TIL MMA legends Shinya Aoki and Masakatsu Funaki had a shoot-style wrestling match at IGF (Inoki Genome Federation)

Inoki was a mark for proving wrestling was the strongest style of combat. When JMMA came about he wanted to prove that wrestling was stronger, but the problem was JMMA had been set up by Inoki's own shooters in Japan, guys like Masakatsu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki, etc...

The guys he had left were entertainers, fighters who hadn't been in combat sports for decades and had been too used to wrestling. They all got ate up by JMMA as a consequence, losing their nationwide appeal and feeding the JMMA stars as a result. So Inoki was left with the loyal wrestling audience but he wanted that nationwide appeal, so he pushed the guys who actually won in JMMA (Kazuyuki Fujita, Kendo Kashin, Shinsuke Nakamura), only none of them were draws on the wrestling side.

So Inoki did stuff like set up the Universal Fighting Organization, act as the face of an anti-NJPW JMMA stable, sign guys like Bob Sapp and Brock Lesnar. It got to the point where it was gonna kill NJPW dead, so he and the other owners of NJPW (Masahiro Chono, TV Asashi, a lot of backstage employees) sold out to Yuke's.

Inoki fucked off for a couple of years and then came back with IGF, which was basically the continuation of Inoki's Inokiism ideal (wrestling is real, wrestling is the strongest there is) and a successor to the shoot-style that had developed and splintered off from Inoki's strong style (which in turn saw legit combat styles like Shooto, Shootboxing, etc... develop).

Where you once had the UWF, UWF International, Battlearts, Fighting Network Rings, Kingdom, PRFG, etc...you now have only the IGF and some random shoot-style matches put on by your NJPWs or whatever.

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