India, Sept. 18 -- At the Asian Games, which began on September 19 in Japan, there's a "new" sport that has been waiting in the wings for some time now to become a part of the Olympic movement: Mixed Martial Arts.

MMA has come a long way. It started as an "underground" sport, with fights fought illegally on the rooftops of Hong Kong and in basement parking lots in Tokyo, in the 1920s. Then came the speakeasy fight clubs in Bangkok and Rio, before it burst into the mainstream in the 1990s.

As a fighting method, its original goal was to adopt aspects of various martial arts to create the most effective, practical combat tactic for a street fight or other real-world unarmed combat situation. As a result, in the early decades, MMA fights we...