The paradox of professional wrestling is that it is well-defined yet quite nebulous. Most fans, particularly English-speaking ones, can tell you the defining characteristics without hesitation: predetermined outcomes, performance for an audience, and a fictionalized competitive framework where genuinely harming your opponent is completely taboo. These characteristics have defined the business for the better part of a century, and tracing them back further reveals they were present even before the Gold Dust Trio systematized the modern tradition in the 1920s. Professional wrestling has always understood, at some level, that consistently drawing paying customers required more than what legitimate athletic competition could reliably provide. The shoots between highly skilled grapplers tended towards long stalemates, which decreased customer interest and threatened livelihoods. Yet, professional wrestling has never been entirely comfortable inside its own definition. The business has sometimes expanded outside its own boundaries, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident. Real fighting and professional wrestling have often realized that there are some things you can’t get with pure performance or pure sport, and that to truly thrive, they sometimes must cross each other’s shared borders and borrow, or outright engage with the other in a delicate dance. The resulting identity of professional wrestling has therefore always been more fluid than its purists or detractors tend to admit. This was especially prominent during the 1980s and 1990s in Japanese pro wrestling, as professional wrestling and combat art were in a constant dialogue with each other. One of the greatest examples of this phenomenon was Pancrase.
To understand what Pancrase was and where it came from, some historical grounding is necessary. As one might have guessed by now, the name itself is the first clue. Pancrase borrows its name from Pankration, the combat sport introduced to the Ancient Olympic Games in 648 BCE, which combined wrestling and boxing into a single discipline and is widely regarded as one of the earliest ancestors of both mixed martial arts and professional wrestling. Pankration itself was part of a broader global tradition; grappling contests had been placed before public audiences in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Persia long before Greece formalized them as Olympic competition. The dual ancestry that pro wrestling and MMA share with Pankration is not incidental. The line between athletic contest and public spectacle has been blurry historically, and the audiences watching have wanted both. The tradition of placing grappling contests before public crowds runs from ancient history through the traveling carnivals and catch wrestling circuits of 19th-century Europe and America, where catch-as-catch-can wrestlers would challenge local strongmen for prize money, sometimes by shooting, sometimes by cooperating to maximize entertainment. The name Pancrase was suggested to its founders, Minoru Suzuki and Masakatsu Funaki, by Karl Gotch, who took an interest in Pankration after reading about it. It was a fitting name as it signaled something to anyone paying attention. Pancrase was returning professional wrestling to its origins.
Karl Gotch himself was part of the old catch wrestling tradition. Gotch was trained in the Wigan Snake Pit, a famed catch wrestling school operating out of the United Kingdom, a stronghold for traditional catch-as-catch-can wrestling in the 20th century. Gotch was also a former amateur wrestler who participated in the 1948 Olympics. He was someone who prized legitimacy above all else, and his career as a professional wrestler was defined by his resistance to the increasingly entertainment-driven business that had taken hold after the Gold Dust Trio established a new order for professional wrestling. Gotch believed that professional wrestling shouldn’t abandon the submission-based hooking skills at the heart of catch wrestling. For Gotch, the legitimate martial discipline of catch wrestling was the soul of professional wrestling. Karl Gotch did not find much luck in working with American and even European promoters, who viewed his insistence on realism as a relic of the past. Gotch stuck to his convictions and started working in Japan in the 1960s, where he found an audience far more receptive to his philosophy. His influence on the evolution of Japanese pro wrestling was profound, particularly on the young wrestlers who would later train under him and absorb not only his technical knowledge but his belief that pro wrestling should be, at its core, a genuine test of skill.
Those very wrestlers would launch the transformative UWF revolution in the 1980s, which created a whole new style of wrestling that emphasized realism and legitimacy. The matches were still pre-determined, but the audience now believed they were watching something real. The first wave of Karl Gotch trainees, including Akira Maeda, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, and Nobuhiko Takada, all believed that their style of wrestling was “real pro wrestling.” They were happy to promote themselves as such, but at the same time, they recognized that embracing legitimate shooting was risky. When the second wave of Gotch-inspired trainees, including Masakatsu Funaki, asked about the potential to embrace real combat, they were either told to wait or that it would be unwise. Dave Meltzer, in writing about Masakatsu Funaki after his induction to the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame in 2006, wrote, “…he would question why pro wrestling matches were worked, and the wiser, older teachers like Kotetsu Yamamoto, who had spent their lives in the business, explained all the reasons that had been told since pro wrestling became worked. Shoot matches weren’t entertaining enough, you couldn’t sustain it to the public, and there would be too many injuries.” Regardless, Funaki still upheld a dream that professional wrestling could return to its earliest roots, a dream that would eventually draw him to join the second UWF in 1989.
Meltzer would add, “Maeda told Funaki, as well as Suzuki, that he was going to make pro wrestling into a legitimate sport, and Funaki believed this was the new direction of pro wrestling, and it was what he always wanted pro wrestling to be. New Japan got wind that they were thinking of quitting and flew Funaki back in April 1989. Inoki himself tried to talk him into staying, telling him he had the great look and ability and would be a superstar in New Japan. He said he wanted to fight in a shoot style.” The transition Maeda promised would never come, and eventually, the second UWF folded due to internal politics, much like the first UWF did. However, the effects of the collapse of the second UWF would be much different than the first. Instead of returning to the confines of more traditional professional wrestling, the pioneers of the shoot-style movement would take their vision further, with three groups emerging in the wake of the dissolution of the second UWF: UWFi, RINGS, and Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi. Masakatu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki, and another young hotshot, Wayne (Ken) Shamrock, would find themselves in the last group, following their mentor, Yoshiaki Fujiwara.
Fujiwara’s promotion ended up disappointing those three, however. Eventually, as Meltzer noted, “all three felt the only way to get attention to their promotion was to take that final step of realism, actually being real. Fujiwara had no interest in that.” The tension reached a breaking point after the Tokyo Dome show in October 1992. Wayne Shamrock had defeated Don Nakaya Nielsen, a kickboxer who had previously handed Fujiwara himself a loss at an earlier PWFG event. It was an honorable act. Shamrock had avenged his mentor’s defeat. They had proven they could compete at the highest level. The question was whether Fujiwara would let them do it on their own terms. The answer came on December 18th, 1992, during a meeting. “Funaki, Suzuki and Shamrock were even stronger in the idea that it was time to change pro wrestling […] after a meeting on December 18, 1992, where they made the plea to do it as a shoot fell on deaf ears, almost every wrestler in PWFG except Yuki Ishikawa quit the promotion.” The split was total.
With their newfound independence, Funaki, Suzuki, and Shamrock pursued their vision. Funaki would later describe the concept simply: “Pro wrestling for the 21st century. Everything was a real meritocracy, not political.” With the help of a business partner in Masami Ozaki, they borrowed money, found a gym, and secured office space. A few months later, on September 21, 1993, Pancrase held its first event. Professional wrestling was going to find out, for the first time in its modern history, whether it could be real, and it was going to do it on its own terms.
So that brings us back to our main question. Can Pancrase be considered pro wrestling? What Tokyo NK Hall saw on September 21st, 1993, was not quite what they expected. While there was some uncertainty about what to expect, the belief was that Pancrase would be another shoot-style promotion, with matches that still had elements of cooperation. What they saw instead was something that took the entire business in Japan by surprise. Japanese press articles coined the term “byosatsu puroresu” (instant finish pro wrestling) to express the style of wrestling that they had seemingly just seen. The event saw only about 14 minutes of action spread across six bouts, with most of them coming under five minutes outside of the main event between Masakatsu Funaki and Wayne Shamrock. There were no dramatic finishing sequences, no nearfalls, and no one was working towards a pre-agreed conclusion. At the same time, the rope breaks were there, the ten-count was there, and the boots and open-handed strikes were there. Closed fists to the face were prohibited. It had everything that pro wrestling had at the time, except for the nature of the actual bouts taking place.
If one sees pro wrestling as purely a performance art where cooperation and pre-determined finishes are a must, then Pancrase won’t meet the standards of what should be considered pro wrestling. However, that definition is quite limited, and as we have seen, it misses the mark of what historically molded and shaped pro wrestling from the very beginning. The statement Pancrase made on that historic evening in 1993 was an argument that pro wrestling is actually more than people defined it as, and the nebulous nature of it can be quite shocking and controversial if one isn’t ready to confront the very nature of professional wrestling. Of course, one can object by saying that it is easier to define Pancrase as early MMA, and that its founders had something different than pro wrestling in mind, but the founders themselves tell a different story.
In his biography of Ken Shamrock, Jonathan Snowden recounted a conversation Masakatsu Funaki had with Ken. It revealed exactly what kind of organization Funaki believed he was building.
“I thought back to me at 17, wanting to do a kind of pro wrestling where you don’t cooperate, you don’t willingly take bumps,” Funaki said. “I talked to the other boys, and they were up for it, and then I called Shamrock.”
“Shamrock and I had that conversation. ‘I want to do a kind of pro wrestling where we don’t cooperate with one another. You don’t bump for people.’ He goes ‘Is that really ok? I might knock you out.’”
“If that happens, it happens.”
Funaki mentions pro wrestling twice. He does not say he is building a fighting organization, a mixed martial arts promotion, or something new entirely. He is describing professional wrestling in its most basic, earliest form. At its core, Pancrase was not an iconoclastic revolution against pro wrestling, but an honest reckoning with the true nature of professional wrestling. What the Gold Dust trio had tidied away, and what Fujiwara had ultimately refused to pursue, was now standing in the open, confronting the business with questions that it had spent decades avoiding. The delicate dance between legitimate combat and entertainment was brought to the forefront.
Pancrase did not shy away from this dance. While the wrestlers were mostly engaged in legitimate combat, there were instances where the blurry line between legitimacy and entertainment was seen in practice. Meltzer notes: “Many matches saw the superior fighter carry the loser for a few minutes before going for the win. There were matches where an entertainment spot would be put in early to thrill the fans (when two guys “in the know” had a rare huge main event), but the finish wasn’t predetermined, and they’d shoot for the win. There were matches that were shoots, at least in the eyes of one of the fighters, but the loser may give up the finish because they wanted to create a new star.” Frank Shamrock believes his match with Minoru Suzuki in January 1996 was one example of this. Meltzer also adds in his Minoru Suzuki Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame article, “To this day, Shamrock doesn’t know whether or not Suzuki let him win, as at the time, Suzuki may have been just wanting to make Shamrock a star, and repaying the favor Ken did for him the year before.”
“It was commonplace for established fighters in Pancrase to make opponents look good,” wrote Jonathan Snowden in his book Shooters. “Without new stars, the matches would quickly grow stale, so it was important for Pancrase to create the kind of stars who could draw fans to the arena. Sometimes that meant the fighting arts gave way to the fight business.” This type of dialogue between legitimacy and entertainment would define Pancrase for much of its early life, especially between 1993 and 1999, before adopting full Vale Tudo rules after their 1999 anniversary show.
No single moment better encapsulates the nature of Pancrase than the September 7th, 1996, anniversary show main event between Masakatsu Funaki and Bas Rutten. By this point, Pancrase had largely answered any remaining questions about its legitimacy. The injury rate alone was enough. And yet, what Funaki chose to do that night was something a large majority of fighters wouldn’t have done. He absorbed punishment he didn’t need to absorb, got knocked down dramatically, got back up, and kept engaging in a way that gave the crowd something to remember. He fought, in other words, like a pro wrestler. He understood the match was also a performance, and that a memory of a great contest was invaluable.
Meltzer notes, “It has been said Funaki went into this match with the idea of having the perfect match, which didn’t necessarily mean winning […] At the time it took place, it was referred to as the first match that was a strong match of the year candidate in pro wrestling and martial arts at the same time. It took 12th that year in pro wrestling match of the year in the Observer polls, but was high on every Japanese list for both pro wrestling and for fighting, due particularly to the finish. At the end, Funaki was getting destroyed standing, was knocked down several times by hard open handed blows, but would dramatically get to his feet, beating the ten count. He received a broken nose, and both eyes swelled up, with several cuts and tons of swelling, which totally disfigured his face. It was a Rocky movie type finish with Funaki constantly getting up […] The fact was, Funaki could have gone for more takedowns because he was still the better of the two on the ground, although submitting Rutten by that point would have been extremely difficult. He sacrificed his best shot at winning in hopes of creating the greatest match possible, which, at the time, he seemingly succeeded in doing. In no way was the bout fake, nor did he throw the match, but he fought the match to entertain the audience, for maximum excitement, and to create memories the fans who saw it would never forget. Is that the mentality of a pro wrestler, or a fighter?”
Meltzer doesn’t really answer his question, but to me, there is little doubt that what Funaki and the other founders of Pancrase aimed to achieve with the promotion was something more rooted in professional wrestling than most people, especially English-speaking fans, have given it credit for. Funaki was a pro wrestler that night, and Pancrase was a professional wrestling organization. It didn't have predetermined finishes, and the matches were not defined by cooperation or a fictionalized framework, but it retained everything that truly defined professional wrestling, including the legitimacy that professional wrestling had convinced itself it no longer needed. It exposed how far professional wrestling's limits truly extended.
In writing about the 1996 Pancrase anniversary PPV that aired in the U.S., Meltzer adds “…Bruce Beck talked about Minoru Suzuki’s childhood hero being “the legendary Antonio Inoki,” talked about Suzuki, Yusuke Fuke and Masakatsu Funaki in terms of number of years of “pro wrestling experience” and talking about Suzuki growing up as a teenager and watching the legendary June 1983 Hulk Hogan vs. Inoki match and that match inspired him to become “a pro wrestler.” The belief is going in that Pancrase was going to be more of a hit with martial arts fans in the U.S. as opposed to pro wrestling fans, but SEG apparently has come to the conclusion that the main audience buying Pancrase consists of pro wrestling fans.” A pro wrestling audience had looked at Pancrase and recognized something that no amount of rebranding could obscure. You can rename the thing, but you cannot change what it is.
Ultimately, for a period of six years, Pancrase was pro wrestling. It was pro wrestling in its origins, built by individuals who spent their careers in the business and never truly left it. It was pro wrestling in structure, with rope breaks, traditional pro wrestling rules, and a promotional capacity that emphasized it was “hybrid wrestling,” a fitting name. It was pro wrestling in its culture, where the best fighters understood that a match was also a performance and that the audience deserved more than the most efficient path to victory. It was also pro wrestling in spirit, most embodied on the September night in 1996, when Funaki believed that creating a memory was worth more than simply engaging in a fight. With Pancrase, pro wrestling had returned to its origins, asked the question it had been avoiding for decades, and discovered the answer was far more complicated, more interesting, and more revealing than anyone had anticipated. Pancrase demonstrated that it did indeed fit inside the larger definition of professional wrestling. It also demonstrated that the old definition had never been large enough to contain what professional wrestling actually was.
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