MOUNTAIN OF MEN: Inside Dagestan’s Wrestling Culture of Champions($14.99Value)

Description

How does a Russian village of fewer than five hundred people produce more world champions than most countries? That is the question MOUNTAIN OF MEN spends eight chapters answering and the answer turns out to be about much more than wrestling. For sixty years, the small republic of Dagestan, perched between the Caspian Sea and the highlands of the Caucasus, has been producing wrestlers at a rate that has no equivalent anywhere on earth. Olympic champions. World champions. UFC champions. They wrestle for Russia, for Azerbaijan, for Bulgaria, for Bahrain. Wherever the Russian quota system pushes them. They all train, more or less, in the same village gyms, under the same coaches, in a methodology that has been refined over three generations and is, by widespread consensus among elite coaches, the most effective grappling system in the world. This book is the first single-volume account of how that happened. Tracing the lineage from nineteenth-century resistance fighters to MMA legend's undefeated UFC careers, MOUNTAIN OF MEN moves between mountains and mats with the curiosity of a scholar. It explains why the style looks the way it does, why the rest of the sport has spent twenty years trying and mostly failing to copy it, and what makes the methodology so resistant to export. It examines the three-layer code, highland custom, Sufi Islam, and the figure of the coach that turns boys into the kind of men who walk forward in a cage and do not stop. Written for combat-sports fans, wrestling enthusiasts, coaches, parents, and general readers curious about what makes a culture great at a thing, MOUNTAIN OF MEN is a celebration that does not look away from its subject's shadows. It treats Dagestan with the seriousness it deserves and the honesty it requires. If you have ever watched a Dagestani fighter walk forward in the third round of a fight that should already be over and wondered where that man came from, this is the book.