Nobuyuki Sakakibara's attempt to revive the memories of the Pride Fighting Championships, built around the stars of a decade ago, was a reminder, sometimes fun and sometimes painful, that time marches on.
Aside from the presence of John McCarthy as a referee, and a few fighters familiar to U.S. fans, the show seemed like a different animal to the MMA presented by UFC and Bellator, even with some Bellator stars on the shows.
From late 1999, when Pride really hit its stride on the back of Kazushi Sakuraba, until 2006, when it lost its television deal due to a Yakuza scandal, Pride was the biggest MMA promotion in the world. It was by modern terms, both freak show and sport. It had the best fighters of the time, the legendary fights of that era. but it also had an element of sideshow matches aimed at the non-fight fan in Japan, using celebrities, pro wrestlers, sumos, actors and comedians to draw what at times were incredible television ratings.
The idea of a big New Year's Eve show in Japan actually began with the success of a pro wrestling event on Dec. 31, 2000, promoted by Antonio Inoki. Inoki, the pro wrestling legend who was one of the public faces of Pride until splitting off in 2003. The first Pride New Year's Eve show, called Inoki bom ba ye, took place at at the Osaka Dome. It was an all pro wrestling show that drew a reported 42,753 fans to the Osaka Dome, and included MMA stars like Bas Rutten Gary Goodridge, Mark Coleman, Mark Kerr, Kazushi Sakuraba, Ken Shamrock, Don Frye and Renzo Gracie.
The success spawned a show a year later, produced by Inoki, Pride and K-1, this time an MMA event at the Saitama Super Arena. The show aired on network TV, on the Tokyo Broadcasting Systems (TBS).
For decades, the NHK network has owned New Year's Eve, and still does today, with the Red & White Concert. It is annually one of the biggest television shows of the year in Japan, drawing usually a 35 to a 50 rating. While not exactly equivalent to a Super Bowl game in the U.S., the comparison between the two as the annual biggest television tradition in each country has been made for decades.
Up to that point in time, every other network had tried, and failed miserably, at competing with the concert. TBS, Inoki and Pride, built a show around the stars of New Japan Pro Wrestling against the stars of K-1, doing MMA fights. The show did a 14.9 rating, significantly larger than any show had ever done in competition with the concert. The number grew to a 16.5 rating the next year, built around Bob Sapp facing pro wrestler Yoshihiro Takayama.
The success led three different networks bidding for the New Year's Eve show in 2003. With so much money being thrown around, the three groups split up. Inoki ran a show on one network, Pride on another and K-1 on a third. The K-1 show featured the Sapp vs. Akebono match, that drew 54 million viewers on TBS. Both the Pride and K-1 shows were major successes.
The Inoki show featured Fedor Emelianenko. Emelianenko at the time was the world heavyweight champion with Pride but was a free agent. He quickly beat pro wrestler Yuji Nagata on a show that was big ratings failure and the promotion went belly-up after the show.
It came out a few years later that prior to the show, the life of one of the promoters of the Inoki show was threatened by Yakuzas. The Yakuzas were allegedly aligned with Pride, threatening the group for signing Emelianenko. Soon after the story broke, the Fuji Network canceled Pride. The scandal was such that no other network in Japan would touch it. It effectively killed the promotion. Pride limped along for about a year, and was sold to the UFC in 2007. At the time, the UFC was going to operate it in Japan as a separate promotion. But even with new ownership, no television network would touch the tainted brand, and there was never another Pride show.
Pride's last New Year's Eve show was in 2005. K-1 continued running New Year's Eve through 2010. By that time, interest in MMA and kickboxing had fallen greatly, and ratings declined to where it didn't make economic sense to finance the big shows.
In recent years, there had been fighting and wrestling shows on New Year's Eve, and even things like arm wrestling and tug of war contests featuring the stars of the glory days like Sapp, Alistair Overeem, Emelianenko, Mark Hunt, Sakuraba, along with celebrities from sumo, rugby, baseball and other sports. It was the familiar names and they were cheaper to produce than big fight shows. But they also ran their course.
The Fuji Network, in particular, had struggled badly on what was the biggest television night of the year. In 2013, their prime time programming fell to a 2.0 rating. Last year, they were up to a 4.0, less than one-fourth of what the Pride fights were getting in the glory days. It seemed to make sense to go back to what worked so well not all that many years ago.
Sakakibara, who was behind the some of the biggest New Year's Eve shows, felt the time was right to bring Pride-style MMA back to Japanese network television. The goal was to bring back the glory days on the traditional night, by building mostly around the familiar stars, although they were now more than a decade older.
There was also competition, with one competing network airing a sports show that included an exhibition kickboxing match with Masato vs. UFC's Norifumi "Kid" Yamamoto. The latter was a rematch of one of the biggest New Year's Eve fights of all-time. Another network aired a live WBA flyweight boxing championship fight. Inoki also ran a big show nearby, a combination pro wrestling and MMA event at Sumo Hall in Tokyo, but he was unable to get network television for his show.
But his show ended up relevant for one of the side stories.
One of Rizin's biggest freak show fights was to debut Baruto Kaido. Baruto is a 6-foot-6 1/2, 425 pound Estonian sumo (who weighed in a 403.5 for his debut fight). He was one of the biggest stars in his sport until injuries led to his retirement in 2013. He was at first rumored to face Emelianenko, but instead was to fight Jerome LeBanner, a huge name from the glory days of K-1. However, Rizin officials were under the impression that LeBanner didn't come to Japan. It was announced two days before that Peter Aerts, another K-1 legend, would replace LeBanner, and face Baruto. Aerts, at 45, had retired and hadn't trained for the fight.
LeBanner then showed up at Inoki's show, making it clear Inoki's side raided him at the last minute. This led to immediate lawsuit threats from the Sakakibara side, and claims by LeBanner that he had not agreed to a deal or signed a contract. .
Rizin ran two shows at the Saitama Super Arena, one on Tuesday night, the other on Thursday. The Fuji Network show aired from 7 p.m. to 11:45 p.m., scheduled to feature highlights from both nights. The key things promoted for the network special were Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Shinya Aoki, the Tuesday night main event, the MMA debut of Gabi Garcia, a family feud match with Kron Gracie (son of Rickson Gracie) vs. Asen Yamamoto (from Japan's most famous amateur wrestling family and the nephew of Kid Yamamoto), the Akebono vs. Sapp return from 12 years earlier, the Baruto debut, and Emelianenko coming out of retirement.
Was the show a success? That's hard to say. Attendance was strong, with 12,214 fans on Tuesday and a nearly full house of 18,365 on Thursday. For a comparison, UFC ran the Saitama Super Arena in September with Josh Barnett vs. Roy Nelson and drew 10,137 fans. The year before, with Nelson vs. Mark Hunt, and they drew 12,395. It was nothing like the glory days of Pride, where they'd expand the building and put 35,000 in for the biggest MMA events of the era. But nobody was expecting that either.
UFC has tried for eight years to get network television in Japan without success, while Sakakibara got it for his first show, which shows why, for Japan to revive, it's going to have to be with a Japanese promotion. But the big difference is, Pride had a lot of the top talent in the world, while today, almost all the top talent is under UFC contract.
Everything about the show was about drawing television ratings and getting the mainstream audience to watch the fights.
The show did a 7.3 rating average during the key prime time period, which put it in fourth place among Japan's six networks in that time slot. The Masato vs. Yamamoto fight, which Masato won via unanimous decision, did a 9.0 rating. The boxing title fight did a 3.7.
Executives at the Fuji Network had no high expectations, expecting a 6.0 rating, so it beat their projections.
Anything under a 5.0 would have been a failure, but anything above a 6.0 was considered a success.
Rizin has announced shows for April 17 in Nagoya, followed by shows in July and September. Sakakibara told Tokyo Sports that he'd like to run the July show at the Tokyo Dome, but would need a strong marquee lineup or booking a building like that would make no sense.
Rizin's success will be determined by how the network will support their efforts, both financial and from an exposure standpoint, and the state of the world marketplace when it comes to MMA talent and creating stars outside the UFC, and the Japanese public's interest level.
The general reaction to the Tuesday show was very positive. There were a lot of explosive finishes, and people enjoying the "Pride" style production, ring entrances, and even the return of the Pride theme music. It started on a happy note. Tsuyoshi Kosaka, at 45, nine-and-a-half years since he retired, took a one-sided win over James Thompson, a regular heavyweight from the Pride days. While Kosaka was not a major mainstream name, he was one of the best Japanese heavyweights of the early days of MMA.
But it ended on a sad note. Sakuraba, at 46, had nothing left to give. He was taken down and mounted quickly by Aoki, the ONE lightweight champion, moving to welterweight for this fight.
Then it got ugly. Aoki punched at will, bloodying up Sakuraba who turtled up. For five minutes, Sakuraba remained a punching bag. Announcer Jimmy Smith made the apropos comparison on the air with the Muhammad Ali vs. Larry Holmes fight.
It was clear it pained Aoki to keep beating on an older legend, but the ref wouldn't stop the fight. It's not like it went a few punches long. It went several minutes too long. While the fight aired on Spike in the U.S., it was so bad for the Japanese audience that the Fuji Network decided against airing it on the network special two days later even though it was one of the most publicized fights going in.
New Year's Eve has its clear freak show elements. You couldn't find two worse matches than the woman's super heavyweight battle with Garcia vs. Lei'd Tapa, an American pro wrestler, and Sapp, now 42, who had lost 15 of his last 16 MMA fights, and Akebono, 46, who has never won an MMA fight.
The star, Emelianenko, took kickboxer Jaideep Singh down, had no trouble getting mount, and Singh tapped from punches. The one-sided mismatch in Emelianenko's first fight in three years gave no indication at all how much he still has left. I
Garcia looked monstrous at 216 pounds, particularly in structure with massive arms and shoulders that appeared bigger than almost all the men who competed. She was much larger than Tapa, who was listed at 5-foot-11 and 201 pounds. Tapa knocked her down early, but it was two women who had never fought, flailing away with unskilled standup, until Garcia threw a backfist that looked more like a reflex action than a planned move, and Tapa went down.
Sapp, at 6-foot-4 and 330.5 pounds, and Akebono, who looked much larger at 6-foot-8 and 419 pounds, was even worse. Sapp, for once, decided he was actually going to try and win the fight, held under shoot boxing rules. That meant punches and kicks were legal, as were takedowns, although nobody tried any takedowns. If they went to the ground, they'd be stood right up.
Sapp kept hammering Akebono with cuffing punches that connected to the back of the head, cutting the huge Hawaiian. Akebono had made his name as one of the greatest sumos in history in the 90s, and is a nostalgic household name in Japan. He's not a fighter, even though he draws a lot of public interest when he has fought.
Eventually Sapp got a yellow card. Early in the second round, the fight was stopped due to the cut. They went to the cards, because the rules in Japan are different than the U.S. Sapp had dominated up to that point, and won the decision. This fight didn't even air on the U.S. version of the show, even though the expectations in Japan were that it would be the peak rated fight there.
Between the freak shows, there was great action.
The Jiri Prochazka vs. Vadim Nemkov heavyweight tournament semifinal was a great back-and-forth bout. Both had fought two days earlier in the first round. Nemkov was left exhausted at the end of the first 10-minute round and couldn't continue.
Bellator's King Mo Lawal, who had also fought once on Tuesday and earlier on Thursday, was getting hit with a lot of kicks by the taller Prochazka, but connected on a perfect right to the jaw to win. This $340,000 tournament win made up for Lawal's failing to win, due to injury, a Bellator tournament in September that would have gotten him a light heavyweight title fight.
It's pretty clear with this win that Lawal would be the likely opponent for the winner of Bellator light heavyweight champion Liam McGeary and tournament winner Phil Davis that should take place over the next few months.
Hideo Tokoro may have a 33-28 MMA record, but because of his aggression in constantly going for submissions, few fighters in the world are as consistently entertaining. His fight from Tuesday beating Kizaemon Saiga, a kickboxer, aired on the Spike show. Saiga was booked as Tokoro's opponent partially because his wife is a well-known model and actress in Japan. They showed her screaming for her husband throughout the fight. But it was for naught, since Tokoro kept the fight on the ground, and got the armbar.
Gracie vs. Yamamoto, which Gracie won via submission with a triangle, clamped even tighter when Yamamoto hit a power bomb in an attempt to break it, may have created two new stars. It was the introduction of Yamamoto, a 19-year-old wrestling prodigy. They showed his grandfather, a well-known former Olympian and coach, and his mother, a former multi-time world champion, cheering him on. It was clear early he was in over-his-head with Gracie, but he came across well in defeat.
In many ways this was reminiscent of when his uncle, Kid Yamamoto, first fought Masato in their New Year's Eve kickboxing battle 11 years ago. Kid Yamamoto fought Masato under Masato's kickboxing rules. He showed great spirit and charisma in losing. From that loss, Yamamoto became Japan's biggest MMA star. The difference is that more than 30 million people saw that fight in 2004, perhaps four times as many as saw this one.
Baruto's fight with Aerts also didn't air in the U.S., but was played up big on Japanese television. Baruto was far more athletic than one would expect of someone so large, and was able to use the judo background of his youth to throw Aerts down and ground and pound him for three three-minute rounds.
The fight should have been stopped much earlier. At one point, Baruto landed about 60 straight punches on the ground, but since Aerts rolled under the ropes, instead of it being stopped, they broke it up and moved it to the center.
With the good and the bad, there were a few key takes out of this. There used to be a debate about ring vs. cage in MMA. The debate was because the cage made people who have no knowledge of the sport feel uncomfortable. Everyone grew up seeing fights in a ring. But for MMA, this mentality has long past. While nobody fell out of the ring, watching people roll under the ropes, causing artificial breaks, looked bad after so many years of seeing the sport presented a different way.
The freak show stuff had its appeal early on, but it felt so dated and amateurish in the bad fights.
That said, there is room for an alternative. MMA lost a lot when Japan went down. The "show" aspect of Pride that was brought back here is something different. There is something to be said for exciting fighters like Tokoro and Gracie, possibly Yamamoto as well, who have unique skill sets. They may have weaknesses where they wouldn't be able to beat top guys, but when matched up in the right way, can give entertaining performances.
But there is an extremely limited shelf life in the fighters who drew the big ratings a decade ago. In some cases, it's sad to see. If anything, the take on the show is just how much MMA has evolved in the last decade, between a far higher quality of fighters, the implementation of drug testing and in all-around skill.
It was easy to see what Sakakibara's vision was in bringing back the stars from the past and recreate what, in his mind, was something taken away by a scandal. It's true actual market conditions or lack of public interest didn't kill Pride. But reviving it in the same form, with some of the same stars, isn't a long-term answer because the shelf life of many of those stars is over.