Thought IÂ’d chime in on this since, over the years, IÂ’ve interviewed many of the people whoÂ’ve been discussed here for Black Belt Magazine and other publications. To clear up a few things:
Yes, there were some karate vs. boxing and karate vs. wrestling matches held back in the 1950s and possibly even earlier, though how legitimate all these matches were, I couldn’t say. But from my understanding they were true style vs. style bouts as each person stuck pretty closely to his own style of fighting (for reference, see the Gene LeBell-Milo Savage judo vs. boxing match). Also, muay Thai and other forms of “kickboxing” were held throughout Asia for decades before the sport began in the west.
As for kickboxing in the west, Joe Lewis founded the sport in 1970. Lewis was originally a shorin-ryu karateka, though he and many of the other top tournament fighters from that era like Bill Wallace and Chuck Norris cross-trained with each other (Lewis also trained for a brief period with Bruce Lee in jeet kune do). Norris never fought full-contact, strictly the tournament karate of his day. That is not a criticism, as he was the most successful competitor under the only rules available for competition at the time. But those karate tournaments were definitely a far cry from full-contact kickboxing events. Contact was generally not supposed to be legal to the head in most of those tournaments, though naturally slips did occur and people did get hit in the face, sometimes quite hard. Since no padding was used in those days, such slips could cause some harsh injuries. Nevertheless, those injuries were usually accidents and not a regular occurrence. The level of contact was typically far below that found in boxing or kickboxing. That is the reason Lewis began training with boxers and, ultimately, founded kickboxing. He was contacted by a karate tournament promoter asking him to compete at his event and Lewis said he would fight only if it was a “full-contact” fight. They agreed to a set of rules which essentially allowed most of the techniques done in the karate tournaments of that era but with boxing gloves on, full-contact being legal, and no stopping to score points (kicks below the waist were not allowed in tournament karate and I do not believe they were allowed in Lewis’s original fights; they were definitely not allowed in the Professional Karate Association fights that began in 1974). The fights were basically boxing matches with kicks above the waist allowed. Since Lewis was the only top karateka of that era actively training in boxing, he pretty much cleaned up in those early fights (there’s a great picture of that first kickboxing match where Lewis and his opponent, Greg Baines, are going at it with Baines in a classic karate type horse stance with his hands low and Lewis upright with his hands high in a standard boxing stance).
In any case, Lewis fought a few more times like this until 1974 when the PKA held the first official “world championship” bouts, now calling the sport “full-contact karate.” Lewis won the heavyweight title, Jeff Smith (a Jhoon Rhee taekwondo student, I believe) won the lightheavy title, and Wallace won the middleweight crown. I believe there was one other titleist crowned but can’t recall who at the moment. Anyway, the PKA still used essentially the same rules combining karate and boxing in their bouts. A few years later, a rival organization, the World Karate Association, was formed and created their own champions, of which Benny Urquidez was one of the first and the most notable. I believe the WKA wanted to have more international appeal and, therefore, allowed leg kicks which were legal in Japan and Thailand. Thus, their style of kickboxing began to borrow more from muay Thai. Around this time, kickboxing also started to catch on in Europe. Many of the early fighters there, particularly in Holland, came from a background in kyokushin karate, which also allows leg kicks, and so their kickboxing tended to follow more the WKA model.
