Many martial artists that scour the Internet for the latest news, rumors, discussion forums, or just more information on the martial arts have undoubtedly visited and loved www.fcfighter.com [we're sooo modest.]. It is also more than likely that they have visited www.submissionfighting.com. The site has recently changed it's name to www.mixedmartialarts.com, in order to reflect it's dedication to promoting the mixed martial arts, the more politically correct term for no-holds barred fighting. It is a site that includes martial arts related product reviews, links to NHB event promoters, listings for available fighters, martial arts products, and features The Underground, probably the most popular Internet discussion forum related to martial arts and martial arts related subjects. What most people do not know is the man behind the site (except for The Underground members, of course), Kirik Jenness. Jenness is a martial artist, instructor, gym owner, business man…basically, one of the few guys that fit the title "Martial Artist Extraordinaire." Kirik is a man of many talents, the least of which was the creation of The Fighter's Notebook, a very organized, compilation of techniques that any NHB or submission fighter should possess. The book also includes various stretching and conditioning exercises. I tracked down one of the busiest martial artists on June 7, 2000 at the New England Submission Fighting Academy.

FCF: First off many people might not know who you are. Can you tell us a little about your background, like how you got interested in the martial arts?
Kirik Jenness: I am genuinely honored that you are taking to time to talk to me. That sounds like BS, and I guess everyone says it, but I am honored. My grandfather was a tremendous wrestler. He was the captain at Lehigh in 1914 and wrestled one of those carnival wrestlers in Britain during WW II, and won, but puked afterwards, the family is proud to say. Pop was 2nd in Pennsylvania in secondary school but quit wrestling to be a husband and college student. He did go on to become a founding member of the Harvard Judo Club as a graduate student. So it is kind of in the blood. The problem was, I was awfully small and an awful wrestler. I moved around a lot as a kid, and somewhere skipped 3rd grade, I think, so I graduated high school at a small 16 years old. In between school and wrestling practice, I tried Karate. That summer, at a Holiday Inn, in a place few have heard of called Maseru, capital of the Kingdom of Lesotho, I saw Enter the Dragon. I wandered home trying to engage in battle every neighborhood dog I laid eyes on, and never looked back. I have spent most of my time since trying to figure out what works. That was in 1973.

FCF: Can you go into depth on your striking background?
KJ: I started striking in Tae Kwon Do in 1973. In 1976, I got a black belt, but didn't think that was all that I needed to know and started working out with everyone I could find. In 1981, I opened up a Karate school, and have been doing the same since. The biggest influences on my striking are my gym partner, Larry Kelley for my lower body, and my boxing trainer, Joe Frazier protégé, Djata Bumpus. Although people tend to make a distinction between grappling and striking, to me it is all part of trying to find what works. They are identical, in that they both work great.

FCF: You created The Fighter's Notebook, which is the first of its kind. Please tell us what it is and how it came about?
KJ: The Notebook is an ardent, yet flawed attempt to take a picture of the mixed martial arts. To capture on paper the techniques used in our great sport. It's at least a big contender, weighing in at over six pounds, with over 600 pages, 3,500 images, and yeah, I had the computer count them, 100,000 words. At UFC I, a couple dozen people from the gym packed into someone's condo and enjoyed the show. I thought it was fixed in the sense that Rorion set up the draw so his brother was ideally situated. Dave Roy thought otherwise, took up a collection, and bought the Gracie I tapes. I checked them out and was still unimpressed, it looked to me like how to beat Gracie Jiu-Jitsu with Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. I shrugged and said, "Who cares about passing guard? How many people know that??!?" If you think that is dumb, I wrestled with a guy in the mid 70s, whose family owned a huge farm in Brazil. He told me they had a weird real fighting Judo there, and used the word "mount" and talked about fighting off their back. I assume now it was BJJ. What did I do? I thought Judo was inferior to Karate, and acted kind of bored. But then again, if Bill Gates had asked me 1981 if I wanted in on a small company he was starting, I would have explained that computers were for geeks, and not very useful.

My friend Dave Roy in the mean time was practicing. One day he hinted that he could beat me on the ground. I laughed, tied up, and tapped six times in a row. I can still hear his giggles as he made my elbow go like an ostrich leg. From that moment I understood. We had no instruction in the area, so I got the Renzo/Kukuk tapes and watched it straight through on Christmas Day. I have a terrible memory and could probably hide my own Easter eggs…and do sometimes miss my own driveway, so I took notes. Then I typed the notes up. Then I laid them out. Then I got a Mac [Apple Macintosh] that allowed me to digitize images, and lifted select images and dropped them into a layout. Killed two home VCRs doing it, but I had something. I repeated the same process for a couple of other tapes, and approached a few tape producers. I got some positive feedback, but couldn't make it work, so one day I decided to do it myself, for the whole sport, using stuff that was not in the tapes I had covered. I got a decent digital imager, a bigger better mac, storage, and a few other things. After about a year I had the procedure down, and one more year I was done.

FCF: What was the most difficult task of this project?
KJ: The actual thing people read took 10 to 30 hours per week for a year. There was shooting pictures, and working with the images, and laying them out, and editing, things like that. The difficult part though, was deciding what to put in, and how to display it. For months on end I fell asleep thinking about how to show a sequence; sometimes in the morning the answer was there. While it drove me little crazy…at the end, I got an inner ear virus and couldn't move for a few days. Every bad thing that happened was proof to me that anyone else doing the same thing was going to have to earn it too. That said, I really would like to see more people putting down what they know in book format.

FCF: You also designed it with the intent of making supplements to The Fighter's Notebook. Tell us about that.
KJ: There's an amusing story behind that. An employee at my gym broke up with his girlfriend and she started dating a programmer at a software company across the street and convinced her guy to start training at my gym. My guy took one look at the clever guy, lost his head, ripped the registration form up and I guess chased him out of the gym, and his job, and the entire town, come to find out. The next day I had to go apologize to the president of the company, doing the equivalent of writing an "I will not let my hothead employee terrorize valuable engineers" 1,000,000 times on a black board. The president ended up becoming a great friend. He mentioned one day that the dough in software is in the upgrades, not the initial product, and I remembered that. As I was and am learning better things every day, and the sport is growing, it made every kind of sense to offer periodic updates. The only problem is, I have gotten so wrapped up in other related things, and it takes so much concentration, that I am as yet only nearly done with the first one. It has three parts: It offers a number of improved ways to do the moves presented, it provides a training and teaching curriculum, and it goes over to how to employ MMA techniques on the street.

FCF: What do you hope to accomplish with The Fighter's Notebook?
KJ: My greatest hope is that every single move in there is proven to be less than the best. I want to try to capture the sport, as it is played at a high level. The best thing that happened has been people telling me what was wrong with it.

FCF: To help promote The Fighter's Notebook, you created submissionfighting.com, which grew into arguably the best martial arts site on the web. Many web surfing martial artist know you very well from your site. Tell some of the less fortunate souls, who are not familiar with it, about your site.
KJ: At the gym at any given time over the last 20 years, there has always been one or two ferociously dedicated younger people who for whatever reason; divorce, cancer, abandonment, etc, have no father in the home. One of these kids grew into a tremendous programmer AND one of the best salesmen I ever met, and he explained that I needed him. He said, "anything you can think of I can do." Years later, I did need him and he can do anything I can think of. A second guy at the gym, Dave, was already exploring the capabilities of the web, and built a significant base of viewers by previewing techniques from the Notebook as I laid them out. Those two guys, and that unheralded hero Mike, who posts as Skillrules, are the driving force on the page. Me, I go along for the ride.

FCF: Submissionfighting.com recently changed it's name to mixedmartialarts.com. Can you explain the background concerning this?
KJ: I had a hard time looking my mom in the face and reminding her, sometimes in front of her friends, that the URL was SubmissionFighting.com. It sounds either violent or kinky, neither of which you want to appear as in front of your mom. Then there were the people who got irate when they realized it wasn't a bent nudie site. Then no one could remember it. My good friend Kipp Kollar was forever getting on the mike and reminding people to "Be sure to remember to check out Submissions…er eh SubmissionsFighter.com, no FightersForum.com no…" Mixed Martial Arts is the name of the sport, and is a lot more presentable.

FCF: What are you hoping to accomplish by doing this?
KJ: We formerly had the entire site password protected, and lost 70% of our traffic right there. Now the page is open so that anyone can view it. We hope the new URL, new code, and new functionality will allow us to grow with the sport, and even modestly aid that growth. At least that's the plan.

FCF: The most popular section of your site is definitely the Underground, which is a martial arts related discussion forum. You have accumulated a panel of experts in their fields for specialized sections of the Underground. Can you tell us who they are and why did you choose them?
KJ: They are all better than me. I am honored that they are willing to help us out, and for free. Like everything good on the page, I had little to do with it. They generally approached us, and we tried to provide. I joke that the experts in the Q&As represent the greatest meeting of talent in martial arts since Dioxypus dined alone. Dioxyppus was a champion in Pancration, who accompanied Alexander the Great to India, and gave nightly exhibitions. Some historians believe that inspired the martial arts in India. In turn, many top Asian martial artists, like Mas Oyama, cite India as the source of their martial art. So it can be argued that that was the last time East and West were as one in unarmed fighting, and that was around 350 BC. We are finally together again, in Mixed Martial Arts.

Although we are in the process of adding more Q&As, right now, alphabetically, we have BJJ with BJJ black belt Roy Harris and his top student Michael Jen. No one on earth skillfully describes techniques in writing, or many say, on the mat. Judo is covered by USJA 5th degree and Shingitai Jujitsu 7th degree [black belt] Mark Tripp, who has for a generation trained, written, and rolled with the very best. Tony Blauer brings his incomparable skills in helping fighters get mentally ready for events, and everyone ready for the street. Pat Miletich and several of his great fighters talk with the fans of what many acknowledge to be the best fight gym in the US, or anywhere. The Q&As were inspired when everyone on the original Underground started a thread that stayed up for months talking with members of the rAw team including the Big Cat Tom Erikson and the ever very lively Frank Twinkle Toes Trigg. rAw gets my vote for the head to head best in the sport. Sambo is covered by Scott Sonnon and his protégé Todd Milhoan. The average post on the Internet can be quite dumb. The best ones are like reading a good book or magazine article. When Scott posts it is like reading great history, he is amazing. Strength & Conditioning is moderated by Mike Sanders, MA, who is a strength and conditioning coach at Nebraska. I first noticed his work when he published an article on conditioning for Submission Fighting in the prestigious Journal of Strength & Conditioning. Since we don't have a Q&A for Zanzibar [the letter "Z"], Yahoo ["Y"], or Xerox ["X"], [that's a joke friends] that brings us to Weapons, which is run by one of the Dog Brothers, SaltyDog, Arlan Sanford for blades and sticks, and "Chief" Mike Gillette, who is an expert's expert on firearms. So anything you want to know about anything, just ask!

FCF: Some Internet forums are moderated, is the Underground moderated?
KJ: We get a lot of help on that score from a few selfless members, and I am grateful to them every day. An unmoderated Forum turns into the Lord of the Flies within about 24 hours. I asked a guy who is learned in psychology what was going on. Apparently there are a number of people in this world who cannot show their true selves. With the anonymity of the Net, their desire is to be seen as powerful, or to show people pictures of poop, or whatever oddness, is unfettered, and what you get is pretty unfortunate. We have banned well over 100 screen names from the page in the last couple of years, and delete dozens of inappropriate posts every single day. Still, we try to be respectful, some of my favorite members started of on the wrong foot.

FCF: How many members does the Underground have?
KJ: We have about forty some thousand screen names registered. But many, many people have multiple screen names. We get about 5,000 unique visitors every day.

FCF: Many breaking news and rumors appear first on the Underground. Do you or your partners make any attempts to validate these rumors or do you let the information play itself out?
KJ: If the rumors involve a prominent person's personal life, it is deleted. After that, it is handled on a case by case basis. For example if it is a long-time respected member from Japan, watching Pride on TV there and posting the results, I say "Hey thanks much bro, I owe ya a tshirt." If it is some guy repeating something they heard on the Internet, I generally remind all that one of these days something is going to posted on the Net that isn't true, and boy will we all look silly then. Bottom line, if I want daily news, I got to our sister site at ADCombat.com. For a full look at the world of MMA, I read Full Contact Fighter the day I get it. That would sound like a kiss ass thing to say, but everybody in the sport reads it. Everybody!

FCF: Many NHB fighters are regular visitors of the Underground. Can you name a few of them?
KJ: . I love this question! Someone asked it last week, and here is what was posted:
Ken Shamrock, Bas Rutten, Becky Levi, Dan Severn, Ron Waterman, Jeremy Horn, Tito Ortiz, Kevin Randleman, Mark Coleman, Royce Gracie, Pat Miletich, Jens Pulver, Matt Hughes, Renzo Gracie, Tim Lajcik, Gary Myers, Eugene Jackson, Shannon Ritch, Evan Tanner, Igor Yakimov, Matt Serra, Travis Fulton, Harry Moskowitz, Henry Matamoros, Fabio Clemente, Tra Telligman, Royler Gracie, Pete Williams, Mikey Burnett, Thomas Denny, Din Thomas, Tom Erikson, Frank Trigg, Fabiano Iha, Mo Smith, Ian Freeman, Guy Mezger, Mark Schultz, Chris Brennan, Zee Vjesalicu, Gilbert Yvel, John Dixson, Andy Anderson, Josh Barnett, John Lober, Dexter Casey, Elvis Sinosic, Ryan Bow. A lot are left out, and I apologize for that. This is just what people posted last week. There are also many members who are instrumental in the sport, but not as fighters.

FCF: What do you feel brings these fighters to your forum?
KJ: Simple. They are nice people. Every single one of them. They like to talk with the people who make this sport tremendous; the fans, each other, and all the other people who are everyday elevating the game.

FCF: The Underground is a place where members can request information or opinions on any subject. Did you ever think about compiling this information on the site?
KJ: Yeah, one of a number of key improvements in the new site is an archive function that allows us to archive important posts. So that will grow. One expert who runs a Q&A is turning the exchanges into a book that I would love to write the introduction for.

FCF: The web site is pretty comprehensive. Do you have anything else you are working on to add to the site?
KJ: There is no part of me that is visionary. It took having a guy half my size beating me silly while making "tee hee" noises to see the truth about submissions. My ideas are by and large terrible. So I generally wait for someone to suggest functionality. Then I bounce it around my brain and a few other people's heads, and if it's still buzzing, I check on its affordability. I am adequately tenacious though, and do get things done once inspired. Eventually, by keeping my ears open, I would like the page to be where people go to find out how to get what they need on, from, for, or to MMA. That is the plan. A good example is this magazine, if someone wants to read about MMA, I put FC Fighter right on the main page. I actually didn't tell you guys either, I just got the question 1000 times, so it made sense.

FCF: You are also doing some other things. Don't you sponsor events and put on events of your own?
KJ: I try to use funds generated by sales to help the sport. To that end we sponsor Superfights, belts and prizes and promotion and like that. Dave also runs a small team of New England competitors that we send to events outside the region. Dave is also putting on a grappling tournament soon that I will help out with. The event is sponsored by NAGA, which I am the Commissioner of. To date I haven't drawn a dime from sales. I am not St Francis of Assisi though. I am making a bet on the sport. And I don't even gamble. This sport will rise, and everyone's hard work will come to fruition.

FCF: What do you think about the current state of the martial arts?
KJ: I think it is at the same point that medicine was at the advent of the germ theory of disease. Before then, there were a few people who understood that cleanliness and public health were important. Most times you went to a doctor he was likely to stick leeches on your neck to bleed you, which come to think of it still makes more sense than what is still taught in many martial arts schools, even now. We are at the dawn of the age of reality.

FCF: Where do you see the martial arts heading in the future?
KJ: I see martial arts gaining genuine respect. I have done this for nearly 30 years. As I understand it, in the 50s and 60s, people thought 'Kuhrawtty' [most non-MA people's pronunciation of Karate] was truly dangerous, but strange. Somewhere in the mid 70s, the general public by and large figured out that a lot of it didn't work, and that a lot of the people in it were wack jobs. They still think, and for a good reason, that dumb moves [are taught] by dumber people. MMA is changing all that. People respect the athletes and the disciplines as real. And as the purses grow, and shows continue to add to their polish, they will come to respect it as a viable sport too.

FCF: Are their any future projects that you are working on that you can share with us?
KJ: I am working on an exercise machine, a loop of rope that allows you to climb endlessly. Best workout on the planet. Number one though is helping to add Massachusetts to the list of States that have done the right thing and "let my people fight."

FCF: Is there anything else you would like to add?
KJ: Yeah, thanks bro!

FCF: Thanks Kirik. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
KJ: Always!