This is part one of a two-part article. You can find part two here.


Nothing sets Jon Jones apart from his peers so much as his willingness to try new and unfamiliar techniques. Lead leg side kicks, step-in elbows, and lately the classic Hollywood shoulder crank--hardly a year goes by that Jones doesn't reveal something hitherto unseen in his arsenal.

But are these techniques really new? Or are they simply being brought to light, recalled one by one out of the murky darkness of the past?

It's been pointed out many times, by many different pundits and analysts, how the development of MMA mirrors that of boxing, which grew rapidly in popularity in the English-speaking world near the end of the 19th Century, and changed just as rapidly as new techniques and approaches were tested, proven, and ultimately folded into the metagame of the sport.

As a striker, Jones did not begin to come into his own until his bout with Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, the first defense of his light heavyweight belt, but only his 15th professional fight, in just his 4th year of MMA training. Prior to that bout, Jones was essentially formless on his feet--a raw striker whose eccentricities in the standup were enabled by his fearsome wrestling. It was wrestling, both directly and indirectly, that clinched Jones his shot at the belt, and wrestling that won it; even if Jones' performance against then-champion Mauricio "Shogun" Rua hinted at the striker he would soon become.

That bout with Jackson was the first time that Jones had successfully employed a gameplan based on controlling the distance rather than closing it. After initially clinching with the hard-hitting challenger, Jones ended up resorting to out-fighting, with which he kept the smaller man at bay and picked him apart until the finish eventually revealed itself.

This was the goal of almost all fighters in the early days of boxing. Boxers like "Gentleman" Jim Corbett fenced with their foes, dancing around at long range only to lunge into single, straight blows.

As fighters learned to avoid these long-range sharpshooters, in-fighting became more and more common. Though looked down on by the most respectable boxers of the time, rough and tumble in-fighting proved the best way to beat a fencing master. Corbett himself was de-fanged by Bob Fitzsimmons, who used vicious close-range punching to wear the champion down, ultimately leaving him open to a knockout in the 14th round.

But Fitzsimmons' in-fighting was crude stuff, and the boxers of the next thirty years would make dramatic improvements to this new aspect of the art. One such man was Frank Klaus.

A little-celebrated boxer, Klaus was a splendid technician whose contemporaries generally chalked his success up to toughness rather than skill. This is because Klaus was among the first to truly specialize in in-fighting. In 1913, Klaus defeated the great Georges Carpentier, battering the young Frenchman for 19 rounds before his opponent's cornermen were finally compelled to enter the ring to save their charge from further punishment, making Klaus the middleweight world champion via disqualification.

Later that same year, Klaus penned a book extolling the virtues of in-fighting, aptly titled The Art of In-Fighting. It would prove to be well ahead of its time, and in ten years boxers around the world were incorporating his same techniques into every bout. Klaus didn't invent these techniques, nor the concept of in-fighting, but he was an early pioneer of what he rightly called "a too-neglected art."

Leafing through The Art of In-Fighting's 27 photographs, the modern fight fan would not only be amazed by how much the featured techniques resemble those of Mixed Martial Arts, but specifically those of the current light heavyweight champ and pound-for-pound number one, Jon Jones.

ATTACKING INSIDE

In the early days of boxing, professors of the art frowned on just about all circular punches, which they saw as crude and artless. "The natural tendency is to hit round," wrote Lord Rowland Allanson-Winn in 1889. "Put any two men together, who have never heard of correct principles, and tell them to . . . "go for" one another. The chances are that very few of their blows will reach home and that they will damage the surroundings more than each other. . . . A straight line is the shortest distance between any two points and if you never lose sight of the fact . . . you will in time overcome the unfortunate, but very natural habit of hitting round."

Of course, round blows have their place just as much as straight ones, but the prevailing thought at the time was to attack the center-line of the opponent's body, driving straight forward and throwing the body weight into