Clyde Gentry's "No Holds Barred" and Jonathan Snowden's "Total MMA" provide a pretty well-rounded portrait if you read them together. Snowden is much more skeptical of the Gracies in particular, from what I recall. And then start watching the first UFCs,once you have the context. They're zany, but also a very interesting look into the traditional martial arts culture of the 1990s. They're almost a memorial to 90s martial arts, before MMA closed down most of the "Does Mike Tyson beat Bruce Lee?" type debates. You have to put yourself into the shoes of the people at the time. They had very little idea what would happen if you matched styles up against each other. This was right after Bloodsport, which some people believed was based on a true story. A sizable minority of the TMA community believed in stuff like pressure points, chi, and death touches. Lots of the guys entering the early ones were amateurs. They had very little idea what to expect. They didn't know a lot by today's standards, but full credit to them: they threw themselves into something very close to a no-rules street fight on live TV, against guys they'd never seen before, from disciplines they'd never competed against, in a quasi-sport nobody understood very well. People have all these crazy techniques that their opponents have never seen before, so there are all kinds of attacks that you rarely see being fight-enders in modern MMA because either (a) few people are stupid enough to get caught in them anymore, or (b) it's a common technique that most fighters can defend pretty well as a matter of course. But back then, there wasn't much information out there, so these things are spectacularly successful. As somebody who enjoys pre-Queensberry boxing history, you might find the Melton Bowen / Steve Jennum fight especially interesting. (Or funny.) Jennum was a police officer trained in ninjutsu of all things. He takes a rather confused professional boxer named Melton Bowen down with something that John L. Sullivan would have recognized as a cross-buttock throw.
I don't know if it's wrestling itself or the filtration of talent that takes place in wrestling that accounts for the phenomena. For example, the talent level between a Division One wrestler and the high school wrestler not worthy of a college scholarship is probably very significant. Just because the Division I athlete can control a champion judoka doesn't mean the other wrestler can. Is it wrestling technique or the constant competition that weeds out the lesser talents that causes this?
