STING LIKE A BEE: Christian Grosinsky, 25, of Tempe practices a punch sequence with ASU nursing graduate Lars Havens at the Student Recreation Complex. Pankration is a form of mixed martial arts that includes wrestling, kickboxing and other forms of fighting.

“Where else can you choke your professor, slap an attorney, punch your boss or in one case kick a politician without getting into trouble?”

For Jeff Funicello, the mixed martial arts coach who posed the question, ASU Pankration is the safe and legal way for ASU students to fulfill that fantasy and train to compete in martial arts.

Four times a week, a group of mostly ASU undergraduate students meet in the Student Recreation Complex to train in mixed martial art disciplines nearly 3,000 years old, called pankration.

Funicello, a 17-year veteran of the sport, said about half of the team competes in competitions ranging from local events to international bouts.

“Where else can a Christian fight a Muslim, or a Hindu fight a Jew, and walk away good friends?” Funicello said in an e-mail about pankration.

Pankration is a form of mixed martial arts, or MMA, that originated in ancient Greece as one of the first Olympic events. It encompasses different martial arts disciplines, such as wrestling, kickboxing and other forms of fighting.

ASU Pankration meets twice on Tuesdays and twice on Thursdays to train in kickboxing, submission wrestling and other martial arts with the world champion Funicello, a former ASU wrestler and wrestling coach.

Funicello said he travels and competes all over the country, and has placed numerous times in world and national championships. He is a Pan American Games silver medalist and captured one of his more recent awards, a bronze medal, in world championship beach wrestling in September.

Undeclared sophomore Aaron Sims said he has been watching MMA since he was young, and he decided to take up pankration at ASU as a fun challenge.

“I wasn’t playing football anymore after high school so I had to fill the void,” Sims said. He added he is trying to improve all aspects of his mixed martial arts game with ASU Pankration, such as wrestling and boxing.

“I do a lot of grappling and submission,” Sims said. “I’m planning on competing in submission wrestling.”

Justice studies junior Kelsey Campbell said the coaches and members of ASU Pankration helped improve her skills in wrestling and make connections for her wrestling career.

“All the guys there made me feel welcome,” Campbell said. “That was so huge, especially when you’re a girl.”

Campbell, who took fifth place nationally in the women’s freestyle wrestling 130-pound weight class last April, joined the ASU wrestling team on Monday. She said she hopes to be certified to wrestle at 125 pounds by the NCAA.

ASU has been a powerhouse for mixed martial arts and UFC-style athletics since the early 1990s, Funicello said.

“We had a really good team last year — five national champions, three world medalists, several world team qualifiers, several national placers,” Funicello said.

The ASU wrestling team has produced internationally-renowned MMA fighters such as Don Frye and Dan Henderson, who recently lost a world championship fight to current UFC World Champion Quinton Jackson.

Funicello, who currently trains with world-class MMA fighters such as Henderson, said that because of MMA’s rising popularity, most people are able to understand what pankration is about.

Danny Kessler, a 2005 ASU graduate and founder of the women’s self-defense program Angels With Attitude, said he has always been involved with combat sports and currently coaches with ASU Pankration.

“I was a high school wrestler and when I got to college I needed to find something to test me physically and mentally and push me to the next level,” Kessler said. “I train in everything now, I try to learn as much as possible and for the past six years I’ve been grappling on a national level.”

Kessler competes nationally as a representative of ASU Pankration, in competitions held by the North American Grappling Association. He won first place last January in Honolulu, Hawaii for the 147-pound weight class.

As for Sims, the ASU sophomore said he is playing his martial arts career by ear.
“When it comes to MMA, it just depends on how good I get,” Sims said. “I don’t want to go out there and get beat up.”

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Considering the fact that undefeated heavyweight Tony Grano of Hebron, Connecticut, didn’t begin boxing until he was 20 years old, he’s come a long way in a short time.

The former high school wrestling star, now 5-0-1 (5 KOS) as a pro, won a slew of amateur titles and was considered a frontrunner to represent the United States in the 2008 Olympic Games.

But Grano, who is now 25, had other plans. “By the time I’m 28, I want to be fighting for a [professional] heavyweight title,” he said. “I accomplished a lot in the amateurs, and just thought it was time to turn pro.”

Grano, who trains in New York, last fought on September 23 in Hartford, Connecticut, which is a stone’s throw from his hometown. He personally sold a few hundred tickets to his fans, who saw him demolish a former middle linebacker turned boxer named Mike Miller, now 2-4 (2 KOS), of Akron, Ohio, in two rounds.

While a victory like the one over Miller might seem insignificant to some, if you go behind the numbers there is more than meets the eye.

Besides the fact that the 6’1”, 214-pound Grano was outweighed by 41 pounds, Miller had gone the distance with undefeated Travis Kaufman, who was 3-0 (3 KOS), and once beat Nicolai Firtha, who was 7-1-1 (4 KOS) in his previous two fights.

One person who is not the least bit surprised by Grano’s success is his adviser and co-trainer Andre Rozier, who also works with such hot prospects as middleweight “Mean” Joe Greene and super middleweight Curtis “Showtime” Stevens.

Rozier met Grano at an amateur tournament, when he was the head trainer of a regional East Coast team that included such standouts as Danny Jacobs, William Rosinski and Adam Willett.

Rozier, who was in the opposite corner of Grano, couldn’t believe the durability and resilience that Grano displayed after Rozier’s fighter got him in trouble.

“I said, ‘Boy, this guy can rumble,” recalled Rozier. “The fight was going back and forth and was a real war. I told my partner if I had a kid like this, if I could refine his natural ability, he’d be a beast.”

At a national tournament in Little Rock, Arkansas, Grano had scored four straight knockouts to make it into the finals. By that time he and Rozier had developed a friendship and Grano would have loved to have had him in his corner for the championship match.

“If Andre had been in my corner, I would have won the final,” said Grano. “I lost by one point. But I knew we were right for each other.”

“If I was in his corner, he would’ve won,” added Rozier. “He was reaching out but I couldn’t respond to him. In the politics of amateur boxing, that would have caused World War III.”

Another member of Grano’s tight-knit circle is his father Bill, who admits that when his son first told him he wanted to box tried to talk him out of it.

“It’s a very unforgiving sport,” said Bill Grano. “But I saw how dedicated he was to it, and once he won the nationals you couldn’t ignore his talent.”

The younger Grano’s braintrust have formulated a step-by-step plan to build Grano, despite his relatively small stature amongst today’s heavyweights, into a bonafide contender.

They believe that within one year he will be a complete heavyweight, and within another year or two he will be on the cusp of winning a championship.

To that end they have provided him with challenging sparring partners. Grano worked for several weeks with Oleg Maskaev as Maskaev prepared to wrest the WBC heavyweight title from Hasim Rahman.

“Sometimes, for about four rounds, I’d think I got the best of him,” said Grano. “Then I’d realize he’s a 12-round fighter and whatever happened in the first four rounds didn’t really matter. He is very strong and he’s very determined.”

One day at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, New York, Grano was discouraged after vigorously mixing it up with a fighter he didn’t recognize. Afterwards Rozier asked him if he knew who the sparring partner was. Grano said he didn’t. When he learned that it was former cruiserweight titlist Wayne Braithwaite, his attitude change completely.

“I guess I did alright,” laughed Grano.

The only blemish on Grano’s record is a six-round draw with Rodney Ray, who was 3-3 (3 KOS), in a bout that took place at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan in May 2006.

Grano said that he went into the fight thinking that the 6’7” Ray was actually four inches shorter than his actual height.

“I headhunted too much,” he conceded. “I didn’t prepare for such a tall guy. A lot of people thought I won, but the fight was close enough where I can’t [complain].”

Exactly one week after his victory in Hartford, the media-savvy Grano made the rounds at the John Duddy-Yory Boy Campas fight at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York.

On a leave of absence from Local 777 of the plumbing and pipe fitter’s union, Grano said that he was eager to get back in the ring, the sooner the better.

“I’ve had a lot of setbacks, including losing my best friend,” he said. “But I’m not going to get distracted and I’m not going to get discouraged. I’ve stuck through enough hard times already to know that eventually this will all pay off.”

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