For the Shanghai police, often facing long odds in dark basements, fascia-powered fighting was a lifesaver. And when Fairbairn and Sykes brought it back with them to Britain, they found it was just as effective for the women and poets and professors about to be dropped behind German lines on sabotage missions. “Sykes was the instructor who taught me silent killing,” recalled Nancy Wake, the Australian party girl who became one of the SOE’s best agents. Nancy’s specialties were strolling past Gestapo offices in France to chuck grenades through the door and rescuing downed Allied fighter pilots by using her sex appeal and ice-cold nerve to distract checkpoint guards.
“I’d slink right up and purr, ‘Do you want to search me?’” Nancy would recall. “God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was.” The Gestapo nicknamed the mystery woman the White Mouse and put her at the top of its Most Wanted list, but Nancy was uncatchable. Seventeen times, she successfully led British fighters all the way across the Pyrenees to freedom. “If a German came at me I’d kick him in the ‘three-piece service’ and chop him in the side of the neck.” Once, when her Resistance band was surrounded, Nancy shot her way out and stole a bike, pedaling more than 125 miles through the night to safety. When a German sentry blocked her escape during an arms plant raid, the Mouse’s hands came up just the way Sykes had taught her. “Whack,” recalled Nancy. “It killed him, all right.”
Miraculously, Nancy Wake survived the war and lived to a fiery age ninety-eight. During a postwar dinner in France, she heard the waiter mutter under his breath that he preferred Germans to “the rotten English.” Nancy followed him to the kitchen, hit him Sykes style, and knocked him cold. When the manager rushed over, Nancy’s dinner companion advised him to walk away or she’d drop him next. “There had been nothing violent about my nature before the war,” Nancy shrugged. “The enemy made me tough.”
A Mouse who thrives inside the trapping zone: what a perfect bookend for Ng Mui, the battling abbess who three hundred years earlier proved that women could fight as well as men. Except the origins of Wing Chun, it turns out, are a little more complicated. And a lot more Greek.
Deep within the Labyrinth on the island of Crete, Theseus felt his way through the dark stone maze, nudging his feet past the gnawed corpses of men and women who’d come before. He was just a teenager, with no help or weapons. Turning a corner, he came face-to-face with the Minotaur: half man, half bull, and hungry for human blood. A new art was about to be born.
“Much weaker in strength than the Minotaur, Theseus fought with him and won using pankration, as he had no knife,” goes the legend from Pindar’s Fifth Nemean Ode. Pankration basically means “total power and knowledge,” but the word resonates deeper than the definition: it’s associated with gods and heroes, with those who conquer by tapping every talent. Pankration is a fighting style that not only combines boxing and wrestling, but exceeds them, with a savvy of its own. Some pankration techniques, like the gastrizein heel kick, have never been surpassed. “It’s one of the most powerful offensive moves we’ve ever seen,” a modern martial-arts expert marveled after watching a demonstration. “The attacker’s knee and foot are chambered like a piston and then stomped into the opponent’s stomach, genitals, or thighs. It channels some 2000 pounds of force into the opponent, more than enough to break a baseball bat.”
The scariest thing about pankration is when it’s not scary at all. The ready position is so nonchalant and relaxed, you could be a blink away from taking a gastrizein to the knee and never suspect the person across from you is poised to attack. If you’re set to play catch with a toddler, you’re set to fight pankration: just face forward, dip your knees, and raise your open hands. It looks less like art and more like an accident, which speaks to pankration’s ancestral authority: it feels so natural because it is. Pankration refines raw impulse, chucking out everything that doesn’t help and focusing on the three things that do: ease, surprise, and stopping power. You activate without thinking. Attack without signaling. And strike, like any other animal in a fight for its life, without mercy.
Pankration is so frighteningly true to real violence that for years it wasn’t included in the original Olympics. “To get his opponent down and by throttling, pummeling, biting, kicking reduce him to submission is the natural instinct of the savage or the child,” explained E. Norman Gardiner, D. Litt., the Oxfordian ancient sport specialist. “But this rough and tumble is not suitable for athletic competition; it is too dangerous and undisciplined.” Pankration finally made it into the 33rd Olympic Games, in 648 b.c., with two rules: no biting, no eye gouging. Otherwise, it was anything goes; the entire range of human cruelty and creativity were at your disposal. The Spartans still grumbled and refused to participate: if you can’t blind your opponent and chomp his nose, then what’s the point?
But for everyone else, pankration became “the most exciting and worthiest of all sports in ancient Olympia,” as the Greek chronicler Philostratus put it, even though some bouts didn’t last much longer than a sneeze. There were no points or pins; you won as soon as you put the other guy into unbearable agony. One champion won three Olympic titles by getting really good at snatching his opponent’s fingers and bending them back. Matches could end only in death, submission, or—as in one epic contest—both: the great champion Arrhachion was in a choke hold when he managed to grab his opponent’s foot. Ankle breaking is a classic pankration move, and so effective that thousands of years later it would be the reason the Twins protected their feet by never risking anything higher than a crotch kick. But Arrhachion locked on too late. His opponent begged for mercy, forfeiting the match, but not before Arrhachion suffocated. Victory went to the dead man.
Pankration’s creation myth is peculiar, and not just because it has two. Storytellers couldn’t agree on the original event: was it Theseus against the Minotaur, or Hercules versus the Nemean Lion? But they were unanimous on one key quirk: while boxing and wrestling were fruits of the gods passed down from Apollo and Hermes, pankration was born from human weakness. Theseus was just a boy out to prove himself when he went to Crete, and Hercules wasn’t exactly the hulking He-Man we’ve come to assume. Hercules was never the strongest guy in the fight; in fact, Pindar even went hard the other way and chalked Hercules’s achievements up to little-man syndrome: Hercules was “of short stature with an unbending will.” The heroes were still plenty powerful, but muscle alone would never get them out of a jam. Their real strength was their ears: Theseus and Hercules were lifelong learners and equal-opportunity students, always seeking advice and just as happy to get it from women. That was the mark of a hero and the signature of pankration: total power and knowledge.
And that knowledge has been around a long time. History actually has a dog in the fight in the Battle of the Pankration Myths. When archeologists cracked open sealed caves on Crete—the site of Theseus’s showdown with the Minotaur—they discovered pottery and wall paintings from 1700 B.C. with the earliest depictions of pankration. King Minos really did rule Crete, and his ships often returned from Egypt with hot new discoveries—like the peculiar Hittite religious rituals of bull leaping, boxing, and grappling. On Crete, these rites were honed into martial arts, then exported to mainland Greece. Naturally, anything involving total power and knowledge was irresistible to a combat scientist like Alexander the Great, who still slept with the Iliad under his head. Alexander became a true believer as soon as he saw his best Macedonian warrior defeated by Dioxippus, a pankration fighter from Athens. Alexander’s armies learned pankration, and as they marched east into Persia and India, it’s believed pankration spread toward Asia and became the inspiration for all modern martial arts.