The first cage fight and 45 minutes with no winner

Today nobody in Poland is surprised by the cage. MMA fighters appear on television, compete in the biggest organisations in the world, and children and adults can simply join a club and train mixed martial arts.

At the beginning it looked completely different. When Mirosław Okniński started thinking about developing Vale Tudo and MMA in Poland, not everyone was convinced that this was the direction combat sports should take.

Karol Matuszczak was developing Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Poland. Mirosław knew him from seminars and camps. Both were interested in what works in a fight, but they saw the way to promote the sport differently.

Matuszczak passed on to Okniński what the Brazilians had learned. Sport Brazilian jiu-jitsu was well received. Cage fights, on the other hand, had a bad reputation. Mirosław drew a completely different conclusion from that. He did not want to give up the cage.

Mirosław already knew Grzegorz “Jakubek” Jakubowski from the combat sports scene. A second fighter was needed.

After a notice went out, Temistokles Teresiewicz came forward, connected at the time with the police and a counter-terrorism unit. The matchup alone had an interesting feel to it.

Jakubowski came from Gdynia. He was accompanied by a group connected with Arka Gdynia, some of whom also trained in his circle. On the other side of the cage stood a police officer.

There was, though, no artificially written marketing storyline. They were to walk into the cage and fight.

The bout was organised during the Body Show fair in Warsaw. Okniński met the organisers through the circle around the magazine „Kulturystyka i Fitness: Sport dla Wszystkich”. The Body Show organiser suggested putting on a demonstration of the new discipline as part of the fair.

There was one problem. A cage was needed. You could not simply order one from an MMA equipment shop. That market barely existed.

So the cage was made by a blacksmith outside Warsaw. Jacek Foltyn, a fighter training with Mirosław at the time, helped make it happen. As Okniński recalls, Foltyn put down the initial deposit and encouraged him to run the fights. Later it turned out the rest of the money had to be found on his own.

The cage was nothing like today’s structures. Thick tubing. Hard metal fencing. No soft finishing at all. Mirosław recalls that the first fights on it were rough not only because of the fighters. The fence itself could cut them. Only later was it replaced with a soft one.

Interestingly, according to Okniński that structure still exists and is now in a club connected with his former branch in Grudziądz. If this can be confirmed and photographed, it will be one of the most important physical objects in the history of Polish MMA.

MMA today has detailed rulebooks. That bout looked different. There was no time limit. There were no conventional rounds. The premise was simple. Someone was supposed to win.

Okniński recalls that what was banned above all were attacks to the eyes, the groin and the spine. During the fight one more boundary appeared. Head strikes. When one of the fighters used his head, Mirosław, as the referee, decided that was already too much.

Beyond that the fight stayed very open. Years later Teresiewicz described it as a contest under rules close to the early UFC, with no weight or time limits.

The purse was a thousand złoty. Today that does not sound like a big prize pot. Back then it mattered.

The problem came after 45 minutes. Nobody had won. Both fighters were completely spent.

In the end Okniński made the call. A draw. The thousand złoty was split. Five hundred each. Jakubowski was not pleased. The winner was supposed to get the whole thousand. Except there was no winner.

Looking back it is easy to turn this fight into a huge event. At the time it was not one. Body Show was above all a bodybuilding event.

People were walking between the stands and attractions. They saw the cage. They stopped out of curiosity. Jakubowski had a group with him from Gdynia. Fighters from Okniński’s club came. Mirosław estimates that around a hundred people may have watched the fight.

There was no big television. There was no big promotion. There was also no immediate sense that something had just happened that a dozen or so years later would be remembered as one of the beginnings of Polish MMA. A report appeared, among other places, in the magazine „Kulturystyka i Fitness: Sport dla Wszystkich”.

The real commotion only started later.

When Okniński started running further tournaments in Warsaw, the subject grew much bigger. The fights began to be presented not as a new sporting discipline but as brutal contests between people connected with the football supporters’ scene.

Problems appeared. Mirosław recalls being summoned to a ministry and warned to stop organising cage fights.

The cage was then a symbol of everything people did not understand about the new sport. It was brutal. It had bad associations. According to its critics it did not belong in sport. Okniński did not give up.

The story is not entirely black and white. As early as 2000 Karol Matuszczak fought Tomasz Jamróz at an event in Jaworzno. It was one of the first contests in Poland to bring different fighting styles together.

Okniński points, though, to an important difference. That contest was held under more restricted ju-jitsu rules. The Jakubowski against Teresiewicz fight was meant to be something else. A cage. Vale Tudo. No time limit. Minimal restrictions.

That is why Mirosław considers it the start of real, official MMA in Poland. The definitions are open to debate. One thing, though, is not. It was out of experiments like this that the scene we know today grew.

The best part of this story is that not everything stayed in the archives. According to Mirosław the first cage, made by a blacksmith outside Warsaw, is still standing in Grudziądz.

Jakubowski is alive. Teresiewicz talked about this fight for years. Jacek Foltyn, who helped build the cage, is alive. There are people from the first club. There are former staff of the magazine „Kulturystyka i Fitness: Sport dla Wszystkich”.

Somewhere there may still be photographs. Old issues of magazines. VHS tapes. Negatives. Material nobody has looked at for twenty-odd years.

And that is exactly why we are not closing this story. We are only starting to document it properly.