Brief History of Kickboxing: Buffalo Kickboxing

Brief History of Kickboxing: Buffalo Kickboxing An article from columbia.edu

The true roots of Buffalo Kickboxing can be found to date back 2000 years ago in Far East Asia, where Muay Thai Kickboxing was commonly practiced as a self-defense discipline. However it gradually became more of a sport over the years. Thai boxing soon became the most common and popular fighting sport in Asia. MuayThai - Kickboxing was controlled by the Thailand government, under the name of WMTC (World MuayThai Council). The main proponent that gave way to the rise of Kickboxing was Bruce Lee, making the link with the United States, making way for the future of International Kickboxing. By the late Twentieth century the sport Kickboxing was starting to take its own original form. The strong urge for a Full contact sport, overtaking the rigid rules and boundaries of Karate, led to an all- new evolved version of Full contact Kickboxing.

Joe Lewis, the first Professional Karate Association PKA World Heavyweight Kickboxing Champion, was a pioneer of full contact karate and fought in the prototype full contact bout in Long Beach, CA in Jan 1970. It was Lewis who contacted karate innovator Mike Anderson with a view to organizing and promoting the new sport of full contact karate, as it was called in those days. Full contact karate, now called kickboxing, was officially born in Los Angeles in September 1974 when Anderson, together with Don and Judy Quine, formed the first world sanctioning body for the new sport and named it the PKA. They promoted the first full contact World Professional Karate Championships. This was the beginning of modern Buffalo kickboxing. 

George Bruckner from Germany, who was a close friend of Mike Anderson, pioneered full contact karate in Europe. In 1975 Bruckner together with other European martial artists formed the World All Style Karate Organization WAKO. First European Kickboxing Championships were promoted by Bruckner in 1976 in Germany. Full contact karate, or kickboxing, was by this time spreading globally and had become an international sport.

In USA a number of other kickboxing sanctioning bodies came into being, namely WKA (World Karate Association) , ISKA (International Sport Karate Association), KICK (Karate International Council of Kickboxing), PKC (Professional Karate Commission) and WAKO-Pro (World Association of Kickboxing Organizations - Professional).The WKF (World Kickboxing Federation) was established in London in 1987. With the formation of these sanctioning bodies, promoters in the USA and elsewhere began to promote world title fights as well as international kickboxing bouts. Kickboxing had started to gain in popularity all over the world, even Buffalo kickboxing, to the point where it had become both an internationally recognized sport and martial arts discipline.