What Is American Kickboxing?

When Alby Tam of the San Francisco-based Muay Thai gym Combat Culture was growing up, the only combat sport that he remembers watching with any regularity was boxing (we’re not counting the WWF and WCW). Every so often, however, he’d stumble across a different kind of martial art that he’d never seen before. It was usually late at night, and usually on a station that he didn’t watch very often, but it was here that he caught a glimpse of another type of combat sport where the fighters were wearing pants and shoes. They were also kicking each other. 

He had seen that kind of fighting in martial arts movies with Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee and a few tapes of Muay Thai fights, but he’d never seen professionals based in the United States fighting in this style because the UFC and MMA fighting hadn’t really taken off yet.

American Kickboxing: Origins

What Alby was watching was “full contact” or American kickboxing. It was a style of fighting that arose in the very late 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S. While there were several fathers of this style of fighting, the person who is probably most commonly associated with American kickboxing is Joe Lewis. Lewis was a black belt in karate who rose to prominence during the 1960s after winning several karate competitions. During this time, he even defeated Chuck Norris.

However, Lewis was unsatisfied with the point system in karate and wanted to pivot towards a kind of competition where there were knockouts. He ultimately partnered with a promoter named Lee Faulkner to participate in a new style of karate competition that was dubbed “full contact karate” or just “full contact,” though it later took on the name kickboxing. The first tournament took place in 1970, which Lewis won, making him the first champion of any professional kickboxing tournament to take place in the U.S.

Lewis defended his title several times and participated in a few crossover events during the early 1970s. Throughout this time, most of the people who were attracted to the sport had backgrounds in karate or taekwondo. The American audience was still more fixated on boxing, which was far bigger at that time than it is now.

Therefore, it is no surprise that as kickboxing began to attract new fighters during the middle 1970s, it began to resemble boxing far more than karate. The rise of people with backgrounds in boxing within the sport put less of an emphasis on kicks and eventually the name “kickboxing” took over. In other words, it started to look less like karate and more like boxing with kicks—hence, kickboxing.

Several organizations arose, including the Professional Karate Association (PKA) in 1974 and World Kickboxing Association (WKA) in 1976. The latter popularized the term “kickboxing”, which resonated with American audiences more than “full contact karate.”

Rules of American Kickboxing

American kickboxing consists of between three and ten rounds that each last 2 minutes. There are one-minute breaks between them. There are also weight classes similar to boxing.

In general, the rules of American kickboxing are as follows:

Strikes

Opponents can use punches and kicks above the waist. They cannot use their elbows or knees. Some fights may allow shins, but their use is typically prohibited.

Sweeps

Sweeps that contact higher than the ankle are not allowed.

Clinching and Grappling

Not allowed.

Why was it not a big deal?

Though American kickboxing produced some superstars, including Lewis and Bill ‘Superfoot’ Wallace, it faced a lot of headwinds. Boxing had a monopoly when it came to audiences interested in combat sports within the U.S. during the 1970s and even into the 1980s. While there were several televised matches that drew some attention from viewers like young Alby even into the 1990s, it just never really caught on. Had the sport started at a time when the internet could have brought in a bigger audience, they may have eventually found a foothold in a diehard, niche fanbase. Unfortunately, they didn’t stick around long enough to chip away boxing’s monopoly on viewership.

Secondly, the rule against kicks below the belt altered the dynamics of the sport and fighters who trained in the American style were taken off guard when they competed against fighters from other disciplines where these kinds of kicks were allowed.

Finally, when the UFC showed up on the world stage in the early 1990s, it basically ate American kickboxing’s lunch and many of the viewers and fighters who would have been interested in American kickboxing ended up transitioning over to the kind of mixed martial arts fighting in the UFC. Given that it is not a style that fares particularly well within the context of an MMA or vale tudo match because of the rule against kicks below the belt, it struggled to become popular among this group of fighters and their audience, as well.

Though American kickboxing exists to this day and the PKA relaunched in 2022, it still struggles to attract a fanbase, though it is certainly worth checking out.