John Dolan's excellent reporting on a recent No Rules fighting match in Moscow... DAMN IT, I can't believe I missed this!

Fiction came before fact in the genesis of no-rules tournaments. Long before real full-contact inter-style competitions began, dozens of Hong Kong movies focused on imaginary secret tournaments in which fighters of different styles were lured to the mysterious East and forced to fight each other to the death: sumo vs. karate, judo vs. kickboxing, boxers against capoeira masters, aikido gurus against wrestlers. Despite the fact that every one of these movies made money from the hordes of dreaming nerds around the world, it wasn’t till the late eighties some entrepreneur in the US got the obvious idea of doing one of those tournaments for real.