission"[[note]]Olympic Freestlye Wrestling is called "Luta Livre Olímpica" and Professional Wrestling is "Luta Livre Profissional"[[/note]]. Different from traditional catch-as-catch-can, LL doesn't have a pin, allowing from fighting from the back and thus focused on submission-seeking. Luta livre almost disappeared with the wild rise of UsefulNotes/BrazilianJiuJitsu, but the style is still out there and surviving in European countries like France and Germany.

** Japanese catch wrestling took it up to eleven. The influence of judo and traditional puroresu on their culture meant crowds were able to understand the holds's workings and were already expecting something more, so the wrestlers had to keep it the most dynamic and visually appealing possible, even when they wrestled for real as in the Pancrase and early Shooto promotions. That many of the wrestlers themselves had judo and sambo backgrounds only contributed to it, as the former art favors a grappling game very fast-paced and based on wild submission-hunting, while the latter features bold entrying into joint lock from very unusual angles.

* BoringButPractical: Ancient catch-as-catch-can styles often prefered to win by pinfall instead of by submission, to the extent that some rulesets disallowed submissions entirely. Many experts believe most submissions in catch wrestling were created by controlling an opponent with regular pinning holds and then squeezing or twisting whatever you were grabbing, or even vice versa, by squeezing or twisting something painful so you could control the opponent better in order to force a pin, such techniques were originally preferred to as "punishment holds". The popular, submission based rough-and-tumble style came later, possibly influenced by the Japanese judo and jiu-jitsu stylists who came to Europe and United States.

** Aside from the how catch spread to and in Japan, Brazil, and Russia as listed above, its birthplace of England actually had two seperate styles that formed in Lancashire and London from very different origins.

* GirlShowGhetto: A common scam among hookers was to teach dangerous holds to seeming waifs in order bait suckers into matches. Despite women being natural for this role, few if any women wrestlers of this style aside from possibly Mildred Burke, who wrestled at least 200 men in a well publicized campaign, became stars. Josie "Minerva" Wahlford, for instance, was a world famous weight lifter but her wrestling exploits barely got any attention by comparison(it didn't help that while she claimed to be undefeated in weight lifting she couldn't say the same [[UnskilledButStrong regarding wrestling]]). Cora Livingston was a much more popular and respected ''wrestler'' than Minerva but was otherwise comparatively unknown. Livingston she never lost the belt and retired as champion she was [[OvershadowedByControversy most famous]] for starting a riot after [[RageQuit beating up the first challenger who gave her trouble]]. Shayna Baszler made an effort to bring attention to catch wrestling during the 2010s, but while she did pull off impressive victories in catch as catch can contests she failed to develop [[AchillesHeel an adequate stand up]] for mixed martial arts fights and voluntarily {{pa|yingtheirdues}}id dues as a {{jobber}} on professional wrestling's independent circuits because of it.
* GlassCannon: Among other groundfighting styles, catch wrestling tends to be considered to have a killer arsenal of holds but a not so efficent system of setting them up or defending against other holds. Actually, this assumption qualifies only for a very specific fixture of catch, the Japanese shoot-style, which often saw wrestlers carelessly diving for joint locks (and thus getting into bad positions for an enemy counterattack) due to the sambo and judo influence found on it, as explained in Awesome, But Impractical above (this is brought up by old wrestlers to emphasize the importance of pinfalls in Wrestling). Pure, ancient catch wrestling would resemble more amateur wrestling, with the wrestler controlling his opponent with body pressure and smart chanceries before applying any submissions. This conservative strategy was presumably the reason why the matches started turning into slow snoozefests and forced the business to go worked.

* MartialArtistsAreAlwaysBarefoot: This is subverted in traditional catch wrestling as while wrestlers can go barefoot, most prefered to wear shoes as they offered more protection for the feet and ankles, stability, and a sure-footed grip with each step taken on the mat. This had a side effect as wrestlers developed a focus on leglocks as shoes also offer wrestlers a way to more easily grip the feet. Brazilian Luta Livre plays this straight however due to its fighters participating in the vale tudo circuits that required them to go barefoot.

** In a subversion, the use of this specific jargon is almost nonexistant nowadays. "Shooter" is used to refer any pro wrestler with martial arts training or belonging to the Japanese shoot-style, while "hookers" became known as wrestlers who specialized in scamming carnival goers into paying money to lose in matches against them (or, well, [[TheOldestProfession a prostitute]]). With the downfall of kayfabe, which ironically made fans less willing to try their hands against pro wrestlers, even that's become obsolete, with "hookers" now usually being anyone a promoter throws into a match specifically to get a wrestler they don't like hurt.

** Joe Moreira, a BJJ black belt and pioneer in the USA, was friends and training partners with Luta Livre specialists Marco Ruas and Eugenio Tadeu. He even gave them black belts in the art in recognitation of their technical abilities. This was during the mid-1990s where the BJJ vs LL rivalry was still ongoing and caused an uproar of criticism from the BJJ community at the time.