The triangle choke, also called the sankaku-jime in Japanese, first appeared in a real fight in 1994, during UFC 2, when Kung Fu practitioner Jason Delucia used it to defeat Scott Baker. But even before Kung Fu introduced the triangle to the UFC, Mel Gibson slapped a triangle choke on Gary Busey, who played the villain Mr. Joshua, in Lethal Weapon way back in 1987. Gibson was one of Rorian Gracie’s first students.
Although Delucia’s UFC career would eventually come to an end after losing to Royce Gracie at UFC 2 and Mel Gibson flushed his acting career down the toilet, their legacy—the triangle choke—survived and is still one of the most successful submissions in Mixed Martial Arts today.
While a primitive form of the triangle is said to date back to the 1890s, the technique was resurrected by Rolls Gracie back in the 1970s and has been used and further developed by Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners for nearly 50 years.
The triangle choke is a figure-four chokehold that traps an opponent’s head and arm between the attacker’s legs, cutting off the carotid arteries. The name comes from the shape between the thighs as the figure four choke is secured. The triangle is one of the few submissions that can be applied from a variety of positions—closed guard, open guard, side control, mount, rear mount, and even while passing the guard. Its versatility is one of the main reasons that the triangle is still so effective after 130 years.