More or less, yeah. It's also possible to get there on points, as it were, by winning a sufficient number of matches against people in the bracket just below, but that's governed by a ranking system that's as arcane (and as interesting) as the Maine Principals' Association's points system for determining who gets into the state high school basketball tournament, so I haven't bothered to get into any detail about it. It's much simpler to just win a bout with an established member of the rank you want to move up to.

>And I'm assuming the challenged warrior has the
>right of refusal to prevent getting deluged in challenges by no-names
>looking to leapfrog?

Yes. It's considered bad form for upper-rank fighters to challenge lower-rank ones, and the sanctioning body won't provide any help for someone trying to get hold of a fighter more than one rank above, in order to try and weed out the wilsons. Of course, you can always try tracking them down yourself, without going through the Authority, and setting up the challenge on your own terms, but just learning who and where some of these people are without outside help can require some pretty significant detective work - good luck getting a phone call through to Ryu, for instance.

>(Does the world warrior circuit even have an official records thing or
>central organizer? As it is, it all feels very informal, but at the
>same time, sanctioned enough that it officials look away when it's
>held in places like military bases).

The Street Fighter Tournament (as it is rather over-grandly known) is sanctioned, inasmuch as these things can be when they're illegal in a lot of the places where they're done, by the rather unwieldily named World Circuit Martial Arts Tournament Authority. WCMAT serves as a sort of central clearinghouse for the fighters, maintaining stats databases, simple dossier files like the one for Gryphon to be found elsewhere on this board, and (as previously discussed) helping to get fighters in touch with each other. It also publishes the Fighters' Times, the monthly magazine of the tour, which has profiles, articles of interest, and the same general sort of industry-insider chatter you get from any biggish specialist-trade publication. Kind of Soldier of Fortune for wandering full-contact martial artists.

It isn't anywhere near as formal as a "real" sports league - there are no contracts in street fighting, nobody gets paid, there are very few actual rules, and so forth - and joining the WCMAT tour isn't an exclusive arrangement. It's mainly just a way of trying to centralize information so that the world's street fighters can go about their peculiar semi-underground business with a feeling of community. It's not the only one of its kind - Gryphon's friends the Bogard brothers and Joe Higashi fight on a different, parallel circuit with a slightly different "flavor" - but it's one of the best-known, among people who are in a position to know about it in the first place, in the world.

Mind you, most members of the General Public have no idea this kind of thing is even going on, and if you told them about it, they'd probably assume it was a media entertainment organization, like those guys who do cage fights on pay-per-view, or some kind of outlaw gang. Only in places where there's a reasonably prominent member of the tour with some strong local roots - Worcester, Dnepropovinsk, or Dhalsim's village in India, for instance - does the man or woman on the street have any notion that such a thing exists.

(Well, and in places where the idea of full-contact martial artists who aren't just criminal thrillseekers is an accepted part of the cultural background hum, like Milmáscaras, certain districts in Japan, or pretty much all of Hong Kong. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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