How a sport gets invented on purpose

Kickboxing has a documented beginning, which almost no combat sport does. Osamu Noguchi coined the word in 1966 to sell a Japanese answer to Muay Thai. Americans built a separate above-the-waist version and found out in 1988 what it had left out. The Dutch turned a mechanical insight about leg kicks into the most influential training method in the sport. K-1 put all of them in one tournament and wrote the rulebook everyone still uses. Read it in order — the argument only works chronologically.