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By Sgt. Ryan Matson
372nd Public Affairs Detachment
FORT BENNING, GA. -- The 2008 U.S. Army Combatives Tournament at Fort Benning, Ga., last weekend featured more than 300 of the Army's top fighters. More than 40 teams from posts throughout the world competed in the tournament. When all was said and done after nearly 600 matches, the 5th Special Forces Group Team out of Fort Campbell, Ky., had beaten every team but two. The team finished third in the standings, just a point out of second place and two out of first.
The 5th Special Forces Group All-Army Combatives squad finished with a first, second, and third place finisher in the tournament, which was held in the Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith Physical Fitness Center October 4 and 5, 2008. John Long, who was the heavyweight champion last year, repeated his championship effort by capturing first place a weight class lower, in the light heavyweight ranks.
"It feels good to win again," Long, still drenched in sweat after submitting his final foe, said. "It's basically a culmination of all my training and the experiences I've had throughout the military – training with other good fighters. It's a proud moment. It's sort of a fraternal kind of pride, for me and the people I've trained with."
Long, 33, has competed in the All-Army Tournament every year since it's inception four years ago, placing second in the first two tournaments, and first the last two years. Last year, he won the tournament as a member of the Fort Bragg team. This year, Long won six fights over the two-day tournament. He said he moved from heavyweight to light heavyweight this year because he is considering a professional career, and around 205 is a more natural fighting weight for him.
"I lost the weight to see if I could maintain my strength and endurance," Long said.
Apparently, it worked. Long pounded his finals challenger into submission with a bevy of overhand blows from the guard position, utilizing what is known as the "ground and pound" technique in the mixed martial arts world.
The need to be a complete fighter to excel in combatives is something that Long said he enjoys about the sport.
"Mixed martial arts is a more complete form of martial arts," Long reasoned. "In boxing, you can't use your legs, in karate, you can't use the takedowns and sidethrows. In mixed martial arts, you have the ability to combine all your combative skill sets, and when you do, you can simulate combat in a training scenario. I like to be able to change it up."
Long said he became interested in Army combatives around 1995 by being stationed with Matt Larsen, the tournament director, and the civilian director of the Army Combatives Program. Larsen, a former Army Ranger, is the man credited with bringing combatives to the Army, and even rewrote the field training manual the Army uses to teach its Soldiers combatives.
He explained how the tournament came to life with the formation of the Army Combatives Program.
"I was a squad leader in the Second Ranger Battalion at Fort Benning," Larsen said. "I trained my guys, all the guys in the platoon, then the company, then the battalion, and it slowly grew into the whole Army. It was just a grass-roots sort of thing that started 13 years ago and just exploded because it was effective and it worked."
Larsen said the tournament basically came to fruition as a part of the Army-wide participation in combatives.
"Competition is always a part of it, right from the beginning, and as it grew, the tournament came to be," Larsen explained. "The first year, I just posted on the internet that we were having a tournament, and contacted some guys who I knew were training around the Army that we were going to do it. We just sort of made it happen.
The tournament grew from 136 participants in its first year to 342 this year.
"It even grew a little bit last year when we had the surge going on," Larsen said. "We've got people here from Italy, Germany, even some home on R and R from Iraq."
The tournament was a double-elimination event, featuring seven weight classes. Larsen said the tournament followed a progressive format. In the first few rounds, the matches consisted solely of groundfighting, or grappling. Starting in the semi-final rounds of the tournament, open-hand strikes were permitted, punches to the body, kicks, and knee strikes were allowed. Throughout all stages of the tournament, spiking takedowns, elbow strikes, head butts, groin and throat strikes and other potentially dangerous maneuvers were prohibited. To won the tournament, Long said a Soldier needed to be a complete fighter, but had to first and foremost be a good grappler.
Besides Long, another 5th Special Forces Group team member also placed in the heavyweight class. Ruben Arriaga took third place after knocking out his opponent in a similar fashion to Long's, with a series of thunderous overhead strikes from the guard position.
Josh Landspurg, the lone Airman in the tournament, was the Fifth Special Forces Teams' other top finisher, going 5 and 1 and taking home a second-place finish in the 170-pound weight class. Because he is attached to an Army unit, he was allowed to compete in the tournament, along with a Navy SEAL in a similar situation. He said he enjoys training with Army Soldiers in mixed martial arts.
"I was just a wrestler and I joined a local MMA gym," he said. "Wrestling used to be all the work and no glory, but now wrestlers are branching off into mixed martial arts."
The third-place finish at this year's tournament marks the third time in the four-year history of the tournament that a team coached by John Renken, the 5th Special Forces Group Team coach, has placed third or better. Renken, a former Airborne Ranger and professional mixed martial arts fighter himself, said he is proud of his team's efforts at the tournament.
"We've done pretty well down here," he said.
Although the tournament appeared to entertain the hundreds of Soldiers and civilians who came on post to view it, Larsen said the entertainment value of the tournament was secondary to its training value.
"In the civilian world, these events are about filling the stands, they're about entertainment," he said. "Ours are about training people, making sure people do the right combative actions and training correctly for the battlefield."
| Date Taken: | 10.15.2008 |
| Date Posted: | 10.15.2008 04:19 |
| Story ID: | 24990 |
| Location: | FORT BENNING, US |
| Web Views: | 1,108 |
| Downloads: | 657 |
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