JRE MMA Show #173 with Benny "The Jet" Urquidez & William "Blinky" Rodriguez

What It Covers

Benny "The Jet" Urquidez and William "Blinky" Rodriguez discuss their pioneering roles in American kickboxing from the 1970s, including fighting Muay Thai champions without prior knowledge of the style, inventing shin guards, operating the legendary Jet Center gym, and Rodriguez's gang intervention work following his son's death in a drive-by shooting in the San Fernando Valley.

Key Questions Answered

• •Muay Thai adaptation without training: Urquidez fought his first Muay Thai champion at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles without knowing what Muay Thai was, believing it was an opponent's name. He experienced leg kicks, elbows, and knees for the first time during the actual fight with no prior preparation or understanding of the rules, forcing real-time adaptation to techniques he had never encountered.
• •Shin guard invention from necessity: After experiencing brutal leg kicks in his first Muay Thai fight, Urquidez approached a leather craftsman to create protective shin padding, becoming the first person to develop modern shin guards. The craftsman used Velcro to secure the padding, and Urquidez began distributing them to other fighters, fundamentally changing training safety in kickboxing worldwide before Thailand adopted similar equipment.
• •No-rules Hawaii tournament structure: The 1973 Full Contact Karate tournament in Hawaii featured no weight divisions, no rules, and elimination brackets requiring fighters to compete five to six times on Friday and multiple times on Sunday. Urquidez at 145 pounds faced opponents up to 245 pounds, with techniques including ground striking, biting, and any method to win, representing true mixed martial arts before the term existed.
• •Gang intervention through forgiveness: After Rodriguez's son was killed in a drive-by shooting while learning to drive a stick shift, he created a nonprofit organization that has operated for 36 years. He organized a peace treaty meeting in the neighborhood responsible for his son's death, implementing the principle "no mother's crying, no baby's dying" and providing integrated violence intervention services with both lived-experience staff and credentialed professionals.
• •Jet Center training methodology: The gym brought together gang members, professional fighters, and attorneys in the same training space, using controlled sparring to surface hidden emotions like anger and fear in a safe environment. This approach allowed instructors to reprogram emotional responses and build genuine confidence rather than false bravado, with fighters learning both technical skills and character development through mirrored self-reflection.
• •Calf kick evolution in combat sports: The calf kick remained largely unexploited in MMA until recently, with champions like Michael Bisping never experiencing one during his entire career. Japanese Kyokushin fighters like Yuki Yoza now dominate Muay Thai competitions by systematically destroying opponents' calves with inside and outside kicks, proving traditional Thai fighters can be overcome by targeting this previously underutilized technique with modern combinations.
• •PKA rules limiting American kickboxing: The Professional Karate Association required kicks from the waist up only to protect Bill "Superfoot" Wallace's injured knee, mandating eight kicks per round while fighters did math during combat. This restriction prevented American fighters from developing international-level leg kick defense and offense, ultimately causing kickboxing to lose mainstream appeal in the United States compared to the full-rules World Karate Association format that allowed all techniques.