Between the 15th and 17th September 2006, there was a martial tournament festival titled Ultimate Warrior which was held at Dataran Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur. Although I didn’t get to go, but several friends did, who reported that it was a dismal outing. There were separate tournaments for Karate, Silat, Taekwondo and Aikido (?!!) and one ‘freestyle’ one that employed kickboxing regulations.

Someone recently uploaded a clip of one of these freestyle bouts on YouTube. I’ve included the video below and added a commentary on the whole tournament, translated from http://silatmelayu.blogspot.com (our namesake on another blog provider) written by its blogger, Mat Silau. Enjoy.

“I  was fortunate enough to watch this tournament on the second day. The prelimenary bouts were held the night before. Although it was drizzling, the martial arts fans who crowded Dataran Merdeka wouldn’t miss it for the world.

“Approximately 16 fighters made it through the prelims. Some even pulled out because of injuries. None of them were in any identifiable style uniform except for the Muay Thai fighters who had boxing shorts on. Some fighters who were probably from kickboxing and wushu styles wore them as well. Two fighters who could have been pesilat wore black silat-like trousers. Some even wore white taekwondo/karate-like trousers.

“There wasn’t much information offered on the breakdown of the tournament. From my observations, there were no weight categories. In fact, in one of the bouts, one fighter actually pulled out because of a weight mismatch. Elbows and knee attacks were also barred which led to one elbower being disqualified.

“The fights were pretty uninteresting since the fighters were hesitant and some of them were equally winded. Most of them resorted to leg attacks even though quite a few fighters employed takedowns. I saw little of hand attacks, probably because of the discomfort of wearing boxing gloves.

“The Muay Thai fighters seemed to have an advantage since more often have experience in full contact bouts wearing boxing gloves. This advantage saw that the last two fighters who moved up to the final round were Muay stylists”.