One of the saddest things about having been born too soon is that by the time no-rules fighting came along, I was hopelessly old, sick and damaged. Sure, there were various “martial arts” when I was young. I tried the most popular, karate-only to discover it had more in common with ballet school than fighting. They didn’t do full contact in standard karate classes back then. You were supposed to pull your punches and kicks, so you never found out if you could hurt anyone or not. Bart Simpson said it all in the episode where he pretends to go to the Mall’s karate dojo, reacting to Sensei’s claptrap about inner peace by saying, “Dude, I already know how not to hit a guy.”